Matchup Database

@Hobusu

I couldn’t find a matchup chart, but here are winrates from Yomi Season 1 and Season 2, with a couple of comments about matchup chart opinions (and how they don’t match the stats).

Also, I said before that Degrey was the weakest character by quite a margin, but I think I’d like to partly retract that. What I meant was that he was widely and consistently considered the worst character over quite a period, but Yomi matchups have always been very close, and I don’t think any of his matchups were worse than 7-3.

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Rook (and Midori to a certain extent as well) make sense to me: your opponent just doesn’t have any way to build a hand against grappler throws, short of gold burst. So both characters would, I think, have been much better equipped to play a control game. But that just “seems” correct to me - I don’t have any actual experience with v1 play to say anything confidently.

Like, my gut says there’s no way DeGrey could have been that bad of a character in v1, but probably that has more to do with the rest of the cast’s changes than anything with him.

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@Hobusu, I’m not sure if you saw, but I got the variant selector working much better, and fixed some of the EX/1st Ed override stuff last weekend on my flight to Portland. You can check out jaina to see how the override code should be used.

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Looking good! I think it would look better if you still put “EX” in front of the character name and just had “2nd edition” and “1st edition.” As it is now, it’s not as immediately clear whether you’re looking at an EX character as it used to be.

Yeah, that’s a fair point.

Now that I’m not (quite) as busy anymore, I’m finally trying to do more with this for the first time in… A month!!! Didn’t realize it had been so long!

@vengefulpickle, I submitted 1st Edition Valerie and it passed the checks, but the site won’t load now (it did before the update). Sorry to bother you while you’re running IYL…

Should be fixed shortly.

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OK, after seeing how you fixed it, I’ve also added 1st Edition Geiger. I guess that means it’s time for…

The Revenge of the Return of Thoughts on 1st Edition Characters!

Valerie had two substantial changes, though one interesting thing I noticed is that her innate used to be uncounterable (because Setsuki’s Smoke Bomb used to be able to counter innates, as you might recall). The first meaningful change was the addition of Splash of Color to her King in 2nd Edition, making it unable to be blocked if they use the wrong color. Not only does this make her K more valuable, it also helps her flavor quite a bit! If she can knock someone down, they have to not only worry about mixup normals from the character who can chain them in any order, but they also have to predict the color of K that she’s most likely to play, which makes it even harder to correctly block. The second one is that Burst of Speed used to be able to make moves reach speed 0.0, which is hilariously powerful. A single Burst of Speed could be used to make either of her supers a true reversal! :fearful:

Geiger only got a single meaningful change, and it’s just to make rules-keeping a bit less of a headache: Innate abilities that would activate from blocking a Time Spiral no longer do so in 2nd Edition. I guess it wasn’t that big of an issue in 1st Edition, since the only character with a block innate was Grave… I’m curious what that interaction used to be.

Also, I originally skipped over Jaina because her 1st Edition page didn’t go up until @vengefulpickle got the block damage on her normals working (speaking of which, her 2nd Edition normals currently do 1 more block damage than they should). Now that she’s up, let’s start with that block damage! In 1st Edition, all of her red normals did 3 block damage, which resulted in some weirdness since she could do 3 block damage with a 2 attack (meaning she did more when they blocked!) and return it to her hand for 3 life. If they kept blocking, both players would move into the endgame at the same rate, and if they played anything that lost to 2 attack, she could combo into a straight for big damage and a bunch of aces. That seems particularly mean against Rook, since Stone Wall would have only reflected 2 damage and Entangling Vines would have cost a throw to do anything but prevent block damage – and if she’s determined to keep it going, she can still return it to her hand. This was made even more oppressive by Unstable Power, which you could discard at the combat reveal to rotate any combat card (you don’t search for aces, and using it always costs 10 life). Thus, her 2 attack can be rotated to beat faster attacks as well, leaving only dodges as a way to beat them; hence why Rook had a hard time. For everyone else, she could either knock them down (since the old version didn’t cancel their KD) or return Smoldering Embers to her hand when to damage the dodging opponent. This let her power them up to put them back in the discard pile and get a bunch of aces every time they dodged. Finally, because her innate didn’t have a restriction on when you could buy back Queens and Aces (but face cards cost 4 and Aces cost 5), she never had to let them get in the discard if she didn’t want to.

TL;DR, while I don’t know if Jaina was considered all that strong, she had some degenerate gameplay that came from a combination of different abilities.

Jaina and Grave were most definitely the strongest two characters in edition one.

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I kind of wish v2 Valerie could still bring moves down beyond 1.0 with BoS…

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No! Bad juicer! No cookie for you! :wink:

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I’m just saying it would be nice if Valerie were Very Good.

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I’m sure there’s a way to do that such that Chromatic Orb isn’t an even better Grave Q, though.

Why 0.0 Chromatic Orb when you can 0.0 even/odd/red/black cross-up on KD tho? (Except for lethal, obvs.)

Fair enough, though doesn’t that take more than one Burst of Speed? Also Masterpiece can be made 0.0 with a single BoS too, but that probably isn’t worth it.

I’d just love the opportunity to throw clash with 0.0 speed supers.

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So, almost another month since the last update to this. This time, I can’t blame it on life being crazy as much as finally getting to play Breath of the Wild. I’m finding it hard to put down, to say the least. :sweat_smile:

Anyway, Lum and Argagarg finally have their 1st Edition variants up, which means it’s time for…

Final Thoughts on 1st Edition Characters

I added Arg’s 1st Edition version first because it was simpler, so I’ll start with him. Protective Ward got buffed with the ability to prevent pumping moves (and also tag combos in 2v2) in 2nd Edition, which helps him to stall with it even more effectively. On the other hand, Crash and Flow used to be a normal counter that gave the opponent a free card draw, but in 2nd Edition it puts the card it counters on the bottom of the opponent’s deck if they played the ability from hand. Sirlin himself went into the reasoning behind this change in one of his articles, but it improved the dynamics in Arg’s matchups with Lum, Persephone, and Gloria (in the former’s case, 2nd Edition Roll the Dice lets him get his ability back sometimes and he can power up to shuffle it into the deck, whereas the latter two would prefer their ability cards go to discard because of their innates).

In all, these changes make him a bit better at stalling (but not by much, since Protective Ward still only lasts one turn) and improved his more troublesome matchups in an interesting and flavorful way.


Lum got a lot of small changes! Roll the Dice gained the option to draw the bottom card of the deck instead of healing if you flip 2-3 (which helps in the Arg matchup especially), and flipping A lets you peek at the bottom of your deck (which combos with the other change sometimes). Blackjack used to give you the option of putting the cards you flipped in your hand instead of dealing their damage. I’m not sure what the reasons for that change were, but I’m guessing it was partly so that it actually felt like a gamble instead of “deal damage if you don’t mind losing the cards, otherwise act as if you drew them all along.” The fourth change was to make his 10 throw into a named move that does 4 damage per pump instead of 3, which is another quality of life improvement against Arg (since Poker Flourish is likely to be countered, sometimes you can use your 10s as higher damage throws instead). Finally, the Block Damage on Rolling Panda (Q) was removed to help Rook out (since he needs to block a lot, and every blocked Q used to trigger Roll the Dice “for free,” which is a bit much for such a fast attack).


I think that’s everything! Let me know if I missed something (except formatting changes, since those don’t affect how you play the character).

With that, all the 1st Edition characters have been added! I’m probably going to polish up the formatting here and there for now, though if @vengefulpickle gets time to implement something to make putting in EX exclusive combos easier I could work on them too. No rush; I know you have a tournament to run! :wink:

I think adding EX combos should be pretty easy. You can use overrideMoves (example here), and specify the various combo attributes, rather than the chip that is used in the example.

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Looking at this example, it seems like I could use it to streamline several 1st edition characters (and G. Panda) by removing lots of duplicate data. I’ll have to experiment tomorrow!

(Previous edits to this post have been moved to their own post because it was getting long enough to warrant a new post.)

This feature is very nice! I’ve changed 1st Edition Jaina’s Charged Shot to be more accurate (speed 8.6 and removed all the combo info). I’ll be going through the characters in order and seeing what else this lets me add. @vengefulpickle, how would I combine this with concat for the EX characters? For example, Grave needs to add Overhead Slice and Rapid Poke while also adjusting combos with overrideMoves to account for Rapid Poke being a 1 CP Linker and Dragonheart comboing into True Power of Storms.

I had wanted to list some changes that would need to be made, but I’ve just realized I need clarification on something. True Dragonheart says that Grave can combo Dragonheart (Q) into True Power of Storms (AAA), but the latter does 30 damage if he does so. Obviously this ignores normal combo rules, since both Q and AAA are 3 CP Enders, so does that mean he could do something like D++>Q>AAA to deal 12 + 10 + 30 = 52 damage from a speed 2.0 attack? Similarly, can Jaina use Phoenix Shots to do something like 2>3>4>5>D>J (because both High and Low Phoenix can combo into Flame Arrow if they hit) to deal 28 damage and search for 2 Aces from a 2.6 speed normal attack? I don’t think these are covered in the FAQ on the forums, since that’s more concerned with the tournament game rather than the “for fun” EX expansion, and I don’t have any of the EX characters in either physical form or the Steam game.