Wow, I wake up and Shoryuken is back. Woot! Because I’ve just found out a way to play my team much more effectively, and actually think now that my main team of Nemesis/Dormammu/Strange is viable as hell. Before I just felt lowtierry.
So, Nemesis’s dirty noodles, his tentacle normals, are amazing at zoning. A lot of people wouldn’t realize this, but it becomes especially clear with bolts. They call an assist, bolts and tentacles tags them, you do an air rocket, do it once or twice more because it juggles assists, when they approach go into your unsafe rocket super and DHC to chaotic flame, all the while juggling the assist. Now they’re full screen sans a character, I’ve gotten RR and Strider a few times with this too. So, they have to be careful about calling assists.
Better yet, air tentacles can hit grounded opponents into the bolts of ballthakk for a near-fullscreen confirm, as long as you wavedash well. Unfortunately Nemesis scales like shit, but that’s where TACing comes in, Nemesis can solo relaunch once to get a bit more damage before the TAC, and can also bait TAC counters with his j.S, which, if placed correctly catches all air techs and is an effective TAC bait. Dormy can kill pretty much everyone with a THC following (fullscreen away all the Nemesis shots and step combo, and you can dark matter dark hole, let them reset, and matchupwise, from that position dormy can easily chip out any character in the cast who would be able to survive the previous combo). Against a bulky guy, they’re about to die to chip, against a weak person, after the TAC combo go from a purification and have them reset into a stalking flare, most of the time they’ll die at the hands of a cheeseball, or you want them to. So, if they die close to you, place a carpet where the opponent is going to land, otherwise charge up a few times.
Character 2: as soon as they finish blocking, throw out a dark matter and call bolts, teleport. It all combos on hit, and if they block you can superjump up and land with a normal on either side, the second bolts prevents them from airthrowing you. Two 50/50s. Nemesis assist allows a relaunch from anywhere, but honestly you could just pop XF for the relaunch into death. Either way, with two relaunches available, you will corner carry.
Character 3: Charge a third thingy, lay a flame carpet and go for an incoming unblockable. j.M+Strange j.S Teleport M is my personal favorite, by not jumping towards them they can’t just XF throw you out of the setup. If they know how to block it, do a blockstring and pop a volcano, afterwards you’ll have strange assist available again for more teleport mixups. Hopefully by now you’ve hit, and you are pretty much guaranteed to have a dark dimension available. That should be more than enough to kill any anchor they’ve got left, even if their last is Thor or something not normal. You can either extend after the dark dimension with Launcher slam and dark matters, pop that volcano if you haven’t used it up, THC, be silly and rawtag in Strange for a spell of Vishanti, a lot of things will kill here. I don’t think I need to tell you all Dark Dimension used in the right combo kills 100% of the cast.
Anchors who can get out of this momentum-train:
Sentinel - I’m perfectly fine with the Sentinel matchup, Nemesis is actually a better matchup against him than most people are, and matchups against Whackbot are pretty good already.
Morrigan - I’m cool with her wasting three meters. Dorm can fight her out of doublemode easily enough, Strange should superjump with graces of hoggoth, get two or three yellow and you can start going on the offensive. Nemesis has a tough time of it, but just make sure she doesn’t get too much meter off him.
Skrull - Um…not sure. He’s kind of rare, and also a total wildcard. Nemesis can make Skrull play really slow, though, because j.M smack all of his air approaches, and raw launcher can disrupt elastic punches. He can stalemate it until Skrull runs out of XF. Watch out for command throws.
Closest I’ve ever had to a flowchart team, but this happens more often than you’d expect. And Nemesis is actually one of the more viable points here for a few reasons: 1. The starting confirm for this whole potential teamkill can be done from really far away, and telelporters have to watch out for a jumping back j.H, Vergils have to actually play smart. What’s more, they have to be supercareful about calling an assist, making easy teleports around the zoning harder. Still definitely doable, but just a bit harder 2. Nemesis is pretty good at the start of the round, j.M or st.H covers some space, the latter has armor. He dies so easily to Hulk at the opening move, though, so careful 3. Does a lot of damage before TAC, has a useful THC, and his assist relaunches and extends midscreen, so Dormammu has corner carrying potential as well as decent damage from the non-darkmatter confirms 4. Nemesis’s grappler game becomes really scary when blocking one bolts fullscreen can put Nem right up in their face for a command grab mixup. I hope people may actually consider the Nemesis/Dorm or the Nemesis/Bolts combination as usable now, though truthfully they work best all together.
Up until yesterday I never thought of THCing after the TAC, and I didn’t pop XF on hitconfirming their second character. That makes a world of difference. Tested it in a first to 69 (no joke) last night. It is a good thing.