Matchup help against G (and a couple others)

Street Fighter V
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Laura player here…

I’m silver rank but mainly play battle lounge against gold players.

The 3 characters I struggle with the most at the moment are G, Urien, and Sim

G’s command grab setups/mixups have got me flustered. It might be due to slight lag but I feel like his command grab destroys me way quicker than it should. Can anyone tell me which of his moves in general are punishable? I don’t own G so I can’t lab with him and every time I play a G in battle lounge they tend to be on the laggy side making some things awkward from a punish perspective.

As a laura player G tends to be able to dictate the pace (lengthy normals and that damn axe kick thing he does that covers a ton of space) in neutral and I get walked into the corner way more than I should. His v-trigger command grab shenanigans feel like one of the most OP setups from my experience from a damage perspective and im not sure how to keep G players honest from abusing the command grab

The other 2 characters I mentioned ill be brief with

How to stop sim drill pressure?

How to better control the neutral against urien as a Laura player. uriens reversal and zoning tools make it feel like an incredibly uphill battle the whole match

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@GetTheTables I think you’re a Laura player, right? Maybe you can help this guy with his question.

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I shamefully bailed on the Bonita for Kolin this season but! I did play Laura all the way up to SG and still have the most time in the game with her so I’ll help @Yougottachillbro where I can.

Sim drill pressure is mainly about keeping him honest with the heights he hits it at. Dive kicks in this game in general are negative or neutral if they hit above the lower leg area on your standing character model so unless they are really on point with their drills you can almost certainly challenge. Laura has her 3f jab which helps because it is as fast a button as you are gonna get and on CH you can link into cr.MPxxMP Elbow/Rodeo/Split for KD. Set it up in training mode and check when you can afford to press. Will also help against the Cammys, Menats, and Uriens of the world.

Also try to get a feel for when they want to drill. You can blow it up with neutral jumps sometimes if they get too predictable with it.

For G, this match up is all about getting the momentum then keeping it. He has absolutely no wake up options outside of CA, no 3 frame normals, and nothing that is frame 1 armored so if you get the KD run an oki train on him until he dies or manages to wriggle out.

For punishable stuff, here are the high notes:

  • Level 1 and 2 High Rush Punches are -4. He can space them so don’t get too antsy but a badly spaced one can be punished.
  • All Low Rush Punches are -6. I don’t know if it is possible to space them to be safe but I kinda doubt it.
  • All EX/Level 3 Rush Punches are at least -6 so you can punish those. Be careful if he is in VT1 because he can cancel a blocked one and mix you up if you try to punish.
  • His Level 1 and Level 2 Wheel Kicks are -5, but can be spaced such that you’ll get clipped by st.LK xx Rush Punch if you try to punish. Only reach for it if they do one that is pretty deep.
  • Level 3 Wheel Kick is -2 on block so you get your turn back but can’t punish. Also be careful of above whiff punish scenario.

As an aside, even if you don’t have have the char yourself to practice against you can always look up their frame data in one of the phone apps - I use one called “Framedata for SFVAE” but “Frame Assist Tool (FAT)” is also good - or on Capcom’s SFV site: https://game.capcom.com/cfn/sfv/character/

Frame data doesn’t always tell the whole story but at least you can see what stuff is really negative (look for anything -4 or -5 for things Laura has a shot at punishing) and what stuff isn’t going to be punishable.

For G’s command grab bear in mind that it has 12 frames of start up. That may not feel like a lot in game (especially with SFV lag) but consider that Laura’s is 5 frames. G has no way to actually tick into his grab; any time he hits you with it, it is because they have you conditioned to block instead of pressing buttons (even in his most favorable on block scenarios he can get jabbed out of it).

Sadly just like with other command grab characters the only real way to deal with the mix up is to either a) not be there or b) guess the mix up and get lucky. Observing player patterns can be huge here. Some people are really habitual in how often they command grab. Try to note when they like to go for it and use those moments to hold up or backdash. Backdashing in general can be good against G because his block pressure isn’t super tight frame wise so at worst you’ll usually just get air reset. You have to be willing to challenge him defensively sometimes - either with a jump/backdash or a jab but the jab can lead to very painful CH combos.

His two best buttons to condition you to block are his st.LP and st.MP. The most + he can get with the least pushback (and even then st.MP can push out if not really close on block).

For G’s VT1, best thing you can do most of the time is block a bunch. The majority of G players I’ve run into will just throw out specials cancelled into specials over and over or throw orbs over and over. It can suck to feel locked down for that long but if you can be patient a surprising number of G players will burn their VT1 completely out just hoping for a hit. I played G for a bit while I was debating new chars and it can be surprisingly hard to open people up with him if they are smartly downbacking. He gets access to some shenanigans in VT1 but they aren’t easy to do consistently and still all rely on the command grab; everything else is doing a special and hoping you press after so the cancel catches you.

One of the biggest things with G is that you want to take KDs whenever you can and keep him from leveling. If he gets to Level 3 that fireball can be a nightmare.

Also having played G, Axe Kick can be really good but it also gets clipped by a lot of stuff. Only the Level 3 one has projectile immunity during it; the lower levels just happen to hop over projectiles sometimes but can run into a slow one like Laura’s.

Urien and G give Laura a similar problem in that they have good normals to keep her at bay. Laura’s neutral sucks, no two ways about it. She has some decent counter pokes and the late cancel on cr.HP is great but if just about any character is keeping her in neutral she is in trouble.

For Urien specifically, you can walk his fireball down easily enough - it isn’t super fast or advantageous and if they get too spammy with it you can clip them with a jump/EX Elbow/EX Sunset. Neutral jumps and walking and blocking help the most there. Most Urien players don’t actually want to zone you, they just want to get you flustered and jumping so they can get easy AA damage.

Urien’s reversal is one of the slow ones in this game that you can OS jab on his wake up. Because of how much start up EX Headbutt has, if you time Laura’s st.LP such that it would hit him on wake up, then hold downback and hit MP you can option select depending on what Urien does: if he does anything other than EX headbutt he wakes up into the st.LP and the cr.MP will CH combo, if he does EX Headbutt the downback will block it and you can punish.

The timing is a little tricky but its doable with some practice. I found that just being able to OS block after a jab can be enough.

That is sort of next level though. What is more important to understand is that most Urien players are nuts, Gold Uriens maybe most of all. Always expect the reversal during the first round at least; unless the other person shows you they are somehow a chill Urien player (i.e. a unicorn) bait the EX Headbutt on wake ups and after -2 moves with some regularity.

Two bonus tips I found helpful in that match up in general (not Laura specific but doesn’t hurt with her):

  1. Normal Headbutts whiff on crouchers. A lot of Urien players will take advantage of how hard this is to whiff punish and basically use it as a free way in. If you can, set up a Urien in practice mode to do random Headbutts and get used to whiff punishing the move. It isn’t too hard to do with practice and it can net you a lot of damage.

  2. Urien players (like most online players) love dashing. He is blessed with a 16 frame dash. Practice checking it, pays off a lot. Especially keep an eye out for any dashes after throws - Urien’s throw only leaves him at +11 (forward or back throw) so if they dash after that you are at least +5 on anything they try to do. Great time to wake up jab CH combo, though don’t discount that some will throw dash EX headbutt or even CA.

Actually one more: Urien’s knee drop works just like a dive kick or drill. It needs to be spaced in order to not be negative and Urien has the additional complication of only having 4 frame normals. FAT tells me that the best he can do is make his LK Knee Drop - the close one - +2 if spaced perfectly. Given that Laura has a 3 frame st.LP you should be challenging normal Knee Drops (EX is always plus, hold your ground) most of the time. At worst you’ll trade but most of the time you’ll probably catch them swinging. Again, unga caveat applies here: Urien players will absolutely Knee Drop into EX Headbutt once they realize you are challenging so be aware.

Very broadly, Laura life can be hard. She basically lives and dies by staying in cr.MP-ish range or closer and constantly threatening being able to get in or being in and running a mix up into stun into death.

All three of these chars can make her life harder by keeping her at arm’s length so pretty much your whole match is going to boil down to being able to mitigate that. To that extent a big factor is being patient and getting better and better at reading opponent tendencies. The better you get at that, the more consistently you’ll be able to make it in, but more crucially you’ll be better equipped to read their defensive tendencies (which is a huge part of making Laura work; it doesn’t do you much good to get in if they just neutral jump your first command grab and kill you).

Good luck out there, the Laura struggle is real. If you’d like some more granular advice and want to share matches, feel free. I’ll offer whatever advice I can. :brazil: :zap: :brazil:

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Appreciate the reply bro…Awesome stuff!!

This information will help a ton. Im always seeking advice as a relative newcomer to this series (haven’t played SF5 seriously for more than a year…i wish I was into this game when it first dropped…I kinda feel behind the curve)

Btw… any advice or resources for learning more about option selects? Thats one bit of technical gameplay that hasn’t quite clicked yet both mechanically and in theory… I hear long time street fighter vets say “OS this or that” but im lost most of the time lol. I did some YT searches on option select explanations some time ago but didn’t find anything that really helped…most of the content was from SF4 anyways and the breakdown of the concept was not done particularly well (at least to me).

thanks for the help man! Ill be checking back in for sure especially when I get more time

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Yeah I hear you about the curve. I’ve been playing the game relatively consistently since the end of S1/start of S2 and even with that head start the cast has gotten so big it can be hard to keep up with it. I find it helps to find axioms that apply broadly - like the dive kick/drill stuff - which can cut down on feeling like you have to learn/memorize a bunch of specifics for each match up (eventually we all have to but starting out broad info can do a lot for you).

Regarding OSes, they are really rare in this game, especially compared to SFIV. I didn’t play that game but even watching it and reading about it OSes were more common in that engine. The devs were pretty explicit about keeping SFV as OS free as possible - there was actually a defensive OS that existed in the first season or two that they patched out for just that reason. I’m no expert on OSes but I’ll share what I’ve gleaned.

Apologies if any of this is redundant but just to baseline: an option select is when you perform a series of inputs that have overlapping results and you are relying on how the game engine interprets those inputs to give you the most favorable result.

Because of the way fighting game engines have to handle inputs, the developers have to decide which inputs are going to take priority in a given situation. Fighting game players, being the tech monsters they are, will learn what inputs are prioritized in a given game engine and try to find ways to use that to make their lives easier.

Crouch teching is one of the most common SF examples: http://iplaywinner.com/glossary/general-terms/crouching-tech.html

Note if you try this in SFV you actually get a throw instead of a crouching normal, so you can’t crouch tech OS in SFV like you can in SFIV. You can delay tech (which is sort of a timing based OS) but that is way more prone to blow ups and can be a dangerous habit to get into (but is still a good technique to learn since it gives you another defensive tool).

The “slow DP” OS I told you about earlier is a similar timing based OS. Due to the speed at which the slow EX reversals come out - Urien, Ed, and Falke all have sufficient start up on their EX reversals for this to work - a 3 frame meaty will whiff and recover before the EX reversal even comes out, letting you block after. If you combine that block with a button and time it right, the game will effectively OS the situation for you: if you’re being attacked you’ll be in block stun so the normal won’t come out, but if you aren’t being attacked the attack comes out.

Hopefully that explanation helps. Its a bit of a weird concept but seeing it in action helps to illustrate the point better. Also as I said, not really something you need to worry about too much. This game is really really light on OSes; most of them are little tech things that can help you time a follow up better or deal with a specific tactic, but that is all kinda fine grain stuff you pull out once you realize you need it.

Where you are at, just keep focusing on the fundamentals. If you haven’t heard it a lot you should have and will: most of the matches you’re playing now can be won via a combination of knowing your offense (combos, punishes, set ups), playing patiently (this is the #1 thing people mess up that makes them inconsistent, myself included), and having your defenses together (high AA rate, don’t mash on defense, be comfortable blocking, check dashes). That is the stuff that got me through the Silver ranks and it is what I find keeps paying out dividends as I try to hack my way up the Gold ranks.

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Thanks again for the reply.

You didn’t miss much with SF4 IMO. I actually messed with it very briefly around the time arcade edition released cause I had a friend at the time who was into the game before he bailed on it for blazblue (barf…sorry if you like that game lol).

I didn’t really play SF4 for more than like a month but really didn’t like the game engine/mechanics.

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Yeah that is about the same boat I was in with SF4. I hated the way the game looked when it came out and I didn’t much like the way it played.

I’ve come around on being able to appreciate the game in general but still not gonna be the SF for me. In truth SF5 isn’t really either (game is scrambly as fuck and I hate the way normals feel for starters) but I like it well enough to keep plugging along at it.

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I totally agree

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Sort of off topic from my thread but what’s the story with SRK anyways? I always assumed it was one of the livelier forums for fighting game discussion, and while there’s still plenty of great threads, it seems the FGC at large isn’t discussing the game at length here…

I read an article earlier this year saying the forums almost closed last year? Whats up with that?

I love this forums clean look and format… I couldn’t see myself frequenting reddit or joining a discord…

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I’m new here so for the deep cut you should probably ask one of the old heads. But my understanding based on lurking here through the SF4/MvC3 days and posting starting with SF5 is:

The forums definitely did almost close. That is why there exists an srk2 site and the susgang discord; both of those were started as possible replacements for when this forum was supposed to die.

The way I understood it was that the forum software they were using for the old forums had an operating cost associated with it that stopped making sense for the people keeping the lights on as forum traffic died down. You could argue that they legit thought no one would care if the forums were shut down (since traffic was low) or they led with that shocker to see if anyone cared enough to look into a replacement.

Fast forward some migration and growing pains and here we are now.

There are a few factors as to why there isn’t as much discussion here as you would have seen during, say, the SF4 days.

Biggest one for this forum specifically is that it almost died. That fractured the user base in ways that it hasn’t really recovered from. You have a niche community that split itself across this forum and the discord (with some crossover posters).

There has also been a general shift away from forums, not just with the FGC but with a lot of hobbies. Discussion happens across multiple formats now - Discord, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter - which has that same splitting issue. I think part of that is the march of time: as people have grown up with or had more experience using other means to discuss their hobbies, they are naturally going to turn to those formats as they migrate hobbies (so someone getting into SFV isn’t going to look for a forum, they’re going to look on reddit).

The final factor, and this one is more of my opinion than something as demonstrable as the general social shift away from forums, is that SF5 is a divisive as hell game and MvC:I died a quick, sad death.

SRK is a fighting game forum (at one time “the” fighting game forum) but always with an asterisk: it is/was the place to discuss Capcom fighting games. You can find discussions about other games for sure, and they aren’t discouraged or banned or anything, but by and large SRK folks are Capcom fighting game enthusiasts. For a long time that has meant SF and MvC discussion.

SF5 is a game that turned a lot of people off to it initially and even now you still has plenty of warts, so you have a lot of people who dropped off from that (or bounce in and out of the community as they wrestle with SF5). And MvC:I didn’t even get a year of attention before it got shoved in a trunk and buried in the back yard.

When the premiere Capcom fighting game forum has one new game that players are really divided on (or just straight up don’t like) and another one that people forget about or pretend doesn’t exist, that isn’t going to lead to peak membership numbers. :slight_smile:

I think it is also the fact that SF5 and MvC:I coming out converged with the social shift on how we discuss games online. SF4 and MvC3 were also pretty divisive games in their day (arguably to a lesser degree than SF5 and MvC:I) but they also had the benefit of still being firmly in the “forums” era of game discussion.

Also last kinda sub-factor: other fighting games are really good. Tekken 7 is the best Tekken has been in a long time, if ever, MK11 came out strong (we’ll see how it does long term but at least they didn’t punt the launch and initial impressions), DBFZ has had kind of a weird time of things but still had good vibes, etc., etc. So if you didn’t like SF5 but got really into T7 you also probably aren’t posting a lot on SRK.

I’ll be honest, it is a pretty remarkable testament to the community that this forum is a) alive at all, and b) still has as much discussion as it does around SF5 (even if SF5 general is all the fuck over the place).

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Dang man solid write up.

Ill look over the post again at length when I have time.

After being without my PS4 for a month I labbed a ton over the last month, learned some matchups, got some tech

went from silver to gold rank in a little under 3 days all with laura. BOOYAH

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Good shit man, congrats. :+1:

Gold is where shit starts really getting interesting. Keep at it!

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Appreciate that man

Gonna take a little break then start labbing again soon.

I would have hit gold even quicker had it not been for 3 laggy guiles (5 bar connection my @#$) and getting hit foolishly with wakeup ultra like 4 different sets.

I can’t believe how many people wakeup ultra lmao… lesson to be learned on looking at opponents gauge.

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Wake up CA is very, very, very common online. Every time I let myself lapse on it or think “maybe they won’t do it” I get clapped for my foolishness. A patient approach is the best way to go until you get a really good sense of what their wake up tendencies are.

It can also be easy to forget about vs chars that don’t have an EX DP. You let yourself slip out of remembering they have a wake up option then they dump a full bar on you. I found it to be a bigger issue when I was playing Laura because once she gets in she really wants (needs) to stay in, so you can get lulled into pressing hard once you get going.

The other thing is that you earn shitloads of meter in this game. It is pretty easy to get CA every round or damn close to it especially if the character doesn’t have a good fire-and-forget EX move. So it is not uncommon for folks to be fully stocked at the end of each round, ready to tee off between CA and VT.

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Most of the discussion about SFV (and also things not-SFV from time to time) is in the main lounge thread that should be pinned to the top. I can post a link here if you feel like joining the group some day.

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