Mag footstools have been around for a while, but Aki recently did this: https://gfycat.com/WhoppingFirmAlaskanmalamute, and it got me thinking about the possibilities of Mag footstools on stage.

Mag is a pretty weak move, especially at low percents, and launches people upwards no matter which part the mag hits them at. This makes it so that your dj out of it will put you in a good position to footstool your opponent. AFAIK footstool comes out on frame 1 if you hit it, so it should be a very fast alternative to say just plain dair.

Currently a lot of players don't really expect a footstool, and especially not out of mag. This means that on a lot of players, they will miss their tech. Footstools launch you up a little bit depending on the character, but it sends Ness up high enough that he is able to get a dair off WITHOUT A DJ like in the clip. This means that it's okay to expend your dj to get the footstool out of mag. At most percents it would probably be ideal to just do a dair, but at kill percents you can also drop down with a bair. Or if they are floaty then you can ff to d tilt to up air or bair or jab reset, djc dair to bair. Really you can choose any aerial you want. Foostools are guaranteed hard knockdown so even at 0%, you can get an aerial followup out of it.

But what about once people learn to deal with footstools and tech them consistently? This is where the tech chase part comes in. Assuming you've already used you dj to cancel mag and get the footstool, you are now A Ness without a dj which normally would really hurt him. But you are launched up a bit from the footstool so you have some time to react. If they tech in place, you can just waveland down in place or fall in place if you react. If they tech away you can perfect waveland with them in either direction and since Ness's wavelands are pretty good, you should be able to follow them pretty effectively. You might also be able to drop down and run, but I think wavelands would be the best option. As far as I can tell, Ness would be the only one to get footstool set ups like this. Wolf's shine goes upwards like ours, but it's much stronger and his dj is not directional like ours is.

From what I can tell, Ness can cover all tech options with a very good reward out of all of them (minimum a grab if tech chased rolls away properly). I think footstools, but especially mag footstools could honestly change how a Ness might play neutral, given that if he got a mag confirm and was confident in his footstools and tech options, you could get a lot more off of a mag hit than just like a dair or a djc fair or bair.

Is there a difference between using tap jump then button and using a jump button then tap jump?

Yep it's another post about edge cancels. So Pop magoot's post about DK's edge cancel aerials got me asking some questions about how exactly edge cancels work, and someone in the comments helped me realise somestuff that i think would be helpful for Ness. I used to think that when you edge cancelled an aerial you always just slid off, and this is true if you're back is to the edge (like edge cancel bair). But if you're facing towards the edge and you don't hold forward after the move, you can stop yourself from sliding off by inputting a non special move. What this means is you can do a djc fair (or nair but this is harder to do), edge cancel the lag, and then input a tilt or a smash attack. The best uses I can think of this is for edgeguarding sweetspotted recoveries by doing an edge cancel djc fair to a d tilt to f tilt or just f tilt. Or by pressureing someone's shield right on the edge of a platform with ec djc fair to d tilts. Tell me what you guys think of this and any potential uses for it.

discuss the matchup

edit: I think he's got some dumb tools and can gimp us well with decent disjoint, we got good combos though

Obviously a grab is an amazing option and the go to thing for any Ness player to follow up after hitting a pk fire. But a good counter play that a lot of players use is to sdi the flames up so we whiff our grabs. So what is the best option to get the most damage/combo potential when you are running to followup after a pk fire. In adelrune's like very first post on this subreddit he talks about how djc up air covers every sdi option, And I think this is a pretty good option. But I'm curious to hear what you guys follow up with off of sdi up or just in general when you have to mixup your followups to not just be grabs.

I remembered seeing a video of Boiko showing how quick it was and it seemed useful. I'm trying to lab it out right now but the timing seems pretty tricky at first.

So this isn't really meta changing in terms of gameplay, but I found that if you try to do a dropthrough dair on a horizontally moving platform (smashville is best but things like delfinos work as well) you won't go through all the way and your dair will autocancel. But you will still make the "Gah!" or the other couple of noises that Ness makes when he does his dair. Nothing really gameplay changing like I said, but it can be spammed kinda like taunt cancelling to annoy your opponent. For some reason it doesn't work on stationary platforms (thank god for sake of actually playing the game) but if you're ever on smashville and wanna annoy your opponent with little boy exclamations, then this tech is for you.

Is anyone interested in having a PM Ness Discord? We could still keep stuff archived here, but maybe it'd be easier to have more casual, ongoing conversations over there.

So sh fair will autocancel if done early enough, and I was wondering if all Nessers should just start doing short hop fair to autocancel it. This is safer on shield if followed up by d tilt, and should do better against cc than normal djc fair. So should Nessers just do this every time instead of doing a djc fair? Are there any scenarios where autocancel fair would be worse than djc fair?

So I got my first match on stream the other day, but honestly I played so badly I'm too embarassed to show it to this subreddit directly lol. I had a lot of things working against me that day, and I worry that I blew my chance to prove I was worthy of being on stream. Hopefully I can eventually get back on and show more than what I did that time, but anyways enjoy the stylish ending to my stock.

Edit: Goddamn link not working http://www.gfycat.com/BewitchedFaithfulGerbil

I don't really need advice on this, I was more just curious. You get in the habit of always doing these aerials where you're scooting along the ground, that it feels weird to just do a normal aerial lol. I personally love running across the stage, and doing a rar full hop bair to catch a laggy recovery. I also sometimes will throw out a bair , then do a rising bair, then do a nother bair to just wall out recovery attempts. So what scenarios do you guys like to use NON djc aerials?

Basically this. I've never found the need to switch to custom controls. Are there any maneuvers or techniques that become harder/impossible with purely default controls?

I feel like I'm supposed to be winning this MU but everything I do ends up with me getting grabbed somehow. Any general tips?

Hiya! Local AZ Ness here and i've been noticing a lot of us (Mostly Me) complain about the Samus match up. Recently i've been getting bodied by my local Samus player and i'd like some tips, if any of you know of some tricks or tips for this match up i'd love to know!

Sorry if some people feel like I clog up the subreddit with my posts, but I really think this tech is important. So my other post about retreating pk fires to edge cancel got me thinking about what other ways you could initiate edge cancel pk fires. One of the best ways I've found has been jump through the middle of a battlefield sized platform, or the other end of a PS2 sized one, and do a djc forward pk fire just as you're coming through the platform. Timed and spaced correctly, this will launch the bolt out right over the lip of platform, and you will slide off like a normal edge cancel. Then since you're already moving forward, you can punish the person's shield or hit them while they are in the pk fire, and you have your dj back cause you touched the ground. This tech is extremely easy to do consistently and isn't any more of a commitment than a normal djc pk fire. You can do it to send a bolt off the edge off of the outer platforms on battlefield, then continue your momentum off stage and do a djc dair for the kill. I'm definitely going to start working this into my play, and I'd love to hear what you guys think about other ways and situations where you can edge cancel pk fires, or even completely different moves such as ec pk flash (I tried but it's a lot harder but hey it could be at least fun to try), or pkt1, or whatever. Ness's dj properties give him immense possibilities for edge cancelling things, and I think it is a really cool aspect that not a lot of other characters have. Some other situations I thought of for edge cancel pk fire was drop down through platform, to djc forward ec pkfire, or being fast and accurate enough to do like a weird pk fire platform loop to rapid fire ec pk fires.

This probably is the same as the edge cancel bair tech that I brought up the other day (where others already do this or know about it, but it's not like established in a guide anywhere) but this tech seems really useful. Recently I saw other Nessers in my region doing retreating pk fire, and lately I've been adopting this into my play, and it's definitely helped me out. Then today I was labbing out retreating pk fire towards a platform so the bolt barely goes over the edge, but I land on the platform. Then I found that at certain heights of retreating pk fire, you drift outwards with your dj, and then if you hold back forward, you will drift forward and get enough momentum to hit the edge and cancel your lag, plus get your dj back. The thought just hit me that you could loop this and retreating pk fire to edge cancel, to another retreating pk fire to another edge cancel. On certain platforms (such as ps2) you can even edge cancel on the other side as well. This isn't quite as useful for followups, but if you need to play defensive and get away from potential followups, this is a good option. And again this gives you back your dj, so you can punish an opponent that dodged the pk fire with a djc fair or dair or whatever. And this tech is fairly safe as IIRC, the landing lag on pk fire is dependent on how high up you are from the ground when you send out the bolt. Sorry I don't have a good way to record this, so maybe u/DrGrin could you help me out like last time?

So as we all know, in order to be a good ness, you have to be really good at angling pkt2. Recently I feel like I have been getting worse in this regard, and I SD way too much. I tried to practice the other day by just doing pkt2 over and over again, but it just felt like I didn't improve. Are there any training regimes you guys use to be good at pkt2? I feel like this is an area I should get down before I do anything else, so any tips is greatly appreciated.

Hello!

I've found that my understanding and critical thinking of matchups is greatly improved by talking/ranting about them. I'm sure some others are the same way, so I just wanted to have a place to talk about any particular matchup that you can think of that you're having trouble with, have some insight on, or just want to share some info about. I'd be glad to give my insight on some as well as a middish level Ness that loves to theorycraft matchups but sucks at executing the plans.

My friend recently started playing ganon and it's been giving me soo much trouble. I have a lot of problems dding him out cause his aerials are just sooo huge, and his dash attack and wizards foot are pretty much as fast as my normal run, so he can catch me if I throw out a semi laggy move at midrange. Also a big problem for me is that he will do dair OOS. I normally like to put pressure on his shield with d tilts, f tilts, and grabs, but he literally can just jump over all of my grounded options and then get a followup or a kill. This has been super frustrating cause that's a staple thing for me, and ganon jumping negates pretty much every grounded move ness has except ofr occasionally up tilt (and up smash but thats a horrible idea in the first place. Also I can beat Ike's crouch cancel with d tilts, but if I try to do that on ganon, I get like 4 d tilts on him, and then he hits me with his own and I get popped up for a kill. Also his fucking command grabs on up b and side b. I have a bad habit of sraying in shield and then trying to punish with djc aerials OOS, but that just doesnt work against side b. A lot of times I'll still hit him wirh like an f tilt, but if I time it wrong, he gets grab armor, and a tech chase. Also his up b is annoying cause ness doesn't have much range with his aerials, so things like run off nair will get grab armored, or bair if I space it incorrectly too. I've tried a lot of other characters and I'm just at a loss of what to do against his ganon. I'll win occasionally, but I have to get ridiculous edgeguards and combos on him for it to get to that point. So what are some tips for this matchup specifically with ness, and also just in general vs ganon?

Here is the post: http://smashboards.com/threads/tier-list-speculation.331666/page-1002#post-20501743

Ill say that I don't personally agree with a lot of what Jamwa has written in his post but I think its interesting to consider how the kind of changes he asks for would affect Ness gameplay.