SSBU/Meta Knight/Strategy

Gameplan Summary

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Neutral

Meta Knight is a bait and punish character at his core. He has several Touch of Death combos, but not many moves safe on shield. However, his 5 aerial jumps with landing aerial combo starters as well as his frame 7 burst option combo starter (dash attack) allows him to get a stock off of one interaction, assuming that he plays patient.

Meta Knight is able to play either grounded or in the air, allowing him much more flexibility than the rest of the cast. When on the ground, grab and Dash Attack are his two main combo starters. DA is -18 on shield and grab has 28 frames of end lag.

"Dair camping has several purposes. Dair's hitbox is only active for one frame so you wanna make sure it comes out when it would be able to interrupt your opponent's anti--air. So like if I was hovering above Mario's shield and I think the Mario player is gonna attempt to swat at me with something like a rising uair oos, then I would try to make sure my dair comes out when it would actually hit him. If I were to just mash a series of dairs as fast as possible, then Mario would have a much easier time quickly identifying the pattern and simply punish MK during the downtime between the dairs. MK is a whiff punisher at heart so it's always important to try not swinging first, but you can say that for almost any character with any interaction so I digress.

This however, is not an actual "purpose" of dair camping. It's just a common scenario that is a product of probably its most important role, **baiting**. Y'know that hyper intense dread you feel when a Fox full hops above your shield and you don't know if he's gonna tomahawk, just land on you with a -3 nair, or double jump into one of those two? That's something MK is capable of to an even scarier extent. As you might already know, MK gets almost as much mileage as Fox with his *own* nair. Not only that, but it's also equally as safe on shield so in most scenarios it's pretty safe to throw out (unless it gets parried, obvisouly). So just like how Fox likes to full hop above someone's shield and then usually double jump right before deciding what option to pick, MK gets to do the same thing, except you have WAYYYY more flexibility in this situation because you have a decently disjointed frame 4 aerial to help control space, a down b that let's you safely retreat, and six jumps to top it all off." -B0NK!