[1] last ex.hb on wakeup at the end of a match (chip damage).
This isn’t the case in AE, with the added recovery to whiffed headbutt, but when an opponent only has chip damage left and you land an untechable knockdown, doing a LATE ex.hb can beat all of their offensive options in a couple of ways. For the most part, there are no attacks that can beat an ex.hb offensively, except Gen’s [C]U1, LATE Crane Super and Hakans U2. Mostly everyone elses ex attacks will pass through Balrog and he’ll recover first in time to sweep or jab. An opp can’t backdash because of the late headbutt which will catch the backdash. Dont’ get me wrong, if the opponent knows its coming then they have some options, but you’ve probably been doing meaty jab and throw on wakeup, so the options that would beat a meaty throw and a meaty jab don’t beat ex.hb and vice versa. This can be beat defensively by blocking (if they’re balsy, no Xfactor for you!!) if you miscalculated and couldn’t kill them with chip damage, or by low profiling (e.g. Cammy/Ken cr.forward). But obviously this wins to pretty much any other option.
[2]Burning U1/Super (OR TAP) to get out of a mixup
Sometimes you’re stuck in the corner by a rushdown character and you’re having trouble resetting the distance to drop your stun back to zero and regroup. An option is to burn Ultra. There are certain situations where this will work, get you out of the corner, and the opp can do absolutely nothing to chase you. This doesn’t even take into consideration if they know how to deal with the situation. For example, You’re in a mirror match and you do a nj.hp from neutral and the opp has back-charge. He burns ultra to get out of the corner, and because you lost your back-charge, you can do nothing at face value, but you can start charging for TAP during the Ultra freeze, release as you hit the ground to chase (while building back-charge). Ideally the TAP wouldn’t hit, but i’d have enough back-charge to either ex.ru or Ultra 1/Super in return thus thwarting your attempt.
There are also some cases where you may KNOW that an opponents attack won’t chase/punish you, for example, lets say you TAP out of th corner while maintaining back-charge and Abel attempts to punish with Ultra 1. This has really lengthy startup, and your TAP has probably recovered during , so you can stick out a cr.short to stuff it all together, or headbutt/ultra/Super after the ultra freeze. Yes you can just block. But part of training your opponent is showing them that you know when they make mistakes and you know how to punish them.
[3]Random Whiffed Specials
Always pay attention to what your opponents doing, and have a good idea of what specials have similar input to Ultra/super and even what unique normals have similar inputs to specials/ultra/super. For example, if you’re hovering over rose and she wakes up with an HP Reflect and she has U2 and meter, you can probably surmise that that was an attempted wakeup ultra. Most opponents won’t decide to give up on a certain strategy if they fudge the inputs. Another example would be El Fuerte, if he keeps doing ex.guac on wakeup then he’s botching the inputs for U1. In some cases when you just sit by an opponent, knowing that they’re fudging inputs can put you in a better position to punish because you’re ready. Back to the rose example, if she whiffs a soul reflect and you’ll looking for it, you can punish with <insert move here>.
[3]whiffed jab buffered lp.hb
It’s really weird to explain, but sometimes you’re walking towards an opponent and you’re whiffing jabs/normals to busy up the space between you and your op, and they decide to jump in. You can throw out a crouching jab and buffer in the lp.hb so as soon as it completes its animation, an AA lp.hb will come out. Also this can be used to lower your hurt box slightly, similar to when you use crouching normals to low profile fei longs chicken wing. It can make some jump ins whiff where if you were just crouch blocking or offensive crouching it would connect.