Dark thunder/HOD pretty much is, poke into Commando, and throw dark thunder a bit faster than you’d throw the inferno. It is pretty dicey timing, and if I don’t have it practiced I often find myself doing it at similar timing to the inferno, which is wrong. But yeah, you pretty much have to use dark thunder on Juggernaut and Sentinel, because inferno doesn’t work off of Commando. Inferno works off of Cyclops, Cammy, Guile, and Mega Man-AAA, but not Commando anywhere other than the corner.
Watts versus Scrub is, needless to say, a very interesting matchup. I have heard that Valle used to start Sentinel on Sentinel and then tried to exploit the fact that he had BH/Commando and the other Sentinel only had Commando. I can see some merit in this, but I personally would prefer to start BH on either one of them. BH, interestingly enough, has to play a very similar game plan to be most effective on both Sentinel and Cable. If Sentinel starts and is silly enough to blind rush BH, then this pretty much plays into your hands. It’s the people who play Sentinel conservatively and carefully that are the biggest pains. The way you approach a defensive Sentinel is largely the same as the way you approach a runaway Cable: normal jumps forward, call enough drones to keep him honest in the horizontal game (as long as they don’t have the meter to mangle him too badly), and generally try to zone him off into the corner and then attack him fairly relentlessly from all the angles once you get him there.
How you manage your meter is a lot of this matchup, and it depends on whether you consider their Sentinel or their Cable to be the most dangerous point char to deal with. If they start Cable, then your mission is to get Cable dead by any means necessary. Whether that’s by hitting him with a DHC with BH, or hot tagging Sentinel over a badly placed st. fierce and hit him with a RP into HSF, or whatever… KILL CABLE. Zone him off into a corner relentlessly and make him dead. You don’t care if you wind up getting hurt in the process or get both BH and Sentinel roughed up a bit doing this, because if you can get his Sentinel on point with his Cable dead and you’re free to trap without worrying about a counter-AHVB, you win this match. Sent/Commando by itself has no business beating Sent/BH/Commando if it’s played carefully.
If they start Sentinel, I’ll usually start BH regardless, although this is a situation where starting Sentinel is tempting to do. I personally don’t tend to do it because I’m happier putting BH on Cable than Sentinel if they choose to start Cable, and you never know what some Scrub players will do. In this case, there’s a lot of different options if you get Sentinel hit with something.
If you can get the dark thunder/HOD timing to work, this is a DHC that is very consistent on Sentinel and does quite a lot of damage. BH/Sentinel will DHC that on another Sentinel very, very consistently, there’s virtually no timing at all on it after you get the dark thunder to combo off of Commando right. (Of course, that’s usually the rub.)
If they’re starting Sentinel with Cable in the middle, you can snap in Commando if you get a hit on Sentinel with BH. This is very effective if you’ve hurt Commando on countercalls a lot, and it’s also a pretty much universal way to flat out ruin Team Scrub in any matchup. It’s best to do this if you’ve got enough meter to put up a serious threat to DHC Cable if he just cold tags immediately, but even if you don’t, just screwing up the team order is still a serious blow to Team Scrub. There will come a point where they know they’re flirting with disaster with Commando in the middle if they tag Cable in. Watts is obviously not the first characters you have in mind when you’re thinking that you’ll kill Commando immediately, but this is more to simply exploit the fact that Cable can’t safely DHC in and that they’re running up against a mess whether they tag him, counter him, or just try to pray they can get away with cold tagging back to Sentinel. I believe my last tournament matchup I played against Jackson Chen was won this way, by snapping his Sentinel out for Commando.
Yeah, MSP against Watts is actually a pretty bad matchup for MSP if you play it right.
