Nine vs Rachel

[Monarch]

Discuss the Nine vs Rachel matchup here.

[Soniti]

So I played this matchup a decent amount during my most recent Round 1 visit.

First impressions are that this may be one of, if not the worst matchup for Rachel in this version.

My reasoning for this is entirely due to how much of a struggle neutral felt like. Rachel is more zoning focused in BBCF, but the length of Nine's normals combined with pretty decent startup time on them really seems to shut down Rachel's options. At slightly further than short all the way to medium-far distance, Nine has a variety of ways to counterhit Rachel if she makes an attempt to summon frog or shoot lobelias. If Rachel jumps, Nine's jump normals are also extremely long, which doesn't bode well for Rachel with some of the shorter air normals in the game. It seems like the only time you can get something going is If you are at full screen. Then you can sometimes summon something if Nine doesn't have a spell lets her easily punish it, such as rock (her go-to). 

edit: forgot to mention, wind tech seems pretty good vs Nine.

Anyone have advice? Maybe I'm approaching this matchup the wrong way...

[TD]

236a with wind maybe? Sounds like the only thing that will work honestly. Get her scared of it and then sunmon. Or get a lotus bat on her and work from there. 

[Zephyrion22]

Don't have the game or played it but from the few Rachel vs Nine I've seen, yeah this MU is just incredibly troublesome for Rachel, not only on neutral, but also on defense (no one can escape the rock) and offense (Flux Nurture slow startup and being overall very hard to punish actually makes it very annoying when you're setting up with Rachel, not to mention her invincible dash making it very hard to keep your pressure going)

As TD said, the only thing that seemed to really work was to try to get a lobelia near Nine to get a Lotus Bat, and then try to mount an offense and punish everything she wants do to with a Sword Iris. And Thankfully, once Rachel manages to get up close and personal, her pressure options being really tight won't let much room for Nine to wiggle.

I guess I'd need to see more recent footage of this MU to see if Rachel players found counters to all that, but for now, it's a pretty terrible MU, that much I can agree with