My roommate has picked up Alex and gotten pretty good with him. Here’s what I know about the matchup so far.
If Alex is crouching on the other end of the screen with meter he still has to guess when exactly you’re going to throw a fierce boom to punish you for it. Just be ready to react to whatever option he uses. If he does ex shoulder, you can punish that easily with st.mp xx hk sonic scythe. If he does either ex headbutt, or ex stomp, you can just neutral jump and get a full combo.
At mid range you can stop alex from approaching by mixing up between jab boom and heavy boom. do the jab boom if you think he’s going to do st.hk or lk shoulder. If he tries to poke you out of jab boom with say, cr.mp, then go to using heavy boom. Always be watching to see if he is storing charge for an ex shoulder and be ready to bait that. After doing this well, he’ll start to jump. Just be thinking about his air tackle thing he does in the air. If you block that you get a full combo. He’ll do it to bait you into trying to anti-air with something like cr.mp. You can avoid this mixup altogether with ex scythe.
You can jab punish his chops and his st.hk if you’re close enough. You can also jab punish his normal stomps, ex stomp is plus so treat this like a normal jump in if you end up blocking it.
When v-trigger is ready, you have to be careful about sticking out any normal moves. If he decides to wind up his v-trigger at mid-range then jumping back is your best option, you’ll likely land on top of him and hit him with j.mk. For alex to hit you out of the air he has to let the v-trigger go right away, if you block the v-trigger you can get s.lp xx s.mp target combo for free.
You can punish close-range v-trigger, or wakeup v-trigger by just throwing him. In general, throw is the best option against Alex when he is trying to get up because you don’t have to worry about any of his wakeup options (except for maybe ex power bomb, haven’t tested to see if this is throw invulnerable)
If you get power bombed, he can do a meaty shoulder that WILL stuff you if you try to wake-up v-trigger, so be careful about doing that in this situation! I still need to play around with defensive options after getting powerbombed.
I feel like Alex does better than most grapplers against charlie, but I still feel like the matchup is in Charlies favor. Alex has to work hard against a solid charlie player.
