Marvel vs Capcom 3/Systems/Defensive Actions: Advancing Guard

Summary

To perform an Advancing Guard, also known as Push-Block, just perform a Block or an Air Block and, while still in Block Stun, press any two of the main Attack Buttons.

Leveling Up Your Defense

While Blocking is the most fundamental building block of defense (no pun intended), the most important aspect of defense is the Advancing Guard. Characters in Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 have so many ways to overwhelm their opponent with offense and the best way to counter that is by using Advancing Guard.

What Advancing Guard does is, when activated while blocking, it will push your opponent a very large distant away from you no matter what move it is that you blocked. So even if Felicia performs a single Crouching Light Attack and you block that or Ryu throws a Hadoken at you and you block that or Sentinel performs a Jumping Hard Attack from the air and you block that, hitting two of the three main Attack Buttons will cause a "barrier" to appear around your character as they lean forward, and the opponent gets pushed away.

The benefits of this are obvious: it gets your opponent off of you and keeps them away. So when a character like X-23 is constantly pressuring you, you can keep them off using Advancing Guard. Advancing Guard must be learned. It is sometimes the only way to swing momentum. Without it, you'll likely be overwhelmed and get K.O.'ed almost instantly by rushdown characters.

Advancing Guard Limitations

However, Advancing Guard has some limitations. The first limitation is that it has no effect on Assist Characters. So if your opponent calls in Chun Li with her Gamma Assist, the Hyakuretsu Kyaku, and you start blocking one hit of the move and you perform an Advancing Guard, you cannot push Chun Li away. The opponent will be pushed back whether they are attacking you or not, but Chun will stay in place. So Cross-Over Assists become a key technique to countering Advancing Guards.

The other main limitation is that, once you perform an Advancing Guard, you are stuck in "Advancing Guard Delay." Advancing Guard lasts a very specific amount of time and, until that time passes, you cannot perform any other actions outside of blocking again. The Advancing Guard Delay is not very long, however, but it does lock you into place for a second.

So let's say Felicia comes up to you and performs a Crouching Light Attack canceled into a Medium Attack version of the Cat Spike. That sequence is not a true combo nor Block String, so if you blocked the Crouching Light Attack, you can recover before the Cat Spike and hit her with a quick move.

However, if you block the Crouching Light Attack from Felicia and perform an Advancing Guard, you will go into Advancing Guard Delay. So even though those two moves in that attack sequence used by Felicia is not a true Block String, thanks to Advancing Guard Delay you will be forced to also block the Cat Spike from Felicia. So by performing an Advancing Guard, you've essentially turned that sequence into a Block String. If you hadn't performed the Advancing Guard, you'd have been able to do something in between.

Strategy Corner

Eventually, you will run into some players who become adept at pushing you away via Advancing Guard every single time you touch them, which makes it very hard to stay in their face for a rushdown. However, by understanding the mechanics of the game, you can actually learn to try and bait Advancing Guards and punish accordingly.

For example, if you jump in on your opponent and attack and the perform an Advancing Guard on your Jump Attack after blocking, you can take advantage of this. High blocking a Jump Attack and performing an Advancing Guard has a command overlap with Back Dashing: holding Back and pressing two of the three Attack Buttons. So you can learn to actually jump at someone and do nothing and land with a quick attack instead. What happens is that the opponent will instinctively try and perform an Advancing Guard on your Jump Attack. But since you didn't do one, they will accidentally execute their Back Dash instead! So landing with an attack will allow you to hit them out of their Back Dash and start up a combo.

If you run up to the opponent while they are crouching, however, trying an Advancing Guard will not cause them to Back Dash. It will just cause them to perform a Crouching Attack depending on which two buttons they used to try their Push Block. However, if you run up to them and delay your attack for a brief second, you may be able to bait your opponent into trying an Advancing Guard and then can hit their move with a faster move before it comes out. Since Advancing Guard requires at least two buttons and, when two buttons are pressed at the same time, the stronger of the two buttons comes out, the fastest move the opponent can get as a result of a whiffed Advancing Guard is a Medium Attack. Delaying your attack and then pressing a Light Attack can cause them to whiff their Advancing Guard and then hitting their Medium Attacks or Hard Attacks before their move starts hitting.

Also, if you know your opponent is going to perform an Advancing Guard on you, one of the best ways to get in is to perform a move that will close the gap even after they perform the Advancing Guard. For example, with She-Hulk, if you attack the opponent with a Crouching Light Attack and you expect them to push you away with an Advancing Guard, cancel the move into your Hard Attack version of the Heavy Strike. That moves causes her to run forward and try to throw the opponent. So even though the opponent has pushed you back, the move itself will cancel out the backwards momentum of the Advancing Guard and still catch the opponent right when they recover from the Advancing Guard Delay.

You can even use moves that hit like Thor's Hard Attack Mighty Smash. Let's say you the enemy in the corner and you anticipate them Push Blocking your Crouching Light Attack. Cancel the Crouching Light Attack into a Mighty Smash and the backwards momentum from the Advancing Guard will be counteracted by the forward momentum of the Hard Attack Mighty Smash, which will make it so that the Mighty Smash lands right on the opponent. And since the Mighty Smash cannot be punished on Block, you stay in their face despite the Advancing Guard. This technique takes anticipation, but can be quite effective if you have moves that close the distance and are safe on block.

Air Advancing Guard

Also worth noting is that, when you perform an Advancing Guard during an Air Block, you "lock" yourself in the air for the entirety of the Advancing Guard Delay. Once that ends, you will start falling back down just as you would normally after Air Blocking an attack. However, the difference is that with Air Blocking, the initial portion of you falling back you are still in Block Stun. After the Advancing Guard Delay ends in the air, you can immediately perform any action.