Introducing Sixty-Forty: An Analysis of Match-Ups in Super Smash Bros. Melee

Hi! My name’s Dylan. I’m a scrub who doesn’t know the first thing about how to play competitive Super Smash Bros. Melee at an even mediocre level. And I’m here to tell you what you’re doing wrong in each and every match-up.

But fret not; my advice will not come from my own expertise. Rather, I will simply relay to you what the top players are already doing. Through my partnership with Team Dignitas, I present to you Sixty-Forty: An Analysis of Match-Ups in Super Smash Bros Melee. In this series of articles, I will study high level Melee sets and bring forth my conclusions about the various match-ups which I encounter.

For each match-up, I will determine each character’s best tools in the five following categories: neutral game, approach options, punish game, edgeguarding, and stage counterpicking. Typically three sets will be looked at per article, although this number may vary based on the prevalence of the match-up (certainly no less than three in any case). In order to showcase what these match-ups look like at the highest level of competitive Melee, there will naturally be a few guidelines governing which sets I choose to look at and glean from:

1. Each of the players in the sets I analyze must represent how their character ought to be played at the highest level. As a result, the players I choose to look at will almost always be somewhere in the Top 50, if not, Top 100. The higher the player’s rank, the more likely I am to look to them for information about how to play the match-up.
   
   
2. The sets I choose must showcase a variety of players, so as to represent a variety of different playstyles. If I’m analyzing any of Captain Falcon’s match-ups, I won’t be any good to an S2J-esque Falcon if I look exclusively at Wizzrobe’s sets.
   
   
3. The same character must not win every set I choose to look at. If I watch three sets where Peach destroys Ice Climbers, then simply come to the conclusion that “Ice Climbers suck, too bad,” I probably won’t be offering much help to any ICs mains. Typically, I will choose two sets wherein the character that is considered to win the match-up wins, and one wherein the character that is considered to lose the match-up wins (again, this number will vary depending on how many sets I determine must be studied for the specific match-up at hand).
   
   
4. The sets chosen must be from within the past six months. I believe match-ups are constantly changing in the current metagame. Therefore, the more recent the data, the more accurate my analysis of the match-up ought to be.
   
   
5. The characters being studied must be used throughout the entirety of the set. If I’m looking at the Fox-Peach match-up, I probably shouldn’t look at a set where Mango’s Fox beats Armada’s Peach game one, and then Armada goes Fox for the rest of the set. This guideline isn’t to maintain the validity of the information so much as it is to ensure that I get the most data possible out of the sets being looked at.
   
   

Keep in mind, any and all of these guidelines may be broken for more obscure match-ups; for the Mario-Young Link match-up, it may do me good to look at Mango vs. Axe sets, even though they’ve never played a full set with those two characters. And if I’m looking at anything related to Pikachu, either Axe will be in every set I study, or I’m gonna be working with someone outside of the Top 100. However, such obscure match-ups will be of lower priority, as I will be doing the more prominent match-ups first. As a general rule, the more of these guidelines I break per article, the less accurate and/or pertinent the information presented will likely be.

And with that, I conclude my introduction to Sixty-Forty. Through this project, I hope to ultimately produce written guides for each of the most relevant match-ups in high level Melee. I also hope that, by sticking to the process laid out above, these guides will have the consistency necessary to make each article equally as useful and informative as the others. Feel free to provide input on what match-ups you think I should take a stab at, and I hope you look forward to the first article!

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