I personally prefer BH/Sent/Commando over Scrub most of the time to go after Magneto/Storm teams, although there are times when I wonder if I should use some variant of Scrub to go after teams like Santhrax, Storm/Sent/Cable, or MSS. MSS in particular is starting to worry me that it’s just not a good matchup for Watts. It’s not that BH can’t fend off Magneto, it’s that Storm is a terrible matchup for even a good BH, which means that it’s in your best interest to have Sentinel try to fight her, but then you wind up in a situation where Sentinel has to fight both the opposing Storm and the opposing Sentinel. It’s very hard for Sentinel to stay ahead of Storm/Sentinel in a chip fight when he has to carry the team for two-thirds of the game. I have a tendency to try to hand off the game to Sentinel and just let him stall it out, and that’s very difficult to do. I tend to use the meter a great deal in order to trap and chip down and burn the clock, which means that I often don’t have the option of triple-DHC’ing back around to BH like a Santhrax player would do so back to Storm in order to continue to protect the lead.
There are a lot of parallels between the general game plan of Santhrax starting Storm and Watts starting BH. You’ve got a good DHC from the first characters to Sentinel that’ll effectively kill an opposing Magneto. Watts has a better chipping and altitude space control game with Sentinel on point (and using Storm-Y is not a particularly good substitute, BH’s assist is still way, way better at this), while Santhrax has a better horizontal chipping and space control game. I usually figure that Sentinel himself can handle the horizontal parts and that he favors a vertical attack, particularly against Cable, but against Magneto and Storm I’m beginning to wonder if he doesn’t prefer more horizontal help. Regardless, one significant element that I don’t use much is to try to build and keep the meter for a triple DHC back to BH like a Santhrax player often will to get back to Storm, so that BH can return to point and protect the lead instead of waiting until Sentinel gets killed and then praying that Commando can somehow pull off a DHC to do it later. Against MSS, there’s a distinct possibility that I’m asking too much of Sentinel in this matchup and that I should play him a little more meter-conservative to battery back up to be able to get the rotation back around to BH for the endgame. If there’s a better character in the game at stalling out the last 10-20 ticks on the clock in the endgame than BH, I don’t know who it is… but I don’t use it that way unless it’s by happy accident. It’s ultimately a flaw point in the plan I usually have to rely on safe DHCs to swap characters that then leaves Commando in the second slot while Sentinel’s on point and he’s forced to work on his own to get BH on point if Sentinel gets killed.
Another true tournament example that I’m just now reminded of in this that’s very relevant to this question: I was playing a best-of-five match in Portland against a guy who was using some team like… I think it was Magneto/Storm/Ken or something unconventional like that, but I do remember it was Magneto in front and Ken in back. I was using Watts. The first two games both happened in pretty much the same, very very frustrating way. BH would destroy Magneto. Then Sentinel would wind up on point by a DHC rotation, and then goes and beats Storm in a grind-out. But he’d be low enough on life by the time Storm got out, that Ken would then come in with a mostly full life against a badly weakened Sentinel. Ken is actually not a really great matchup for Sentinel for some screwy reason. He’s got just enough speed, the hurricane kicks are a nuisance for him, Commando’s assist has trouble tracking him when he’s going fast enough, and although Sentinel can slow that fight down a lot if Sentinel’s got only 15-30% life left and Ken’s at a full bar, my money’s frankly on Ken. And so then once Sentinel died, Commando with just BH as an assist got rolled up, and then BH would too once Commando was dead. It was one of the more bizarre things I’ve ever run into in my tournament career, and got me more than a few jeers and accusations that I was a paper tiger from Portland guys who’d gotten way too tired of losing to me. I’m down 2-0 in a best of five, and I was feeling more than a little frustrated because I’m just slapping the guy down for the first 80% of the fight and then inexplicably getting rolled by Ken for reasons that were too bizarre for me to figure out immediately amidst the stress and rising panic of a tournament situation where I’m in a hole.
So after the second game, I’m hearing everybody cheering the guy on, I’m in a state of near-collapse mentally, and so I finally close my eyes in one of those faux-Zen moments to think. The mental conversation in my head went something like this: “All right. I’m better than this guy. I know this. Everybody here cheering for him knows this because they all want to see me lose. I am so not going to let them walk away talking about anything but a moral victory for this guy. Something’s going seriously wrong here, and I don’t know what. I can figure that out later, but for right now I need to do something different. What else have I got…? (pause while I’m going through all my other teams in my head) …Scrub? I can take the same leads with Sentinel/Commando that I’ve been doing with BH, but I’ll bet he can’t pull off that Ken comeback crud on Cable.”
(It’s moments like these where I stop now as I’m writing this and reflect that I was probably a much better tournament player up in Portland than I am now in California, when I realize that just about all of these pseudo-Zen moments where I stop between rounds, look at the bigger strategic picture or just think a little outside the box to shift gears, and then come up with something brilliant that wins me a match that looks really, really bad starting out, have all happened when I was up in Portland. I don’t know if it’s because I just had a lot more energy to put into the game in Portland or if I just haven’t been taking the game as seriously down here, or what, but it bothers me now that I think of it. :shake: )
ANYway… so I married myself to Scrub to carry out the rest of the match. And it goes exactly according to plan: for game three and game four, Sentinel rolls up the early game just as I’d been doing before, but then Cable comes on to point and just flat shuts down any hope of comebacks. It isn’t the only time that kind of thing has happened, and Scrub is probably a very good “I’m pissed off and I’m just going to regulate now” team for me, all things considered… IF my Cable is in practice. For whatever reason, when I’ve got that kind of edgy mindset and my Sentinel doesn’t have BH, I play Sentinel very very differently, much more aggressively, and there are times when I wonder whether it’s more effective that way. I don’t regret that at all – when my Sentinel is in the middle on Watts, he has to be more conservative because he’s carrying the lead most of the time, whereas starting out on Scrub (or even Santhrax), he has to be the one to carve out the lead in the first place, so it’s two totally different mindsets, completely independent of the fact that he has to do more by himself without BH around.
I’m beginning to think that Sentinel likes having horizontal help though, enough that this is one of the reasons that MSS and Team Row work very well with him on point, because he has Magneto on both teams. Since I can’t play Magneto worth a damn, I’ve started experimenting (again) with Scrub with Cable set to viper beam assist, which works much the same way in terms of space control and just has different hit and chip properties, but it can’t be ducked under (I think it’s the only other beam assist that can’t besides Mag’s) and it works for lockdown and keeping the low altitudes under control to free up Sentinel to fly around without having to worry about somebody wavedashing up under him. I think that’s as much the weakness of Scrub these days.
But Scrub has a bigger weakness, and that’s that if Sentinel gets snapped out for Commando, you’re in trouble. Magneto can then go on to kill Magneto, and then you’re stuck in a situation where he can DHC to Storm to hand off a probable lead at any time. And if I were to ever write a “How to tell if your CABLE sucks…” post, one of the first things I’d ask is, “When you fight against Storm, is your biggest worry that she’s going to rush you down? If you answer yes, your Cable sucks.” Because the biggest worry Cable has with Storm isn’t rushdown… it’s that he can’t chase her down very well when she’s ahead unless she just screws up. In fact, if you’ve got a truly good Cable against a truly good Storm, whoever is ahead to start with is usually going to win most of those fights.
This is one reason why Santhrax has come to replace Scrub: if Commando gets snapped in, he can DHC safely back out for either of the other two characters. It’s also why I usually use Watts, more or less the same story. However, I don’t think Scrub is useless, but I think that the way people play it needs to be reformulated, because I don’t think Sentinel/Cable-B/Commando is that good against the rush. I’m coming around to the idea that Sentinel wants the horizontal help enough, and few enough people ever get counter-AHVB’ed these days anyway, that Cable-A is probably the better assist for that team again. I’m still working on this one, but I like what I’ve got with it so far. I’ve experimented a lot with that before, and I’m just lately coming around to it again. Cable-A helps Sentinel hand off a good lead, and Cable is still about as good at protecting a lead as anybody.