I think his standing strong punch and jumping strong punch is underrated.
It’s from close standing mp, his up chop that only can be used when they’re next to you. You usually only use it for combos, like after a successful cross-up attempt, but it’s a wickedly good anti-air because of the hitbox and active frames ending above T.Hawk. It blows up a lot of neutral jumps. In addition, it’s special cancelable. What this means is that after a successful anti-air, you can condor spire immediately and force them into a grab situation. There’s 1f of landing where you can get them with the U1 as they recover, I believe but because of human error and the ability to cross-up an opponent depending where you AA them, it makes it a fairly dirty and effective setup for the U1/Super/Ex SPD.
So:
They neutral jump you -> cl.mp xx hp condor spire -> buffer command grab -> activate and do it as they land. If you missed the timing it, you can probably block because they’ll either be guarding or getting away, lol. It has to be hp (or HK now, I guess) spire because it puts you right next to the opponent and the distance traveled puts the end of the recovery frames for it around when they would become grounded.
It works surprisingly well because the ambiguous nature of where you end up really messes up attempts to reversal it. I did it to a Honda and a Ryu where it switched sides and ate both of their reversals as a result.
DP on reaction beats that set up as does holding up and landing a fat punish. It’s a gimmick not a tactic.
Nah, it’s a tactic. It’s specifically the AA cl.mp into Condor Spire positioning in particular. It puts you into an offensive position, as long as you aren’t screwing the spire timing up. You recover before they do so it’s safe and it leaves you right next to them from a situation that would otherwise be OK for your opponent. Everyone is better when they have the pressure.
U1/Super from it? Could possibly be a gimmick. In theory, you can DP on reaction but the positioning actually changes depending on when you AA. It can force a side-switch so it can mess up z-motion and l/r charge reversals. I haven’t really had a chance to do it against u/d charge reversals but in most cases, if you just block those, you get a free punish anyway. The nature of U1 also makes means that you have to be on on the ground and already doing your reversal to beat it which is very difficult considering the situation. Jumping probably works but there’s one frame where this will land regardless of holding up or not. Additionally, if your opponent knows to neutral jump or jump over you. cl.mp them again. If they jump away. DP. etc. Give it a shot and see how it works.
Also, I laughed at your post and username combination. “It’s a gimmick” and “dontdodat” perfect post. 
Admittedly I’m not a fan of air resets from grounded attacks mainly because of the damage sacrifice and that if you try to keep pressure, anything with startup invincibility will beat you. If you bait and block yes, you can get a strong punish but if they don’t reversal, instead backdash, jump or teleport you lose damage and position.
For these reasons I think HP DP is always the best anti air option for spacing, damage and mixups.
You’ve made a good case for the mix up however so will try it next time.
I can try making a video of it sometime soon to show what it looks like with the optimal timing on the cl.mp xx HP Spire.
It will change a little bit with Ultra though. At the very least, it’s one more option on the table.
I have a hard time buying this, do you have any proof?
I’m not sure how reliable it is but you can test it on the AI set to jump in the training room. I believe that setting was created to jump as soon as it was viable in the game system. I sat and tried it just using that and in most cases, the AI would already be jumping but timed right, you’ll get the AI with U1 as they’re landing. For Ryu, I believe it’s the one where he looks like he’s crouching, with his legs bent, etc. I’ve used it on a number of folks and they’ve said that they were holding up for a jump but still got hit by it. U1 does have those special properties too. As I mentioned in the previous post, there’s the human error factor so there’s a little bit of room on our end for it despite it not being guaranteed.
On that note, we had our local monthly last night and I used it several times. It’s definitely pretty tight if you want the U1. I hit the Ultra and I got DP’d out of it a few times depending on when I input the spire and if they managed to get their DP off. One of those times I hit it was on the cross-up though. I also, just used the cl.mp xx H Spire setup and blocked for the punish as well. So even if you’re not into gambling with the U1, you can still get a good situation off the anti-air and then guess/react with something a bit safer.
It’s really helpful in keeping someone grounded which makes it easier to hit them with SPDs or give them with Hawk’s normals, which are pretty good and will be more usable in Ultra because of the walk speed buff.
I’ll try and get a video up of it soon.
I’m gonna play around with this. It’s possible that it’s a completely unavoidable set-up like Vega’s U1 on Ibuki if the training mode dummy can’t jump out of it.
EDIT: I can’t get it to work. You sure it works vs the AI? Because otherwise I can imagine it works vs people because you activate the ultra one frame before they land. Then they land in the 2nd active frame of the ultra. In this situation, they would need to jump after the flash, and not before it, to jump away.
Yeah, I’ve gotten it to work on the AI before. It was really hard though and took me a bunch of tries. I’ll try to get it recorded this week for you.
I’ve been messing around with Hawk again and it feels like he’s starting to click now. The thing about him is that it takes a huge amount of patience since you aren’t quite nimble enough to press harder than an inch. Maybe its because I main claw which is another character that requires patience, the Ultra changes sound like they fix many of the issues I’ve been having. Not sure if his shite matchups with evolve, but that’s where claw would drop in.