Silmerion does Match Analyses

[Silmerion]

Hi, folks!

Frankly, I feel like I do a lot of "talking the talk" around here and basically no "walking the walk." I maintain the video thread and helped out a little with the Axl Guilty Bits episode, but my real-world match-up experience is lacking, and I probably wouldn't make it out of pools if Guilty Gear were at EVO next year. And while I'm now in a better position than ever to travel to events, I still don't have anyone to play with on a regular basis, so my game sense won't be improving by leaps and bounds anytime soon.

But hell if I'm going to let that stop me.

To that end, I'm going to start doing some in-depth analyses of recorded matches. With any luck, some of them will be mine, but for now I'm going to have to make due with other people's fights. This is partly an exercise for me to start thinking about in-match decisions in a constructive way, partly a post made in the hope that you'll point out where I'm wrong, and partly an info dump for anyone looking to start thinking about Axl on a deeper level themselves. I have no idea how frequently they'll come, but hopefully when they do, they'll be useful.

So let's do this!

Analysis #1: Sammito (CH) vs. Keiichi (AX)

(Note: It's the first match in the video.)

00:29 - Already, we see Keiichi having problems. While Sammito goes for the classic 22D -> j.H approach, Keiichi...presses K? And then follows up with a 2H, out of which he gets counter-hit. All in all, not a good start against the most dominating Chipp player in the world.

But Keiichi had a reason for opening the way he did. That's not to say that he didn't make a stupid mistake: there's no way that 2H could have possibly been anything other than an autopilot button press. But what about the 5K?

I believe that Keiichi was expecting Sammito to run straight for him and start the match with a throw or some normal into a small BnB. In the world where that happened, 5K would have stuffed anything Sammito threw out, and Keiichi could have started off the match with a small life lead and a clean knockdown. When we see him throw out the 2H, we're watching his muscle memory hitch up in fits and starts - he was probably already operating under the assumption he'd hit, and was somewhere along the 5K -> 3P -> 2H -> 2D track.

But instead, Sammito started with 22D -> j.H. What Keiichi probably didn't think of is how surprisingly safe this option is against us! Seriously, go into training mode and try to anti-air Chipp after you see him start the teleport. You probably traded hits, and Chipp teched before you could chase with a 5P or 6K. This result isn't inevitable - if you wait just a moment longer, 5P will connect after the trade, and we can remove half of Chipp's life right away. But the knee-jerk "ANTI-AIR AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE" instinct is a tough one to shake. And, of course, there's the possibility that we simply fail to react at all, we get crossed up, and we eat the combo anyway.

The other problem is that most answers to the teleport get badly stuffed by the run-in. Standing and waiting, or backdashing, or instant-air-backdashing, all Wreak Havoc on 22D, but leave Axl badly stranded against a charging Chipp: in fact, all three options cleanly lose to option-select 4H.

But Keiichi did have an option that beats both openings: f.S. At starting distance, it'll counter-hit him out of teleport and stuff all of Sammito's forward movement if he tries to dash. Now, Chipp can cleanly beat it with a 2D (a real threat, and something to watch out for if you like to start matches with f.S) or an Alpha Blade (too risky for Chipp, in my opinion). But here, it would have forced Sammito to respect Keiichi's distance and settle in for a longer-range neutral game.

00:35, 00:37, 00:42, 00:45 - These are all the times in the first round that Keiichi gets knocked down and Sammito goes for oki. In order, we see Keiichi eat a cross-up; block another cross-up, then fail an attempt to air-throw Sammito out of a teleport; fish for a trade with S Benten and get punished for it; and successfully survive a tech trap, only to press a button and die a moment later.

I learned two things from these exchanges. The first is that Sammito is a god of reading his opponent. I want to specifically talk about 00:42, when Keiichi goes for the ballsy S Benten. In Keiichi's mind, this was probably his best option: it's a square hitbox that covers his whole body and comes out on frame 4, the better to stuff whatever nasty cross-up the Chipp player had in store next. But think about this from Sammito's position: he just watched his opponent mash out the opening to the round, then go for a dangerous air-throw punish that couldn't have even worked (Keiichi was in too much blockstun). Off of just those two incidents, Sammito correctly surmised that his opponent was unnerved, unfocused, and prone to risky behavior.

If I were Keiichi, I'd have been wary of that S Benten from the moment Sammito FRCed his teleport in anticipation of a punish. Even then, Sammito was clearly baiting his mashy opponent. Keiichi missed another opportunity to force the game back to neutral by being too aggressive for his own good. He should have focused on patiently blocking and feeling out Sammito's complex pressure patterns.

The second thing that I learned is that Faultless Defense isn't all that great against Chipp! In none of these situations did Keiichi even try to FD, and I'm fairly sure he was correct to pass up the chance. In exchange for push-blocking, FD puts the blocker in extra blockstun. Chipp's ability to gatling his normal pressure into teleports turns this extra stun from a cost into a real disadvantage.

00:57 - Keiichi misses another opportunity to start the round with a f.S, opting instead to take his chances with the 5K plan again.

I've made this mistake a lot in Yomi, David Sirlin's fighting card game. Keiichi assumed that Sammito, having already punished the 5K opening once, could not imagine Keiichi trying it again. So naturally, Keiichi, hoping to catch Sammito with his pants down, tried it again.

There are a couple of reasons it didn't work. The first is that Sammito almost certainly knew that 5K was not Axl's only, or his best, option for beating a dash opening. We've already talked about how f.S tears it a new one, but even something as simple as a quick 2K can leave that attack plan dead on arrival. That explains why Sammito didn't fall for the bait.

But it doesn't explain why he started with a 5H. For that, we need to examine yomi, or "reading the mind of the opponent," a bit more. Keiichi started with 5K because he expected Sammito to think he wouldn't; in reality, Sammito had been playing a much less complex mind game for the whole match. Take a look at how Sammito handled okizeme in the first round again. He's simply answering what he believes his opponent's first instinct will be. Since Sammito's only information on how Keiichi starts matches is "with a normal," he obviously would not have opened with something that got beat out by any old normal. This is where the 5H comes in: it's active on frame 8, two frames quicker than Axl's f.S.

01:05 - I don't have anything to say about this moment, actually, other than that Sammito's Chipp is so fucking dirty.

After this, though, is when "stay at mid-range!" finally seems to click for Keiichi. One well-aimed 2S and suddenly Chipp's trying to approach from the opposite side of the stage, only really managing to get close enough at any time for Axl's most reliable combo starters to reach. We also see that Keiichi has really re-centered himself: he's far more patient now, poking with f.S and 3P and even landing a max-range 5K!

Notice that once Keiichi escapes Sammito's blender of an oki mix-up, the game becomes much less safe for the poor ninja. His overheads are nothing to speak of on the ground, so all Keiichi has to do is block low and wait to have frame advantage. Even meeting Sammito in the air at 1:20 wasn't such a bad choice: Chipp can't capitalize well from air-to-air hits, and his inability to react properly to the strange positioning costs him a combo's worth of life just a moment later.

Any time Sammito isn't right next to Keiichi, his offense simply loses to our pokier normals. Keiichi takes this round cleanly by forcing such risky approaches every chance he gets.

01:48 - But Keiichi quickly becomes too bold again, and Sammito wastes no time taking advantage of him. Our Axl player throws out another 2H, which Sammito quickly punishes with a 22K into some tough pressure.

Let's talk about the teleport first. By this point in the video, it's become abundantly clear to me that it's Chipp's most dangerous tool: it sets up ambiguous oki and allows Chipp to wiggle his way out of our chains without even having to try. But for all it does for Chipp, teleports are not without risk against Axl. Go back and look at the last round past 1:05 - Chipp teleports once the entire rest of the match, and it's the fake-out version. Why? Because Keiichi was playing patiently. He barely moves for much of the fight, staying focused on watching and reacting to Sammito's approach angles. A K teleport in the environment Keiichi creates in round 2 would have been much riskier, by simple virtue of the fact that Keiichi would have had the time and the presence of mind to punish it.

Now let's talk about the pressure that comes after the teleport. Keiichi eats a knockdown, sure, but I actually don't think he made the wrong decision at any point! Instant-air-backdashing and FDing is a totally safe way to beat out a running f.S from Chipp. The fact that it didn't work comes down to an unfortunate circumstance: Chipp whiffed the attack. If it had hit, Keiichi would have been far enough away once he landed that Sammito's 5K would not have connected, and Keiichi could have gone back to playing the neutral game he'd set up so well in round 2.

And even after the knockdown, he makes an awesome, if risky, play! I'll be honest: I've come to really love S Benten as a countermeasure for in-your-face rush-down like Sammito's here. It comes out as fast as many jabs and is often favorable to Axl if it trades counter hits, as it does here. Why does S Benten work here, when it didn't in round one? Because since then, Sammito has seen his opponent calm down and settle in for the long game. He judged that a meaty j.H would be perfectly safe to attempt, because Keiichi would be too patient to try something risky. And I'm not sure the assessment was wrong: honestly, with Chipp flying at me from the air, I don't think S Benten is very risky at all.

01:58 - Keiichi eats a teleport punish again, this time for a running 6H. It's becoming obvious that aggression against Chipp carries real risks: the ninja is simply faster than we are. I especially would not have tried the 6H after just being punished for trying to start pressure with 2H a moment ago.

I don't have much to say about the rest of this match. Keiichi gets put in the blender and that's that.

Final comments - I play a lot of Magic: the Gathering, and one of the most famous MtG strategy articles of all time talks about knowing when to be the "beatdown" and when to be the "control." The idea is that, in any given match-up, one deck, the "beatdown," wants to win as fast as possible by veritably throwing itself at the opponent. Meanwhile, the other deck, the "control," plays for the long game, hoping to exhaust its opponent's resources and establish dominance by degrees.

When Keiichi lost trades, it was because he was too eager to be the beatdown. Look at round one again: instead of patiently feeling out his opponent's playstyle, Keiichi immediately goes for risky openings and punishes that leave him stranded against his rushdown-centric opponent. Now look at round three: Keiichi loses a lot of ground when, instead of carefully holding his mid-range ground, he tries to go in with 2H and 6H.

It's easy to look at the Axl vs. Chipp match-up and make the mistake of thinking that because Axl needs to guess right on offense fewer times than Chipp does, he must have an advantage in that department. This is wrong because while Chipp certainly does die in two combos, he's much better at making us guess than we are at making him. Our job is to sit back and avoid letting him force us to play a guessing game. Our job is to deny him opportunities to leverage his superior offense. Our job is to be the control.

Finally: in round one, I would have burst basically right away, as soon as I knew that Sammito had confirmed his j.H. The burst would have been up again at least by the end of round two, and I think the space would have given Keiichi just enough time to breathe deeply and really think about his spacing and his poking.

Also, I would never, ever use 2H here. Ever.