its really been a toss up between IM\s\d and ssd for the best strider team. @ least 90% of all the s\d experience in 10 years has been with ssd. I did a lot, clock, kaising, devil x, snakeshotpeople, lockdown, clockjr, da law, deathwish and other cali strider\doom players. Most of the players to ever touch strider played the sentinel version so most of the knowledge is with that version naturally.
I’m so terrible with IM, lol, and I don’t think clock is any good either with him so IM\s\d is only being played by one player where as ssd had 10+ dedicated players to learn it. strider\IM\D in particular is potentially god like IMO. If you play s\IM\D, one orbs on hit = ggpo and thats not exactly the case with ssd. ssd, gets this steam rolling effect due to insane team chemistry but no 1 hit kill from anywhere. s\im\d has a ton of 1 hit kill potential, its ridiculous.
Strider automatically starts the game with 1 bar. If he can safely get out of the opener clean and lands 1 trap pattern on block, strider can do a 50\50 mixup during orbs with jupfwd.lk, tap lp to throw a ring, qcf+lk, mash orbs, land, tag IM, infinite. This combo can be kinda tricky but it does work. Striders overhead series is no more than 4 frames and his low is 2 frames, you can’t react to it and its all guess block. A lot of low tier characters have faster hi\low than top tiers typically they’re frequency of hi\low is rather low. Magneto can get like 3 hi\lo’s on you before you know it where strider has this single shot for a really fast one.
Think about it, strider gets a 50\50 mixup during his trap pattern and wins the game. Instead of strider needing 5-10 bars to win a game, s\IM\D can win the game off 1 bar anywhere on the screen. Its definitely more economical and still extremely safe. Not much you can do to strider if he misses it right. Assist punish with IM is also pretty strong. You can get some very damaging shit into IM assist, reset bomb activate orbs, BS j.fp, j.rh. Might be able to kill an assist with only 1 bar.
Its quite a big trade. You trade alllll the tools sent drones gives strider for 1 hit kill. If you’re a great mixup player, it seems to me that s\im\d is better???
there are a lot of characters and teams in mvc2 that will NEVER be mastered. s\im\d falls into that category IMO.