Notes

Ice Climbers

The biggest counterplay vs Ice Climbers is to separate them. This is what everyone tells you, but it’s not always so simple. Some characters have great tools for this, like Snake, and some don’t. But it’s really important to do this whenever possible because icies rely so heavily on being together to do their setups. Prioritize hitting Popo if you can, but it’s also good to hit Nana to separate her even if they are in a position to punish you with Popo since the SoPo punish is usually not too great and they likely won’t have Nana with them to capitalize even further on that advantage. But the hardest part about fighting icies imo is that they force you to play their game in most matchups. Icies are a Luigi-type character, but the other Luigi’s play more like normal characters. Icies having two climbers makes it extremely disorienting to play against. There are two characters to keep track of, and if you don’t know which moves from each of Popo and Nana they can convert off of into big combos/kills, you’ll get lost easily. Unfortunately, this means you’ll likely have to play differently vs them than you do vs any other character. For example, I play Pokemon Trainer, and for a long time I would never play Squirtle vs Ice Climbers because they throw off my normal gameplan. My long, multihit combos with bair/dair are almost impossible to get off since multi hit moves give them a big window to punish you if they have control of the climbers, especially since a lot of Squirtle’s combos are typically started by a grab, which they can often hard punish. I also couldn’t play bait and punish as well as I normally do with Squirtle because they can often cover their approaches with desyncs to punish me if I whiff punish one of the climber’s moves. But I eventually realized that while Squirtle’s bair, dair, and grab are heavily nerfed against them, my other aerials can be really useful. Nair, fair, up air, and f-tilt are all safe single-hit moves that I can use as combo starters. And they all have really fast startup, so I essentially can have a bubble of fast moves around me that I can throw out to separate the climbers. So instead of playing bait and punish, I essentially go in and mash. Icies can’t punish any of my aforementioned safe moves unless they’re desynced and are at a good position to do so, so if I go in and catch them while they’re synced, I can mash my safe moves until I get a hit. And when I get a hit, my combo starter takes much less time than a grab or bair, so I can often get a quick and simple combo on one of the climbers before they can react and punish me. Or I can hit one of the climbers and then hit the other one to separate them, from where I can punish Nana’s AI or combo Popo across the stage. This process is going to look different for each character. Some characters won’t have to change up their gameplan at all, and some will have to change it entirely. You’ll have to find out how to do that effectively with your character, which will probably require playing a lot vs Icies players. Their playerbase loves to play games online (especially with delay mod) and help people with counterplay to Icies, so you should be able to find some good help. But I hope my analysis was able to help you figure out where to get started in fighting Icies if you’ve been struggling. Believe me, it’s a long journey to understand Ice Climbers, but once you do you’ll feel so much more confident, like you’re able to actually play against your opponent instead of just fighting against Ice Climbers. Bonus tips: - When Nana is separated from Popo, she’ll run straight to him. So if they’re across the stage from each other, you can abuse this by charging a smash attack and waiting for Nana to run past you. - They can do desyncs off ledge, but only very soon after they grab ledge since they’ll both be actionable and are forced to choose the same ledge option. So when ledgetrapping them, you have to play safe around their initial cheese off ledge. But after they’ve held ledge for long enough, you can ledgetrap them like a normal character. - There’s this weird interaction where sometimes if they hit you with their Up-B while recovering, Popo won’t shoot up at all and he falls to his death. I don’t know why or when exactly this happens, but it makes going low to edgeguard Icies more appealing on average.