SSBM/Marth/Strategy

Overview Combos Matchups Strategy Resources VODs Discord Cookbook

Strategy

Marth has highly variable neutral plans and punish trees per matchup and as a result a general strategy page is of limited use compared to more matchup-specific resources. Despite this, Marth has several options that are almost universally extremely strong.

Dashdance and Dashback

Note that Marth's purple lower legs are invulnerable to grabs, making this even stupider than it looks

Marth's dashdance is arguably the best in the game, with high speed and an animation where he adopts a very low position to the floor that allows him to dodge many attacks and grabs effortlessly. Every matchup in the game largely revolves around Marth abusing his excellent dashdance and stupid dash animation to safely threaten space and safely throw out moves.

Marth's extremely disjointed dash (L) and crouch (R) powershields

Powershield

Marth's silly dash animation also has the advantage of having an extremely disjointed shield that allows for trivial powershields. Marth's crouch also shares this trait. This is particularly useful against characters who rely heavily on projectiles like Falco.

Efficiency

Marth players must be efficient in their punish game. Dropping edgeguards and combos, or even just comboing without finding ways to convert into a kill move or edgeguard scenario will result not only in wasted openings, but will make Marth's job significantly harder. This is because most of Marth's moves are counterintuitively significantly less rewarding when the opponent is at high %, resulting in the bane of low-level Marth mains: Marthritis. Thankfully, Marth has an excellent set of tools for consistently making the most of his punish opportunities.

Kill Moves

When aiming to kill outright with Marth, you are hoping to combo into one of three moves: fSmash, dAir, and upB. How you combo into these and which ones you will likely combo into is highly variable on matchup, though a weak fair can generally combo into any of them, depending on di of course.

Edgeguards

Marth has excellent offstage game and tools to cover ledge and can thus very effectively and consistently close out stocks once his opponent is offstage, particularly if they are without their jump. Runoff fAir, dTilt at ledge, and strong upB are three particularly strong options but, like almost everything with Marth, your plan of action will be highly variable with matchups.

Grab

Marth's grab has huge range and his excellent grounded movement allows him to get grabs with unmatched effectiveness. On top of this, his throws are extremely rewarding, with dThrow and fThrow forming the basis of many DI mixups and setting up techchases, and uThrow putting the opponent in a terrible position or starting a combo outright.

Crouch Cancel/ASDI Down

Marth is a prime abuser of crouch cancel and ASDI down due to his aforementioned excellent grab game. ASDI down can also be done while dTilting to make a safe poke even safer. However you must be wary of characters with rewarding multihit moves such as Fox's dAir, and meteor smashes and spikes such as Captain Falcon and Falco's dAirs respectively.

Of course Marth's ridiculous dash also comes into play, allowing for callouts with dash forward after ASDI down when grab won't quite reach, or resets to neutral with dash back out of ASDI down when direct callouts may be too risky.