Neutral

This MU is a battle of the grappler characters. Both of these characters get very large rewards off of landing a grab on each other, and they’re both relatively weak to CC, so grab is the logical decision for both of them.

As a result of Sheik’s superior punishes because of dthrow combos and relatively simple edgeguards and potentially devastating combos, this is probably what Marths struggle with the most in this MU. Marths are usually comfortable with jumping and spacing fair against other characters like Fox or Falco, dash dancing (relatively) freely, and not having to worry too much about

Sheik, however, punishes this REALLY hard if you jump in the wrong place. Her ftilt is a godlike anti air and her DA and boost grab are conveniently excellent tools for getting underneath Marth’s nair and fair and anything she clips you with usually leads to a ton of percent.

So...what do you do?

Well, if you’re going to commit to a jump you either do the fair far enough away so she has to read your next action (i.e. dashback, aerial again, etc) or close enough that you’re sure you’ll hit her.

The caveat to this is that she can CC punish you if you make an incorrect move, so you have to do your best to maintain your space and keep her out of your face. You can also do aerial>shield or aerial>dash back to beat the CC punish, but then it becomes a mixup of whether she does a grab or a CC tilt. It’s best to go for tipper moves whenever possible, though that should be a given.

Make liberal use of dtilt if the Sheik likes to stay grounded and threaten her if she likes to toss grounded needles at you. If she likes to approach with jump then swatting her with fair is, of course, a good idea, since your fair is bigger than hers and is quite good at stuffing her approaches courtesy of Sheik’s rather high short hop. You can also make use of things like empty jump>dtilt, empty jump>dash back or empty jump>waveland back because typically when Sheik tries to DA you they’re doing it on reaction to your jump.

I do not advise using nair too much in neutral because of Sheik fair being able to hit Marth’s head from diagonally above, which is a pretty easy thing for her to do. It’s good when Sheik is in the corner and you do it in a retreating fashion to beat out DA and roll from the corner but in neutral, I do not think it’s a good idea.

In my opinion, fair is strictly better in neutral against Sheik. Fair and dtilt are the name of the game. Do everything you can to focus on not getting grabbed and building up damage until you can get an opportunity to grab her and get a few hits in or push her into the corner/offstage.

Marth’s game is keeping Sheik out. Sheik’s game is trying to get in on Marth. It’s dash dance versus anti-dash dance.