When you apply your understanding of spacing to various situations, along comes the idea of positional advantage. Positional advantage is a pretty self-explanatory term, but it’s one that needs to be pointed out. There are many situations in this game that strongly favor one player, creating an advantage. These situations are defined by character matchup and stage positioning, i.e. positional advantage.
Being able to effectively use positional advantage hinges on being good at two things: 1) setting up good positions and 2) abusing good positions.
Setting up good positions is one of your most important goals in neutral and in your punish game. It’s how you create good situations for yourself, putting the odds of the guessing games in your favor.
However, setting up a good position is only half the battle. It only stacks the deck in your favor, but you still have to play. And knowing HOW to play is determined by the position you are in. You need to be able to evaluate each player’s options and determine the most effective routes of action in that position.
In my opinion, there are four major categories of situations that give a player huge positional advantage: 1) opponent knocked down 2) opponent off-stage 3) opponent above you 4) opponent in the corner. Understanding each of these is quite important, so I’ll briefly talk about each one.
1) Opponent knocked down:
This one is a no-brainer. An opponent that gets knocked over has very limited options. They can tech or they can not tech. If they do tech, they’ll end up in one of three places. If they don’t tech, they can either roll, stand, or get-up attack. Compare these options with a standing, grounded opponent, who has huge freedom of motion and access to a bunch of amazing moves, and you can clearly see why you would rather have your opponent knocked over.
This is one reason why percentage matters so much! At low percentages, people will not get knocked down by a lot of your attacks, which is why grabs are so vital. Marth’s dthrow will oftentimes throw the opponent on the ground and knock them over, allowing him to set up a good position at low percentages, where most stray hits don’t convert. Furthermore, this is also why Marth’s f-smash is very good at lower percentages, because it knocks the opponent over relatively early, where his other pokes and zoning moves don’t directly lead to much. Also, at low percentages, you can uthrow your opponent onto a platform and abuse the fact that they are above you *AND* the fact that they are knocked down. Getting good at platform techchases can make the difference between getting big damage from all of your grabs vs getting nothing and possibly letting them turn the tables on you.
2) Opponent off-stage:
It’s advantageous to have your opponent offstage, whether they’re completely offstage or merely on the ledge. I don’t think this is any surprise. First of all, when an opponent is offstage, their life is hanging by a thread. An offstage opponent has very limited options because they’re not grounded, they’re limited to the handful of options that allow them to live, and they need to do something quick or else they’re not coming back
Edgeguarding is one of the most unique situations in Melee, and it’s part of what makes the game so fun. Having strong edgeguarding is a must-have against the fast-fallers, and being able to edgeguard effectively requires you to understand your opponent’s limited off-stage options.
One tip that Armada has given on edgeguarding is to focus on and cover their best option(s) at a given time. This sounds vague, but it’s actually pretty simple. For example, let’s say you’re edgeguarding Fox, having thrown him offstage. One of his best options (perhaps his best overall) is to jump and use a side B. Therefore, you should stay in a position where you can easily punish and get a stock off the side B if they decide to do it. Once they have come to a point where side B is no longer available to them (e.g. if they dropped down too low), you can more or less forget about covering side B, and then punish them beyond that.
When I refer to the opponent being off-stage, I am including the situation where the opponent is on the ledge. When an opponent is on the ledge, they have a very limited number of options, and their life is hanging by a thread. This situation can be abused in a similar way to the opponent being off-stage or the opponent being in the corner (one major option you need to watch for is the ledge wavedash).
3) Opponent above you:
Ground control is so important that I gave it its own section. However, I’ll briefly discuss some things in this section. The opponent being above you is one of the most important positions to exploit as a Marth player. Conveniently, you have a uthrow which allows you to make this situation happen very easily.
In general, an opponent that is in the air is severely limited. They lack their ground mobility ( they’re limited to their double jump and their aerial drift), they’re at the mercy of gravity, and most characters don’t have moves that cover their bottoms very well.
Marth is particularly good at exploiting an enemy in this situation because of his character design. Marth has a fantastic anti-air game. His fair, uair, utilt, ftilt, and fsmash are all EXTREMELY strong anti-air moves. Marth doesn’t have the ability to blindly combo these moves on the opponent from a throw (think about Sheik’s dthrow -> fair), but the strength of his anti-air game comes from the fact that he can force his opponent to deal with it or else take huge damage and the fact that HE STILL HAS HIS AMAZING GROUND GAME. In general, every character can exploit an aerial opponent by leveraging the mobility advantage in some way, even if it requires finesse.
That being said, the opponent above you doesn’t directly give you a free hit. You still need to work for it through your positioning, threatening to use your sword, and making the right calls to just go up there and hit them, but know that the odds are drastically in your favor, but only when you’re playing it right.
4) Opponent in the corner:
Learning to use the corner is a very important skill in Smash. When someone is cornered, they are limited. Because they have no space behind them, they have nowhere to retreat to if you decide to poke at them meaning they basically have to deal with your attacks on your terms. Furthermore, if you have someone cornered, they cannot jump at you very well because they don’t have the room to set up a running start. Because you are the one with all the space, you’re more or less the one that calls the shots, but you have to be smart and patient.
Trying to corner your opponent is one of the most important goals in the neutral game. When you throw out attacks or threaten to throw out attacks with your movement, the goal is to either hit the opponent or force an action. A big one of these actions is retreating. Whenever they retreat, you can punish them by moving forward and cornering them. If you read a retreat, this is the smart way to take advantage of it. It is good to call the retreat with an over-extended attack sometimes, but relying on that alone is risky. Learning to set up and abuse the corner is a big asset towards having an effective neutral game.
So now that I’ve spent all those words talking about positional advantage, WHY is it so important to Marth in particular? It more or less boils down to his strengths and weaknesses as a character. Marth is not good at doing things without considering positional advantage. Marth, for the reasons I listed earlier, is very bad at forcing things. His approaches aren’t that fast or safe, he’s very bad at trading, his moves don’t have that much brute force (i.e. His moves are kinda weak against defensive options. His moves can’t brute force their way through shield or crouch cancel the way that Fox/Falco/Peach can), and his moves don’t engage very well. On top of this, he doesn’t have many guaranteed true combos off grab the same way a lot of the other top tiers do, except vs fast fallers (e.g. Fox uthrow -> uair, Sheik dthrow -> fair, Falcon uthrow -> uair string/knee). These are some of Marth’s weaknesses.
What are Marth’s strengths? As I discussed earlier, Marth’s strengths in spacing are his giant sword and his amazing movement. These strengths make him one of the best characters in the game at setting up and capitalizing off positional advantage. His ability to limit, control, and counter the opponent’s options is amplified when you use them with the understanding of positional advantage. When Marth fights you on HIS terms, you cannot beat him. In other words, a lot of Marth’s punish game is understanding how to MAKE things happen on your own terms along with recognizing when you’re not playing on your own terms, so you can be a little more passive.
Even though his throws don’t lead to combos most of the time, his uthrow and dthrow are amazing at setting up positional advantage. His uthrow puts the opponent above him, which is a situation he can control and abuse. His dthrow oftentimes puts the opponent in the corner/knocked down, which is another situation he can control and abuse. Positional advantage should be one of your main objectives in neutral and in punishment. Whenever you’re comboing someone, you should make your decisions based on what actions will result in good damage AND what actions will result in positional advantage. Whenever you have no idea how to get good damage off a grab, a good rule of thumb is to throw them in a spot where you have positional advantage, and exploit that.
Personally, one reason I love Marth so much because his punish game embodies Smash to me. One of the often-cited greatest things about Smash is how interactive the punish game is, opting away from the true combos that more traditional fighters have, creating a much more organic, interactive system where both players have a lot of options, but the punishing player has a clear situational advantage that he can only fully exploit when he really understands the game. The punish game in Smash alone offers so much depth.