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The Duckator Dilemma

Kristoph

, the Angel
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To Squigly--

darling, dearest, dead.


If you are interested in threads with Skullgirls fanart, you would be better off reading some other thread. In this thread, not only is there no Skullgirls fanart, there is no voice acting and very little cosplay. This is because not very many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters. Severin, Chilldog, and Kenin Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with suffering, misery, and despair. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that is how the thread goes.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So Duckator is easily the #1 Skullgirls player in the world right now. He's won every (?) major he's attended since SDE, consistently dominates GGPO, and I hear he even won Evo twice or something. I think it's a bit strange that so little community energy has been put towards figuring out how to handle its strongest player. So!

I thought we could use a thread dedicated solely to making Duckator's life sadder, less predictable, and filled with disappointment.

7523949478_5260b3b8eb_z.jpg

those... shiny eyes...

To that end, I think it's time people start thinking about Valentine/Filia/Double (V.F.D.). Don't get me wrong! In most respects Duckator is just plain better than everyone. Of his three main characters, he's probably the absolute best with all three of them (any challengers?). He has the most solid fundamentals in the community, he capitalizes on opportunities like nobody else, he's a renowned actor and keen emotional manipulator-- the list goes on. But the fact remains that he's also running the most feared team in Skullgirls right now, and yet it seems there hasn't been much time spent trying to minimize that.

So the goal of this thread is to, as a community, "Analyze the current #1 team in the game, break it down, and, ideally, find ways to weaken and exploit it," even if only slightly! If nothing else, it's a great exercise that helps develop more realistic, practical balance theory (which we could probably use more of, frankly). At best, hey, maybe we can shake things up come NEC in December!


The Basics

I don't have much experience against V.F.D. (the one time I played Duckator he mainly just rolled me with secondaries, although Baiken was running this for a bit at FRB), but I think it's easy enough to understand the team on a basic level. It's a pretty simple concept; take the best rushdown character in the game and put her in front of two of the strongest assists. The result is a team that is (a) adept at scoring the first hit, and (b) possibly unmatched when it comes to capitalizing, fully, on that hit. In other words, when things go right for V.F.D., things go really, really right.

The kicker, though, is that those assists are attached to Filia and Double-- arguably the most robust core in the game, and major individual threats in their own respect. Many people have been knocking around the idea that Filia and Double are in fact the two best characters in the game right now, and it's hard to argue with them. All of this is just to say that V.F.D. is uncommonly good at recovering from unfortunate events; Duckator has more than enough disguises to get the job done even when things do happen to go sour.

In other words, V.F.D. is the strongest core, with the strongest anchor, with the strongest point character in front of it, locked and loaded with two of the most oppressive assists. How do you even begin to invent a way around that?


Matchups

Now, I don't know shit about matchups, especially Valentine's. But I think it's really important to recognize that, even though this entire thread is about V.F.D. being this super scary top tier team, Skullgirls is a really well-balanced game. So while it's uncontroversial that Valentine's overall offensive toolset is among the scariest in the game, in no way does that protect her from matchup struggles, even against characters that are ostensibly worse than her. It really would not surprise me if we eventually found that Valentine loses to Cerebella or something 'unexpected'-- especially if that character were backed up with "best practice" (read: boring, effective)-style assists. Hopefully we can get some good theory going in this thread, since I feel if there's any point character that Valentine happens to struggle against, that is very much relevant to the immediate future of the tournament scene and is important to explore. Of course this applies to Filia and Double as well, though perhaps less pressingly.


Assists

Again, I have little to personally contribute here as I'm not yet what you'd consider a "good player," but if people have any thoughts on what assist combinations they believe give V.F.D. a disproportionately difficult time-- even if they're just the bog standard that everyone's using anyway-- I feel that that's hugely constructive in a world where you literally cannot win a major unless you're capable of beating Duckator 3/5.

One little note I'd like to make here is that I've always found it a bit odd how coy non-Valentine players tend to be with their assists. You don't really see the "point character + two cheapest, most basic assists possible" stuff you might expect. All the Fortune players I've played have tended towards a more one-dimensional style with either one or no assists, just focusing on maximizing the basic Fortune mixup and damage output (the exception to this is Worldjem, but I'm not sure what he mains at the moment. Last I saw he was running point Peacock though). It's effective because it's Fortune, but I have to wonder what they'd be capable of if they went full-on "best practices" mode.

Again though, the game is well-balanced. The main barrier stopping people from winning majors isn't V.F.D., it's that they're just not good enough. So it's not like there's some pressing need for everyone to throw Double in the back of their team or anything-- but I have to wonder what would happen if they did.



Snapback???

I think a lot of people had fun watching Duckator's team receive multiple nerfs throughout the 1.02 beta-testing process. All three characters saw significant nerfs to their best supers, though presumably the new superflash hitstop made up for at least some of that. But what stood out for me as a particularly tantalizing anti-Duckator possibility was the new snapback.

In 1.02, snapping out an opponent's point character locks their assists for 300 frames. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that's exactly 300 more frames than in SDE, significantly increasing the vulnerability of a snapped-in character. This is great for people who want to snap in a weakened character to finish them off before they regain red life, but does anyone else see potential for this as a straight up anti-Valentine tactic?

Valentine is arguably the worst assist character in the game, and her meter usage leaves a lot to be desired. She unequivocally does not want to be in the back unless absolutely necessary. Meanwhile, the anchor position is Double's home. She is the best assist in the game, and catheads are a fantastic DHC which remain a strong option as a solo with meter. Double isn't completely wasted on point, but with weak opening mixup escape options and the inability to call assists for 300 frames, will she even make it there?

I think most teams tend to be pretty good about not being too sad if they happen to gum up their order a bit (I play Parasoul/Filia/Cerebella, which really can be played in any order I feel so long as I'm feeling confident). I think "Any Team With Valentine" might be a major exception to that, though:


That's Duckator, completely obliterating another Valentine player by snapping in Filia and laughing in the face of an incoming Squigly/Valentine. Granted, these are two very different teams we're talking about (against Val/Squigly/Filia I feel like it's a straight up no-brainer to go for the snap there, and I was actually laughing about how convenient it was for me that this matchup was recorded), but I think the theory is the same. If you have strong enough incoming mixups, instead of V.F.D. being a team where "even if things go wrong it's still okay," it becomes "if things go wrong you're left with Filia backed by a mediocre assist, possibly forced to spend 2 meters to get Val back in or risk having to struggle with solo Val." It's such a stark difference that I feel it's worth leaving Valentine alive, even if she does have a tattoo of an eye on her left ankle. At the very least, you force Duckator--villain that he is--to play a different sort of game from the one he's used to playing.

Anyway, that's all I've got left to bother you all with. Hopefully this facilitates some interesting discussion. Remember, you are all my last hope that the tales of the Baudelaire children can finally be told to the general public,

With all due respect,

Kristoph, the Angel

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

KRISTOPH, THE ANGEL was born in a small town where the inhabitants were suspicious and prone to riot. He now lives in Japan. During his spare time he gathers evidence and is considered something of an expert by leading authorities.
 
I thought we could use a thread dedicated solely to making Duckator's life sadder, less predictable, and filled with disappointment.

I can get behind this.
 
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Snapping in double seems like a decent option, double is weak to incoming mixups, eats meter on point, and would not have a safe dhc out. You also put val in the back so if double dies you're faced with the weaker shell of filia/val.

That said, I prefer playing duo and if I'm against a trio I should be able to do 100% for a meter. Add to that prudent assist baiting+punishment and it becomes a matter of matching his footsies.
 
Snapping in double seems like a decent option, double is weak to incoming mixups, eats meter on point, and would not have a safe dhc out. You also put val in the back so if double dies you're faced with the weaker shell of filia/val.

That said, I prefer playing duo and if I'm against a trio I should be able to do 100% for a meter. Add to that prudent assist baiting+punishment and it becomes a matter of matching his footsies.
This isn't totally true. Double can whiff a car, then DHC to Valentine's scalpels super. From full screen that super is safe against most characters.
 
Lol, before I read that entire post, I said to myself "the key to beating duck is to pick Val" but you beat me to it.

Duck is great. A very good player. But his team... Every team actually, is weak to hk hairball... Well every assist team because hairball beats assists for free because it meaties them for free forcing the other player to make better assist calls... Which means less assist calls. Meaning more hairballs and more consistent hairball pressure for the hairball user.

However I don't think there are any great hairball users out there yet. None that are on ducks level at least. And it doesn't matter that much if you have a counter... You still have to be good.

Ducks team is still the best because it best takes advantage of the most broken thing in sg... The only thing that still hasn't been hit TO hard by the nerf stick... Dp assists.

I've said it before and I'll say it again... Val converts the best in the game off of out of position updo and pillar and bomber calls. That is why she is the best in the game. Getting an assist hitconfirm has the least amount of risk to a point character out of every other type of confirm. It's also one of the easiest confirms. And finally Val has an easy time cause she has the fastest run in the game COMBINED with a very good cr.mk for getting easy otg.

Now that isn't all. Technically speaking peacock should be the counter to that team. It runs a low range dp assist and a bomber assist that can't hit peacocks airdash back in most situations... However Val has savage bypass as well as double jump into airdash etc etc etc to make her one of peacocks hardest matchups. So keepaway doesn't work either.

The best overall "counter" on paper is a rushdown Val followed by fortune or para with dp assist with filia hairball assist. Val can get amazing mixups off of blocked hairballs as well as can fortun, parasoul is harder but she has some amazing neutral with hairball. Val can convert hairball hits easily. As can fortune. The weakest thing about this team is that if a vfd found it to be a problem... Then they can just switch to hairball as well.

So imho "the answer" without picking Val herself Is fortune with Bella or para and hairball.

That team is actually HIGHLY anti vfd because hp lnl will tend to beat bomber and updo and so will hairball. Fortune has an ok neutral versus Val as well as does Bella. Val would have to go on the offensive to beat this team because assist turtling doesn't seem the way to go for Val to win when the other team is hitting harder.


IMHO
 
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Snap in Double early and get rid of her first. Filia/Val may as well be Solo Filia, and Double without Cat Heads and Updo assist is manageable, plus Double sucks on incoming. Duckator is the best fg player in the sg community period, so that still may not be enough to beat him, but that's the best method of handling that team imo.

A solid zoning team could do it if it plays aggressive until Double is done; also, some method of heavily punishing assists while keeping Val in check would help a lot. Peacock/Filia/Bella with DP and Cerecopter maybe?
 
[quote="Dime_x, post: 17113, member: 459"

Now that isn't all. Technically speaking peacock should be the counter to that team. It runs a low range dp assist and a bomber assist that can't hit peacocks airdash back in most situations... However Val has savage bypass as well as double jump into airdash etc etc etc to make her one of peacocks hardest matchups. So keepaway doesn't work either.
[/quote]


Peacock should never be considered as a counter to this team, even in passing. It's got two of her three worst match ups in it plus a Fillia. The best you could hope for is to force Duckator do what his team was designed to do. Rush your ass down. I know it was said in passing, but Peacock has no place in this discussion as far as hard counters are concerned.

That said, I have to agree with the rest of your post.
 
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[quote="Dime_x, post: 17113, member: 459"

Now that isn't all. Technically speaking peacock should be the counter to that team. It runs a low range dp assist and a bomber assist that can't hit peacocks airdash back in most situations... However Val has savage bypass as well as double jump into airdash etc etc etc to make her one of peacocks hardest matchups. So keepaway doesn't work either.



Peacock should never be considered as a counter to this team, even in passing. It's got two of her three worst match ups in it plus a Fillia. The best you could hope for is to force Duckator do what his team was designed to do. Rush your ass down. I know it was said in passing, but Peacock has no place in this discussion as far as hard counters are concerned.

That said, I have to agree with the rest of your post.

Why is Double one of Peacock's worst match-ups? Band wagon? Honestly, I'm not seeing it. Information would be great though, it's always good to learn more.

Also, I think this thread should be more about beating Duck's team and not about beating Duck himself, because he's just better than everybody atm and will adapt to whatever you come up with...
 
I don't think double is a bad match up for peacock. Pretty even imo unless double has like 4 meters to work with.
 
Learn to block where? Even the best of players can't block mix ups after they've lost neutral very well. Feels like making guesses more than actually reacting and blocking.
 
also band wagon can be blocked pretty easy its not safe, just throw less things double is the one i have less trouble, me being solopeacock she can fight without relying only in zoning.
 
I don't think double is a bad match up for peacock. Pretty even imo unless double has like 4 meters to work with.

My biggest problem with this matchup is car super > dhc into something you can combo off of.
 
Learn to block where? Even the best of players can't block mix ups after they've lost neutral very well. Feels like making guesses more than actually reacting and blocking.
oh yeah see what you mean thats good pont, the same should be true for him thought.
 
Now that isn't all. Technically speaking peacock should be the counter to that team. It runs a low range dp assist and a bomber assist that can't hit peacocks airdash back in most situations... However Val has savage bypass as well as double jump into airdash etc etc etc to make her one of peacocks hardest matchups. So keepaway doesn't work either.



Peacock should never be considered as a counter to this team, even in passing. It's got two of her three worst match ups in it plus a Fillia. The best you could hope for is to force Duckator do what his team was designed to do. Rush your ass down. I know it was said in passing, but Peacock has no place in this discussion as far as hard counters are concerned.

That said, I have to agree with the rest of your post.
Thank you for agreeing with the rest of the post... You could give me a like as well seeing as to how I'm lacking in those lately :(

As far as peacock... It's less about peacock and more about just strict keepaway and zoning. But unfortunately as you've pointed out, Val is one of the best anti zoning characters in the game.

As far as double versus peacock goes... The matchup is based on meter. Solo double versus solo peacock is in peacocks advantage and probably like 8-2 if double has no meter.

Double only really has wagon to take on peacock and it doesn't give full combo without dhc and it doesn't even guarantee pressure... It's just damage and a somewhat closer position to peacock depending on where she decides to tech.

As far as damage is concerned I'd rather be hit by wagon 4 times than by savage bypass xx scalpels once.

Because one is a solo confirm and the other is not.

Filia does very well against peacock also cause filia has lots of angles she can attack either for pressure or for stalling out time.
 
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You can always hope he doesn't get bored of beating you easily every game. Then you can learn how he plays more and more learning each opening in his attacks and your defense eventually making you Mirror Duckator or just a really good you.

That's normally how I learn a game sometimes. I mean what a better way to learn to beat the best by observing the best.

Oh and don't play solo with him, that's when it's really scary.

ALSO: Fortune's head can take the damage for the car and other things for you so there's that. (At least it isn't full damage right?)
 
snip


Good vid. Not really sure whether its supposed to refute what I said or not though. Duck was the better player and won. Though the player that is more than likely much weaker made a DAMN GOOD showing against duck and was beating on ducks assists all throughout the set and forcing duck to counter call and constantly change his assist calling patterns.

If you have to counter call, your assist is probably countered, and you are at a disadvantage.

Just because something counters something else, doesn't mean that it is an auto win.

I play bomber against hairball users all the time... And I get my wins. But fuck if it ain't a fuckton harder than if they didn't have hairball.
 
Hit him first, put him in the vortex, bait the super or DP because he is scared to block (like we all are), and don't give him any momentum.

/thread
 
Seriously...what the fuck is this lol

I complain about Duck sometimes, but I did NOT expect anyone to make a thread based on his total take down.
If you seriously think this thread is about taking duck down in any sort of way outside of beating him in a tourny... You need to get a grip.

Having said that, this thread is EXACTLY what the community needs at this point. Not in a troll "nobody can beat duck har har y'all suck" kinda way. But in a "we level up if we beat duck"

Who could or even would have a problem with duck himself? He's quiet, well mannered for the most part, decently humble for being king of skullgirls, and shows us how to go beat him by uploading all the videos he does.

I'd be hard pressed to find a better ambassador for sg than him (besides if viscant played)... I could think of a lot worse.

Having said that, threads based on how to beat a persons team or the player themselsves aren't exactly new. Duck isn't the first duc. The first duc had entire threads dedicated on discussing the spiral matchup and how to beat it, what it's best counters were etc etc etc. this was considered quite normal because it is.


But nowadays when anyone talks strategy or teams or anything of that nature, we get trolls talking about everything is theory fighter, nothing will be accomplished etc etc etc

Which is funny when that's the exact opposite of what happened back in the day.

I mean why are people even posting here except to impart knowledge or learn?

It seems that skullheart as of late is mostly a place to troll others for wanting to learn, or to troll others for imparting knowledge.

Also as far as duck himself is concerned, we aren't doing him any kind of service by NOT breaking his team, his tendencies, his strategies, down.

Breaking shit down is what fighting game players are SUPPOSED TO DO. Some of us like to do it with others and some of us like to do it alone. The ones that want to participate with others shouldn't have to endure the constant harassment that happens everytime we type out something having to do with strategy.

Sorry for the rant but this place is getting more and more backwards for the conducive exchange of ideas that fighting game forums are supposed to be.

I mean, wow, someone actually suggested that we should try and figure out how to beat duck and people find that weird?



....
 
I don't think that duck thinks he has the best Val. I do think he thinks he has the best dubs though.

He has said before that there is a better or there are better Val's out there, he has also said that he is the best double.
 
Long ass book

No that's not what I mean, this thread in a way is funny. It feel strange everyone is all focusing on taking him down. You even have his picture up and everything like a wanted poster lulz

I understand this thread has good intentions, but it really just makes things look strange.

I do understand Duckators desire for this community to finally get off it's ass and finally get better.
 
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guitalex said:
I have no idea what this thread is supposed to be for lol
Kristoph said:
So the goal of this thread is to, as a community, "Analyze the current #1 team in the game, break it down, and, ideally, find ways to weaken and exploit it," even if only slightly! If nothing else, it's a great exercise that helps develop more realistic, practical balance theory (which we could probably use more of, frankly). At best, hey, maybe we can shake things up come NEC in December!

Anyway, Dime's most recent post is sooooooo fucking good. Wow, like, really really good. Everyone should read that.
 
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At this point I think we should get on with figuring out ways to counter duck and his team rather than continuing to argue with the "omg thread so stoopid get betuhr" comments.

I've already contributed my thoughts on strategy but I'd love to hear others points of view. I come here to talk strategy not to dissect whether we should or shouldn't talk strategy.


And thanks for the compliment @Kristoph
:)
 
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I can't really give thoughts on how to win neutral vs duck since I'm still trying to learn that myself but some basic thoughts.
LNL H is a really good assist to use vs Updo assist since it doesn't care about being hit. So if you want to try to pick characters who are good vs ducks team you would probably want to play Parasoul/Double LK HB/Bella LNL H maybe?
Pay attention to his meter since a lot of a persons decisions come from his ability to waste resources. He's willing to use super to get you off him or to get his offense started as well as dhc to cat heads so be aware of that and take the meter into consideration if you're going for a reset or going for a jump in.
Just don't forget that once you hit a player he's no different than anyone else, so don't get nervous and start dropping stuff for no reason.
 
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Well. The main fact is, nobody watches for what he does. One thing is that people fall into the same trap every time, even myself. Duckator just knows how to manipulate things in his favor because he understands the game better than any of us can.

He knows how to control the flow of battle and we have to learn what his patterns are. Even he has patterns. What we need to do, is learn how to make the flow go in OUR control.

There am I not public enemy #1 anymore?
 
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One thing I noticed while commentating with him during the skullbats top8 is that Duckator is really good at noticing people's bad habits, really quick. Sorry to single you guys out, but for the sake of examples, he's mentioned how BrandX tends to updo on wake-up, or how mpgame tends to do raw Daisy Pusher when Squigly's on point. When he goes on to fight these guys, he would use their habits against them.

So as an idea (and I'm a total scrub, so take it for what it's worth), what if we train him during the match to think we're doing these, and then when he EXPECTS the raw updo on wake-up, we throw in a counter that can open his character up? Granted this will only work until (1) he gets wise to it, which is probably after one match and (2) his opponent actually notices bad habits and makes an attempt to correct them.
 
One thing I noticed while commentating with him during the skullbats top8 is that Duckator is really good at noticing people's bad habits, really quick. Sorry to single you guys out, but for the sake of examples, he's mentioned how BrandX tends to updo on wake-up, or how mpgame tends to do raw Daisy Pusher when Squigly's on point. When he goes on to fight these guys, he would use their habits against them.

So as an idea (and I'm a total scrub, so take it for what it's worth), what if we train him during the match to think we're doing these, and then when he EXPECTS the raw updo on wake-up, we throw in a counter that can open his character up? Granted this will only work until (1) he gets wise to it, which is probably after one match and (2) his opponent actually notices bad habits and makes an attempt to correct them.

That's the thing, Duckator is constantly adapting faster than anyone in this community. He can change the flow of the match back to his favor in almost an instant, which means we would have to be constantly changing strategies every second (And for most, it won't take long to run out)
 
That's the thing, Duckator is constantly adapting faster than anyone in this community. He can change the flow of the match back to his favor in almost an instant, which means we would have to be constantly changing strategies every second (And for most, it won't take long to run out)
He's not invincible or anything. Severin can take matches against him, OmniSScythe almost beat him in the 240p tournament (granted, that was online), Taluda ran a set against Duck a while back and did well (also online, and Taluda's connection is... yeah, but still), and That One Other Dude did extremely well against Duckator in SDE.

But as far as my own contribution goes... part of what makes Duckator's team so good is that he has two of the three characters with the best mobility on his team, and he has safe DHC options (and some that aren't exactly safe but are extremely hard to punish). Not much can be done about the latter, but something to keep his point character grounded (like HK hairball when he comes down from a jump) or something to keep him from moving around how he wishes could help.
 
He's not invincible or anything. Severin can take matches against him, OmniSScythe almost beat him in the 240p tournament (granted, that was online), Taluda ran a set against Duck a while back and did well (also online, and Taluda's connection is... yeah, but still), and That One Other Dude did extremely well against Duckator in SDE.

But as far as my own contribution goes... part of what makes Duckator's team so good is that he has two of the three characters with the best mobility on his team, and he has safe DHC options (and some that aren't exactly safe but are extremely hard to punish). Not much can be done about the latter, but something to keep his point character grounded (like HK hairball when he comes down from a jump) or something to keep him from moving around how he wishes could help.

I never said he was invincible, I never said that anywhere in my post. I said that he is able to adapt extremely easier than most people in this community. People like Sev, Omni, Taluda and etc are able to stand a chance because they are able to create more strategy and know how to counter act a lot of his stuff because they have deep understandings of their teams and how they function and what their abilities are. The main problem is most of the community can't because they don't have the knowledge to keep making new strategies against him.

It's a matter of, most need to gain more knowledge about their team and what the possibilities of counter acting they can do.

And even then, it's just a skill gap that prevents most of us (MOST OF US) from touching him. Duckator probably training modes more than anyone else. Also if I recall, he has 3rd Strike experience so obviously his skills transferred over.
 
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One of the most difficult things for mounting an offense against the Val/Fillia team is that Scalpels makes it extremely easy for Valentine to protect her assists.

If most other characters tried this type of play, 'jump around and run away until the assist gets your offense started', then they're assist would be vulnerable and you could force them to come in to protect it.

It actually reminds me a lot of MvC2 Storm/Psylock shell. Its so hard to deal with because Hail will punish you if you try to attack the assist, and if you try to attack Storm to stop her from running around building meter you'll run into the Psylock assist and eat a ton of damage for your trouble.
 
He knows how to control the flow of battle and we have to learn what his patterns are. Even he has patterns. What we need to do, is learn how to make the flow go in OUR control.

Coming back to the original topic, I've been thinking about what BrandX says, and it's likely true that Duckator has patterns and bad habits just like the rest of us. I haven't fought him enough to know what these patterns ARE, but perhaps this is something that those who spar with him frequently can enlighten the rest of us on.
 
Coming back to the original topic, I've been thinking about what BrandX says, and it's likely true that Duckator has patterns and bad habits just like the rest of us. I haven't fought him enough to know what these patterns ARE, but perhaps this is something that those who spar with him frequently can enlighten the rest of us on.

You have to develop your skills to the point where you can analyze his play and figure out his patterns yourself. You can't wait on others to tell you what to do, it's self improvement that will win it at the end of the day.
 
You have to develop your skills to the point where you can analyze his play and figure out his patterns yourself. You can't wait on others to tell you what to do, it's self improvement that will win it at the end of the day.

This is true. One thing people forget is that he is always streaming and always recording matches of himself. In a way, its an indirect way to show us what he does and what we need to do against him. He's indirectly teaching us and we aren't even taking it to thought.
 
Good. We are talking strats again. I want to say that I don't think we should concentrate on trying to beat duck, we should concentrate on beating his team. Beating his team will either force a character change which will weaken him though he's still very good with other characters, or it will give much easier wins against him.

I've stated my theories on beating his team. But I'll just quickly repeat:

1.hk hairball is a great counter to hornet bomber, and forces hornet bomber to be used in a counter call fashion, this actually works against up do as well. The strategy is to try and keep space to where the opponent will want to use bomber and not updo. As long as that space is kept, hairball gives an advantage. Because it outrangws updo and beats bomber.

2. Grab an invincible assist such as pillar or updo as well. The thing is that ducks team has to get close especially with hairball destroying assist from range, to do any damage.

3. When using hairball it goes without saying that the hairball user MUST COVER VAL WITH HIS POINT. One of the problems in that set with adeveis is that he would call hairball and it would do its job and beat up ducks assists, but, he wouldn't cover Val and Val would just jump over hairball and get pressure. That's a mistake... You've always got to be covering the area above hairball.

The adeveis match is actually a great one to see the great use of hairball and it giving ducks team tough problems such as almost forcing duck to be more predictable in his approaches and thusly funneling duck into pillar confirms. Duck for that matter also shows some good anti hairball strats, like using Val's fireball at the beginning of round 1 to hit it.

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When I played duck and got destroyed by him, dropping all my combos and generally performing like an ass like I did all evo, i noticed that he's just as easy to throw as anyone else. In fact one of the biggest things that I notice about him is that his opponents don't try to throw him that much... Imho that is a HUGE flaw in anyone's fundamentals. You should throw ALOT. Throws are by far the hardest tactic to beat in sg. They put fear into the opponent.

When duck noticed that I throw alot, his defense was to all out attack me. He noticed that my spacing isn't up to par with the high level guys so he made sure to not give me any chances to set my offense up. (Also, I imagine that he noticed that I wasn't using an updo assist so he could kinda have a field day with the jumpins) his resets weren't working that well against me for the first 5 games or so, but the remarkable thing wasn't that his resets and even filia pressure weren't working that great against me for the first few games, it was his approach to playing me that I found to be very remarkable... He kept trying different styles of mixups: overheads, lows, assist crossups etc etc etc. in the fifth game he found my weakness which is I'm absolutely terrible at blocking ambiguous crossups... So he would just combo me and then reset with a Val j.hp ambiguous crossup.

Another thing he did when I was cornered was he ran me through a gambit of filia blockstrings, and generally speaking he would eventually open me up... But... It would generally take him awhile... Like 3-4 seconds which is kinda unheard of against filia in the corner.

Anywho, he finally did the blockstring of cr.lk,delay,cr.mk


And that got me... See the thing is I naturally use certain option select timings to block and beat things. But once duck had discovered this about me.... My defense completely fell apart. Like COMPLETELY.
and that was what I thought was remarkable... He could have thrown me to open me up at any time. But he wanted to UNDERSTAND me... So instead of going the easy route of using throw openers, he just kept using different overhead blockstring timings and low string timings till he found one that worked. And he did the same against my reset defense. He kept trying different ways to open the lock until he found the key... He didn't try to use the same strategy over and over again until it worked, he used many different easy to apply strategies till he found my player specific weakness.

More than anything else it was that specific style of play that made me feel like duck was the real deal.
Plus I had a feeling that he was going easy on me.

Now I don't know how that in and of itself can be used to beat him... But what I am suggesting is that perhaps that level of hard work and adaptation can be used by ourselves to try and make ourselves better... Maybe we should take a page out of his book and do the same thing... Explore our opponents so that we can better understand them instead of just regurgitating our patterns over and over again.

This means that we have to be ready to lose in order to gain knowledge. Especially in casuals.

There was more but I've written to much already....


Oh wait one more thing:

At the highest levels it isn't any one strategy that gets wins. It's the ability for an opponent to adapt to another that gets wins... Seems obvious, but what isn't obvious is that at higher levels, both players are constantly adapting to each other... So let's say I start out with a certain type of offense, my opponent counters it, then I counter my opponents counter, then he counters my counter to his counter... And I do likewise... That is how higher level goes.

The stronger player is the one who makes the last adaptation, of both players continue to Adapt to each other, then generally speaking they will come up about 50/50 in terms of win/loss ratio.

However if one player tends to adapt a bit quicker than the other is where higher win ratios occur for the person that adapts quicker.


This is of course on top of fundamental things outside of adaptation such as getting max combo damage, getting hitconfirms from whatever is hitconfirmable etc etc etc.
 
Make way for some scrub-talk here, but one thing I notice is that Duck doesn't let people get him stuck blocking for very long, he does everything he can to stop his opponent from attacking him, hit, missed, blocked or otherwise (which is how everyone should be playing anyway). This is probably why his team works so well with him as a player because Double's got the lockdown for pressure and Filia's got the usefulness as a counter and shield. Obviously, this means stopping him from laying down the pressure is going to be the biggest hurdle in having a strategy for facing him.

Preventing the usefulness of his assists is clearly the agreed upon first step of this, people have already mentioned Filia's HK Hairball and snapping Val out for Double as a good way of going about it, but even on their own he's more than capable of destroying the vast majority of SG players, and one of the things that stands out in his videos on Youtube is just how much time his opponents spend waiting for him to attack and blocking it instead of attacking or trying to counter with an invulnerable move (even with obvious choices like Filia), which is most likely because we all know him as the best SG player out there and automatically take the defensive instead of the offensive.

Another thing, more specific to playing against Duck than just getting good at the game, is that he doesn't seem too great in the corner (probably because he doesn't spend much time there), so taking advantage of this is bound to help a lot. If you think about it, it's unlikely that he won't throw out a Filia Updo assist when trying to escape pressure while there, so getting him in the corner and getting in a double snap is a fast-track to getting rid of his most useful defensive assist, which will make putting pressure on him a whole lot easier no matter where on the stage you are. As for getting him in the corner, Filia, Cerebella, Valentine and Fortune all have combos that travel far across the screen as well as good corner pressure capabilities, so using one of them as point characters sounds like a good idea.

Personally, I think Fortune may be one of the better characters to use against him thanks to the pressure options and defensive options of her head, however she doesn't have great control over the air so it's more likely than not that she'd lose to Val. Keeping Fortune second, making sure the 3rd team member has a good assist (Double's butt-thrust, Filia's Updo or Napalm Pillar should do the trick) and a decent point character assist (using after an alpha-counter to bring in Fortune) sounds like a good idea to me, but all I can contribute to high-level play are ideas that I doubt I would be able to execute myself.
 
Keep going Dime, with those quality posts I won't need to add much. :D
 
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Well, if we're talking about beating duck's team, I could talk a bit about my matches using the same team, though I'm nowhere near as good, and a lot of this could have been bad play on my part. I play a friend who uses Fort/Bell/Para on his team, and I found it hard to call assists like I wanted too. I got my assists punished a good bit and so I stopped using them as much, which made the match a lot harder. There's some additional cooldown on assists when their hit isn't there? during that time I felt it was harder to keep him off me because he still had his assists ready. Even though Val is a good character, I feel like I lose a lot of power while my assists are out of order. While I guess that's true of everyone, playing other characters without assists I still feel better than playing Val without them. For example, I occasionally lame it out and just throw shuriken to get my friends fortune to approach, then when he gets close I just call Updo, and I'm good. If I got my hornet bomber hit earlier I'm without it and have to do something a bit more risky like run at him and try something. Because of this, I was really hesitant to call assists, or maybe I just didn't find as many good situations to throw assists. It's like what Dime_X said about Hairball blowing up hornet bomber...well now that I think about it I think it IS what he was saying. Finding a way to make assist calling more risky limits Valentine greatly.

Or I could be wrong, like I said, I'm bad at this game.
 
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Good. We are talking strats again. I want to say that I don't think we should concentrate on trying to beat duck, we should concentrate on beating his team. Beating his team will either force a character change which will weaken him though he's still very good with other characters, or it will give much easier wins against him.

This is key to gaining an advantage that can last through a set. Since character and assist choices are locked in, there is much less adaptation that can happen during a match if you have the matchup thoroughly explored and countered. I don't actually believe there *are* any hard counters in SG except maybe against squigly, but even a small advantage that sticks can balance things against an opponent who normally adapts more quickly.


When I played duck and got destroyed by him...

This is useful info. My loose understanding of duckator's playstyle is that he tends to default to midrange defense + updo, confirming hits or switching strategy as he learns. Throwing is a big tool for discouraging that, but as you found it can be countered by adapting with faster transitions to offense. I would be interested to see excellabella assist tried out against him to see whether that could effectively shut down any big parts of his gameplan.

Another thing he did when I was cornered was he ran me through a gambit of filia blockstrings, and generally speaking he would eventually open me up... But... It would generally take him awhile... Like 3-4 seconds which is kinda unheard of against filia in the corner.

This sounds like something an alpha counter could be used to combat. If someone notices that he is using a point character to put you in long blockstrings, it may help to switch in filia and gregor or something like that. This is also countered by frametraps and such, but should be kept in your back pocket as a threat at the very least.

At the highest levels it isn't any one strategy that gets wins. It's the ability for an opponent to adapt to another that gets wins

qft