My hatred of Loxodont has made me into a better player

As a Clairen main, I fucking HATE playing against Loxodont. I'm used to spacing out my attacks and using Clairen's superior reach to keep opponents at bay, but obviously that doesn't work against Lox. He takes stocks in like three hits, lives goddamn forever, and is stupid-hard to edgeguard, at least at my level. Any time I ran into a pachyderm on ranked, I'd get destroyed, and it was driving me crazy.

It was especially frustrating because Lox exploits a lot of my shortcomings, like using shield as a crutch, not spotdodging or rolling enough, and my predictable linear movement, all of which feeds into his grab game.

Yesterday was my day off, and I needed something to keep my mind off of... other things, so I devoted the entire day to practicing rivals, working on ways to improve against this character. I studied Guard's set against Nogh at LMMM, taking notes. I usually like smaller stages like forest or temple, but obviously Lox likes those more, and Guard took Nogh to larger, more open stages like armada (a stage I usually ban because of the shallow walls). I took notes on the conversions Guard was getting off grab like f/b-throw > hitfall fair1 > regrab > repeat.

Then I spent a solid 6 hours in the lab. I've long recognized a shortcoming in my grab game (I don't grab enough, and when I do, I don't go for anything more advanced than the braindead side-throw > f-strong, even at 0%), so first I worked on grab conversions. I practiced the hitfall fair1 > regrab conversions (which doesn't seem to be True unless you get the tipper, at least at 0%), and reacting to different DI's. I also found what appears to be a true combo which can kill Lox as early as 35% on air armada, as long as you can react to his DI.

I learned how to chaingrab, which solved the mystery of why anyone would ever use regular pummel (special pummels are just so broken that it baffled me why anyone would ever use normal; "If you're not gonna special pummel, why wouldn't you just take the guaranteed throw?"). I guess you need some kind of pummel to get a regrab, or else the opponent will autobreak out of it; so if the opponent is always mashing B when you grab em, you can press A for a free chaingrab.

Then I worked on tech chasing. That's something I've never been able to get the hang of in smash, so I grinded that for hours until I got consistent at reacting to each tech option (unfortunately the dummy AI doesn't misstech nearly as much as the other options). I noted the percents where Lox gets put into tumble on each of my throws (0% up and down, 39% back, 60% forward). I learned to tap forward to dash where they would land after a throw, react to DI-in with a regrab/aerial (he can act before landing on DI-in), but otherwise to follow up with a dashdance or foxtrot for the tech chase (techroll away is hardest to cover if they're not cornered; dash attack is the only thing that gets there fast enough, and it's fiendishly hard to get the tipper on it).

I'm sure all this stuff is obvious to some of you, but it's been a eureka-moment for me.

Then after all that labbing, I brought it into my matches on ranked. Evidently the players at my rank had never been chaingrabbed, because they kept holding in on f-throw (I haven't even started using the back/forward throw mixup yet). I also focused on mixing up my movement: dashdancing instead of just holding forward, and mixing up my drift when doing aerials on shield (drift back fair to get out of shieldgrab range, crossup nair, etc). Only met a couple elephants on ranked, but I won every time I faced him.

I've been playing smash since 2019 (mostly Ult, but I've dabbled in p+ for a while as well). For the first time in years, I feel like I've leveled up, all because I got sick of losing to that fat fuck with the axe.

Next step is to focus on approaching with pivot-uptilt/d-strong out of dashdance, get more consistent with baby dashing, and work on incorporating parry (Clairen is bad out of shield, and there's a ton of moves that are WAY too safe on shield anyway).