Crouch HP all ground attacks
Crouch HP > Lariat from range
Crouch MP > most jump ins (if times wrong, you will eat ultra/spd,etc)
Wake up Normal UP ball is fine on wake up jump ins, Save ex for rainbow away.
You should be essentially countering and running this whole fight.
Edit: in bold
Can Gief still kara EX hand a regular blocked blanka ball (not upball)? Also can’t you get grabbed out of startup of regular ball, making this pretty unsafe if they do jump-in SPD/ultra?
I’m liking EX rainbow roll to get out of wakeup pressure, thanks to good Giefs abusing kara EX hand after blocked EX upball.
I meant normal up ball and not ex, i apologize
I’ve seen footage of Kara EX hand catching Blanka post-horizontal-ball. I don’t remember if it was off blocked ball or hit (if I had to guess, blocked, because my interpretation is that Gief is really…REALLY reaching to get any kind of punish off of horizontal ball).
I thought a lot of giefs jump ins would trade with normal up-ball, and if it’s a meaty hit you’ll certainly lose, no?
What’s the best way to punish blocked green hand?
(Aaargh! Blanka sucks in punishing!)
Safest is throw, but if you have ultra do that, if not, you can jab ball or jab electricity. You might be able to get away with cr.MK, jab xx ball, but I haven’t really tried it.
I guess I’ll stick with the throw then, because when I’m playing against good Giefs(in fact, there is only one Gief that I can’t beat:mad:), everything else is too dangerous if missed.
Didn’t know you could punish normal green hand with ultra though. That’s good to know. I only used ultra on EX green hand. The timing on normal is very tight, isn’t it?
Yes. Practice mode is your friend on this one. As everyone knows, you have to make the most out of your punishes on gief, and if you mess up, then you’re eating shit. Good gief matches are a true test of execution.
Fuerte match up is heavily in blanka’s favor, upball ftw ex-upball for everytime he is above you have to watch out for blocked Hori-balls because they can punish with the slide but just do a jab and grab and be careful of the cross up a good fuerte will run away and do the air grab i faced the 2 best fuerte on the east coast and the upball is god like in this fight
Against Gief I generally go for backthrow to punish greenhands if I’m anywhere near mid screen. It gets him closer to the corner than f.throw, and generally gives you enough time to run to the opposite corner and build another meter to EX rainbow out. Low forward is a bad idea after blocking a greenhand IMO, especially against an LP one because you only have a few frames to get the MK out on time. If you don’t and your opponent is mashing you eat 200+ damage and are knocked down. Neutral jump HK isn’t a bad option, whiff SPD has a lot of recovery and then you can land cr.MK, st.LP xx ball after the j.HK and it not only gives you some space, it does beefy damage. Also somehow for me, crossup jumping forward as a desperation ploy when I’m behind on life seems to beat reversal lariat if I time it correctly. The giefs I play against aren’t exactly good however so take that with a grain of salt.
Fuerte has a lot of options. I played a few games against Kai the other day at AI, and I ate Ultra off of a blocked ball, and a whiffed one(!), so be careful with those horizontal rolls, it isn’t just slide you have to worry about. Thankfully yes, EX upball beats a lot of his options, and even if you do trade, it will always be in your favor. You need to be aware of frame traps and do your best to not let him land a jump in or focus(it has deceptive range) so you don’t eat RSF.
Playing against Kai he wasn’t too aggressive with mixups on wakeup when I had meter because of the aforementioned EX upball, so he was doing a lot of stuff like meaty slide. As slow as shit as it looks, it is generally even or even frame advantage for Fuerte(up to +9), luckily the best option after blocking it is to go for the throw/tech. If Fuerte throws too early while you are still in block stun you throw his throw whiff, and if not you tech. What you don’t want to do is ex upball a meaty slide, it is punishable on hit by Caramale Sliding and probably ultra, and if he times the slide early to be a fake meaty, and he blocks the upball, you eat a lot of damage.
The basic point is that most of Fuerte’s normals give him frame advantage including the ones that look horrendously slow(slide, overhead), so you want to recognize this and be safe to not get tricked into getting knocked down and give him control of the flow of the match especially if you aren’t sitting on a meter. So watch out for throws by teching or backdashing after a frametrap, and even if he does go for something else? It’ll more than likely be a handful of jabs. I’ll take jab x4 over getting knocked down any day.
Im great @ the Gief match-up
the goal is, obviously, to stay mid range against him. Jump ins are ur friend against the Gief. Preferably use jump HP or HK, in order to beat a lariat and chain into a combo. dont forget to finish with the rolling attack to recreate distance.
I would like ppls ideas on how a Blanka should take down a Boxer.
I start the match by attempting to get some space, build meter, and most importantly make my opponent imaptient. Then I hold down forward to slide a dash punch on reaction, attempt to land a crossup/fake crossup off the knockdown, then I turtle my ass off for the rest of the match on the life lead that created.
An experienced Rog won’t random dash punch so it is hard to get that initial life lead. I just poke with st./cr. strong and see what happens.
Basically Mullah’s strategy on the front page is spot on. Until you’ve just spammed st.strong and had half of them hit, you don’t realize how powerful a tool it is in the matchup.
i’ve found c.HP to be pretty useful against boxer. the range is unbeatable, and most boxers won’t jump around against a blanka, putting the fear of a c.HP whiffing to rest. Another important thing is to watch and learn your opponent’s patterns, and when they go for their lame c. HK, surprise forward that business and get to work.
You can’t be a 1-trick-pony at anything in this match (footsies/shenanigans/turtling). Strong is nice, but you need to utilize all of his normals for some legit footsies (poke, bait, punish). I discovered that when I was worried about getting random headbutted out of strong, I was probably using it too much. :lol:
Learn your normals damn it and stop playing one style. 
Everything else is just me repeating shit. :wgrin:
Sosage, I agree actually. If you overspam you’ll get tagged by a headbutt, I only do 2 more if they go from stand to crouch generally and then I switch it up.
right vs boxer i’m actually feeling that a massive hurdle to overcome is actually delayed crouch tech on his wakeup which stops all your cross up mix-ups. I’m thinking to counter this off a cross up or when you dash into his wakeup for example you delay your cr.lk > cr.lk >st.lp combo a fraction of a second upon landing and you will counter hit his startup frames of the cr.lk (cr.tech). because you can throw before and after the first lk they will usually throw tech twice, so thats 2 chances to counter hit if your execution is frame perfect. If you land this more than once on any smart player they will hopefully start to block without delayed crouch teching allowing you to do cross up mk > throw etc
I beat a decent Balrog player in a tournament last weekend. I had to block punish his dash overhead with ULTRA to win. I suggest you get in the habit of doing that cause that shit is all pro. He’ll never do that overhead again while you have ultra and any weapon you can take from Balrog you should.
Well I’ve definitely hit a wall with my Blanka. I barely practice on my free time, but there’s a local scene around me where we all meet up on certain days at an arcade. A few of us play a lot together, and I’d say we’re more or less comparable in skill.
Now, a match up I’ve been having some difficulty with, ironically, is Vega. There’s really not much info around these parts for a competent Vega player, and there’s a guy I play with who’s got a pretty strong Vega. The basics pretty much stand, most of his overheads can be stuffed by electricity or vert ball (and I’m quite in tune to that), and this player has pretty much learned never to use those against me. He relies almost entirely on pokes, and it actually makes the match up quite difficult, in my opinion. Maybe I’ll try making a video one day, but does anyone have have any solid advice against a good poking Vega?
Oh, and Boxer still gives me nightmares. There’s a solid Boxer play I play with who gets the wins off me way more than I off him. He’s not unbeatable for me, but I have no solid strategy against 'dem Boxer’s. I’ve done my share of video watching. His play style is very similar to the one from the previous page (where the Blanka player loses after attempting his Super). I play my Blanka similarly to how he played in that match (but with way too many random slides), but honestly, I think the Boxer I play is slightly better than the one from that video. Such a brutal match up.
One thing I definitely know I need to work on are my slides. I throw those slides almost instinctively at all the wrong times. Doing my best to unlearn that. Otherwise, I think I have a pretty solid understanding of Blanka’s fundamentals.
So how to do we handle cammy’s again… G1 cammy’s that are super aggressive and throw a lot… any tips…