Learn about the randomness
whoa I was blocking that and how’d that hit me and I hit you first get said a lot. Marvel is known for it’s randomness but guess what, a lot of that randomness is not so random.
Things like air to air heavy attacks in normal jump state let your opponent recover first, so try not to end normal jump combos with that unless you have a helper to cover you.
Been hit out of a block string you tried to escape? If you pushblocked it guess what, there is a vulnerable amount of frames where you can’t block after a pushblock on the ground and during normal jumps. There are players who have blockstrings made to abuse this.
Ever been randomly crossed up in the corner? Well the characters being comboed then reset in the air in the corner, the opponent can cross them under…
There are more situations like this and it’s pretty helpful not only to be aware but actually use these things against your opponent. I reccommend searching for posts and threads from magnetro since he seems to study, breakdown and de-randomize marvel’s randomness.
While on the subject of abuse of marvel’s engine,
one of the most important things you should have if you want to improve in marvel is a gameplan…
Think about it this way, do you like iceman and wish he could mixup like magneto? Well, he can… Almost every character has an air combo that grounds your opponent and allows you to hi/lo mix up from the same jump as the combo (but you can’t do a whole magic series, you have to give up damage for position). I think for him it’s a launch, light, short, down round house. From that point you can meaty a down fierce, falling light kick overhead or drop straight down and low kick. But what about your opponent’s assist? Depending on how fast your oppnent’s assist is, you can tic throw, jump up and counter call, ect… This stuff can get really deep, and you can really mess someones head up when you mix them up with ice man…
My point to the paragraph above is that you won’t be able to think this stuff up on the fly or in a match. You have to put marvel down, think about what you want to do and come up with a plan. Even with all this I’ve come up with, I still have to have a plan to get an intial hit off with iceman to control my opponent. So far I could only come up with a snap out guardbreak with psy set up, but it works, and that’s my ice man plan. The better your plan, the more you control the match, the more you control the match, the more you win at marvel… <3