That shit is key is bison, sagat, and rose MU
Also great against Fei, Makoto, Gief (especially when they overuse slower attacks to close space) and a few others.
Mixing in cr. LP/LK/MP as buffered pokes are crazy important for Cody. His mobility is poor, so you need to capitalize on people trying to dash into your space or walk you down.
agreed. You should almost always have a buffered normal being used very often. Most jabs should have a MK Ruffian behind them. Cody is a lot like Makoto in that sense. You need to stop the opponent from getting where they want to be and use your normals to get in.
I think @Ramma probably already explained what to do, but I’m having trouble actually getting in with Cody. Besides buffering, are there other ways to get in with Cody risk or no risk?
well the risky way is jumping. Depending on who you jump in on or the player you jump in on always varies. But at that point, it depends on how well your opponent can AA anyway. (doesn’t hurt to try and see what the opponent does.)
outside of that, you need to establish a strong ground game. Toss some rocks to either force the opponent to come to you (which you then react). If you throw rocks, you’re gaining meter and your opponent has to do something. (even if it’s neutral jump.) regardless, you’re getting meter and they’re not.
Otherwise walk them down buffering cr.Jab/st.Jab>MK Ruffian. You can also try Crack Kick. (F.HK) to help out a bit. In this situation the opponent’s losing ground (which they don’t want against Cody) so they’ll have to either hold their ground or do something to push you back or get more space. As long as you’re outside your opponent’s footsie range and looking for a normal to buffer with the above (or if you’re really good at whiff punishing normals, replace cr.MP with the jabs.). All you need is a knockdown to start your nonsense.
basically your neutral is rocks. If the matchup doesn’t allow you to throw rocks outside of full screen, you’re simply walking them down and downbacking creeping your way in to see what they do when you approach them. (while also staying right outside their footsie range to really get the use of cody’s jab)
Cody’s rocks are definitely under utilized. You just have to know when and who to use them on. If your opponent isn’t jumping, rocks are more of an option. Against an opponent or more airborne character, rocks need to be used with caution.
Inch your way in. If Gief can get in, you can get in. You have the same walk speed. Buffered pokes, kara focus, cr. MK, crack kick, and just walking forward. If you’re dealing with fireballs, know your options depending on the spacing. If you can’t zonk, use ex ruffian.
Getting in with Cody against many characters is far from easy, but also remember that you have no urgency to by pass the neutral game. You’re not Makoto. You have a decent mid range game.
Take your time. Take a little chip if need be. You’d be amazed how many Guile, Ryu and Juri players you’ll make hang themselves just by not moving Cody forward. Throw some rocks at Guile…see how patient he really is.
In some matches, you don’t even need to go in. Just fight for spacing. If you have a life lead on E. Honda…or Dudley…or Sakura…and they are playing keep away suddenly, you hold your ground and wait or create an opportunity to finish the match. Once your in, get to work.
Now this is all relative to the quality of the opponent. If the guy can’t anti air, can’t block cross up or has no footsies, just go to work.
If you can’t block cross up, I’ll cross you up all day. If you don’t tech…throw throw throw. If you have no idea how to get in, I’ll zone you all day…
Ya surprising against a lot of players, once you are about to establish your netural game and shut down their approach, they start making riskier decisions once the overall pace of the round is slowed down. I am going to stop trying to be anxious to get in and zone a lot more. Momochi’s play style kinda shows how to slowly approach
Food for thought: I completely lamed out a Dee Jay player in my pools at this past NEC by simply throwing Rocks. As soon as the match started, I tossed rocks for him to block and went to the complete other side of the screen. Now I have the slight life lead and meter building lead. The Dee Jay player decided to play lame by throwing projectiles and I personally didn’t care. Rocks canceled them out and I still had the life/meter advantage. Threw in a few neutral jumps and forward jumps to mix it up and went right back to being lame. Dee Jay had to take risks to get in and in turn, lost more life most of the times I saw the approach. Even to add to the already lameness, I made sure to know my punishes against dee jay’s stuff and it really just didn’t go well for the guy.
but just an example of the neutral and how it can turn out depending on the player.
-Takes out notepad- Man, these are all good tips lol
I had a ft10-set with one of the best players in Norway yesterday, and got completely destroyed, as expected. And since the set was streamed, I’ve got some nice footage on my hands for you guys to ridicule. My matches start at 02:01:45.
A lot of the stuff here is obvious enough for me to see it as well: my defense needs some serious work, I need to actually confirm stuff off of f.HK, and the online tactics of throwing out low ruffians and hope they hit is a bad habit I need to get rid of. Any other kind of criticisms are welcome as well.
(shoutouts to SevenDaggers for watching this horrible mess on stream yesterday :V)
Get some dandruff shampoo. You’re poker game must be awful with that bad of a tell. I swear you scratched your head 5x a round lol.
Less crMK more crMP/crLK IMO is one I’d say could help. At least when the opponent is close up.
I’m calling my shampoo company to get my money back >=[
(and poker is boring. Real men play chess, M:TG and video games!)
As for using different buttons: could I get an explaination of why? I’m not disputing that it probably is a good idea, I’m just trying to wrap my head around how to go about the mid-close range game, and which ranges I should use which buttons.
cr.MK isn’t safe for one thing (it’s somewhat safe spaced but if you’re taking the time to space that move, you have better options at that range that lead to damage/knockdown/something that isn’t putting yourself in danger even on hit.)
close to mid range you want st.mp, cr.MP, s.lp/cr.lp, cr.lk, F+HK, sweep. Really any button that isn’t cr.mk. All those buttons mention lead into something either a move, start of a combo, hit confirm, whiff punish tool, etc. the best you’re getting out of cr.mk on grounded opponents is nothing since it leads to nothing and still unsafe on hit.
EDIT: I went back and watched the match and it was pretty horrible. There’s just a lot of things you did wrong both with the Ryu matchup and just as a general player. Just a few tips on both here:
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Zonk fireballs. You never attempted to even challenge a thrown fireball with a zonk. Because of that, he didn’t have any reason to stop throwing fireballs. If you’re not in range for zonk, you can neutral jump or just jump over it if you don’t want to take the chip. Focus if you want to build meter. But there were a lot of times you could have been charging zonk and hit him to keep him in check of throwing fireballs constantly.
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Throw some more rocks in neutral. Especially if a fireball player is throwing them. At least you’ll be gaining meter and can start mixing it up with a possible jump in attempt or something else to have them think you’ll throw more rocks.
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You need to block more. This is probably the biggest thing I’d complain about on that set. Anytime you got knocked down it was either a quick rise>counterhit or a quick rise>some reason you didn’t block. (not counting the obvious ambiguous setups.) You tried doing EX upper as reversals but just don’t even bother on Ryu. Good Ryu players will safe jump it everytime and this is pretty much what happened each time I saw any EX on wakeup. But yes. As a Cody player (or a player in general really.) You need to block more and not push so many buttons during frame trap attempts. Take the throw if you need to. Better than eating Count Hit Setups.
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Work on your Anti-air game. there wasn’t much of that at all. I saw 1 HK ruffian which wasn’t an AA (I don’t even know what it was) and I never saw any b+MPs on any jump ins outside the one that missed due to being just out of range. If you don’t feel confident in the angle to do either, just slide under and reset the position.
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Eternal already said it, but please do less cr.MK. It’s not that great of a move (yet) and right in someone’s face is just an easy punish for the opponent.
The only other thing i’d say is hit up training and explore Cody’s normals a bit more. You got hit confirms here and there but anytime you got a hit confirm off cr.LP you went straight to cr.MK instead of another cr.LP, cr.MP,cr.lk>special for the knockdown and damage. Most of your damage from that set literally came from stray hits and j.HK>cr.HP>upper.
Cody’s variety of useful normals is one of his biggest strengths. He only has maybe 3 or 4 flat out BAD normal moves. (Close MK has a gimmicky anti - reversal use that I discovered a while ago but other than that it sucks. close HK is pretty garbage outside of maybe the Vega match up. NJ HK sucks. NJ LK isn’t awful but it’s extremely limited in usefulness.)
Other than that, almost every normal Cody has is useful for SOMETHING. Maybe it’s not as good as we’d like, or even particularly exceptional, but it’s useful. far MP is one of his farthest pokes btw. It reaches farther than far HP or far MK.
crMP is one of his better bufferable normals since it has a solid hitbox behind it (unlike crLK which has a hurtbox that extends past the hitbox and tends to trade / get stuffed.) and it does 60 damage + buffers to LK Ruffian.
Far HK is a good poke in neutral and a solid pre-emptive anti air.
Far HP is one of the most underutilized normals that ALL of us should be using more but its hard to add to your gameplan since you usually use it to charge zonk. Trust me, the move is a good anti air at one of Cody’s more uncomfortable ranges to deal with jump ins (a range HK Ruffian isn’t good enough for the risk, too close for far HK, too far for B+MP)
far LK is one I’ve been incorporating more. The fact it’s faster than far MK and has a better hurtbox is very helpful. It is actually IMO a better move for avoiding / punishing lows than far MK.
Fun fact: Cody has the most normals in the entire game. Yes, more than Gen or Dhalsim (including stretchy) or Ibuki or Dudley or anyone else.
6 close normals
6 far normals
6 crouching normals
12 air normals
4 command normals
3 standing knife normals
3 crouching knife normals
3 jumping knife normals (4 if you count the fact that NJ HP and FJ HP have different hitboxes but the same frame data.)
That is 43 different normals!
far.LK is a great poke in certain matchups (I abuse it in the Sakura matchup.) and really is a overall good tool.
Far.HP is a great whiff punish normal and a solid anti-air all around.
Yeah, I wish Cody had better hurtboxes though. His normals have a variety of uses but god damn the hurtboxes on most of them are awful
far LK/far MK/crMK/crLK/NJ HK/NJ LP/close MK/FJ MP/FJ HK/FJ HP/FJ MK/FJ LK/F+HK/F+HP
All of them either have the hurtbox completely surrounding the hitbox, or close to it. Especially bad on far MK which has one of the largest hurtboxes in the entire game. Period.
Alright, that was the kind of feedback I was hoping for. Thanks guys, that’s quite a few new ideas for what I should work on.
I’m still irritated with far.MK’s hurtbox. It’s supposed to act like Rose’s far.MK Where it’s supposed to beat out lows or at least go over them without trading but you have to pre-emptively hit far MK before say a shoto’s cr.MK comes out. Otherwise cr.MK will beat out a reactional far.MK. (which makes no sense.)
no problem. We’re all here to help out.
I know a lot of people are saying you can cr.mk under fireballs but how do you go about doing that? I try to do it in training mode but I always get hit.
It doesn’t work vs every fireball. You can’t do it against Sakura/Chunli for instance. You also can’t ever slide under Guile/Deejay’s slowest fireball.
Really it’s only reliable vs Rose/Seth/Gouken/Juri (MK fireball only). You need to do the slide at very specific timing to do it versus any other character’s fireball and that timing changes depending on the speed the fireball is traveling. It’s not a reliable option vs characters like Ryu.