Defense

Your defensive game against Sheik is going to be your solid dash dance game, abusing your dtilt, and also abusing your massive aerials to swat her from the skies. Of course, this is all easier said than done and, in my opinion, a writeup for this MU is really not all that helpful compared to Fox because a lot of it comes down to testing your spacing, timing, abusing her less effective neutral game, and not getting grabbed. Most of these are things you can only learn via practicing against her, especially since the combo game on Sheik is not as simple as fthrow tech chasing her to a percent where you can get a knockdown with an aerial or getting her to a percent where up throw will lead to some huge damage or possibly a stock.

The best advice I can offer here is, when you get grabbed, make it as difficult as possible for her to get serious percent on you. Slight DI the dthrow up and away so you can DI it more effectively and escape the up tilt if you’re at too low of a percent for up air to send you into tumble. DI to platforms whenever available to force her to waveland or NIL on for a tech chase situation instead of a guaranteed followup.

One thing of note here is that when Sheik wavelands onto a platform to tech chase you, you don’t have time to escape by dropping through the platform. Your only real option here is to buffer a spot dodge and force a mixup between dsmash and grab here. If you spot dodge and she tries to grab, you can spot dodge a second time and you’ll be at frame advantage to grab her back instead. However, if she dsmashes to beat the second spot dodge you lose the mixup. I’d personally take getting dsmashed over getting grabbed by her any day of the week, getting grabbed by Sheik sucks.

Also, if they elect to go for down air as a platform tech chase option, be sure to slideoff DI it for as long as you can. Force her to work for everything and don’t let her get away with anything for free. Zain does this a lot against Plup, watch VODs of those two for examples of this.