Ground Control

The ground is where the majority of important neutral game takes place. Learning when you’re supposed to stay grounded is an invaluable skill in all fighting games, and a huge mistake that rookies make is jumping too much.

Why is the ground so important? The ground is important because it’s generally where a player has the most options and the safest options.

First, the ground is where you have the most mobility. When you’re on the ground, you can dash, wavedash, walk, and basically go anywhere, as opposed to being airborne, where you are limited to the relatively short arc of your jump. To visualize this, let’s think about the threat that Marth poses to you on the ground vs in the air. Whenever Marth is on the ground, you have to worry about the long range he controls with his tilts and his other ground moves, and you essentially have to respect a much larger area because he has a lot of freedom to go wherever he wants. Whenever he is in the air, his effective range becomes much shorter, limited to the max distance of his jump. Whenever he is airborne, not only is his effective range shorter, but he has much less freedom to control where his character goes (he’s limited to how far he can drift his own character along with his double jump). Double-jumping is a cool mechanic in Smash that gives you a little more maneuverability when you’re in the air, but ground control is still king.

The ground is generally where you have more tools available to you. Not only does the grounded player have a huge mobility advantage, but the person on the ground has access to their shield, crouch-canceling, along with a lot of their best attacks (smash attacks and tilts), still having the freedom to jump.

So whenever you jump at someone, they can look at you and KNOW that your mobility is limited, and they KNOW that you’re limited to a certain number of options, and they can act accordingly. However, in trying to stress the importance of ground control, I don’t mean that jumping is BAD. Jumping is, however, a commitment. You don’t want to commit mindlessly, otherwise you’re limiting your own potential for no good reason. You need to be able to pick your spots for jumping.

Ground control is ridiculously important for Marth because he probably has the best ground control in Melee. Neglecting ground control is basically ignoring one of his biggest, un-contestable strengths. Why is his ground control so good? Well, put simply, it’s because of his amazing movement (top 3 in the game) and good ground moves, most notably (BY A HUGE MARGIN), his down-tilt. I will write several paragraphs about how amazing this move is in the “Move List” section of the guide, but it really is an amazing move. IMO it’s the most important move he has. If Marth’s dtilt (somehow) got nerfed, I would not think twice about quitting him, because it’s that amazing and it’s that crucial to playing Marth.

Having discussed how important the ground game is, it becomes clear that having such a strong ground game is a huge asset to Marth. Marth is a character that limits the opponent’s options, and this is largely because he has ground superiority vs practically every other character in Melee. His ground superiority gives him the ability to beat the opponent when they’re on the ground. In other words, his ground game allows him to limit his opponent’s options right at the core. Once you have effectively castrated your opponent, the rest of the match becomes a matter of recognizing and exploiting the positional advantage you have in a lot of situations, once the opponent is forced to play in a way that respects your ground game.

Marth needs to focus on a solid ground game largely because… well… he’s pretty weak otherwise. It’s almost all that he has in neutral. He can’t do aerial approaches the same way that characters like Fox and Falco do for a lot of reasons. The first reason is that in the air, he’s pretty slow. Whenever Marth jumps at you, it’s extremely easy to see him coming and just avoid him. The second reason is that his aerials are not good aggressive moves. They’re too laggy (His fair travels in an up-to-down arc, meaning that his lower-front side is vulnerable during its entire startup. His aerials are somewhat easy to beat/easy to avoid when he does them blindly), and they’re not very safe in any sense of the word. They’re relatively unsafe on shield. They can be unsafe on hit, depending on the circumstances. And if he misses, he doesn’t have any fast moves to cover himself (e.g. shine, fast jab, fast d-smash) or follow up.

This isn’t to say that Marth is BAD in the air. Marth’s air game is extremely important to playing him well. However, you need to understand when it’s appropriate to jump and when it’s appropriate to stay grounded. In general, Marth wants to go in the air when he needs to beat or zone off (threaten) the opponent’s aerial approaches, but, as you can imagine, the reality is not nearly this simple.