SSBM/Mario/Introduction

Introduction

Mario appears on rank 13 in the D tier on the current tier list, placing him in the center, along with his brother Luigi and two places below his clone of Dr. Mario. Mario acts as a well-rounded character, with average weight, falling speed and other such attributes. Mario has some good comboing ability, and he has a very versatile grab game, with a powerful back throw that can lead to gimps and an up and down throw that can chaingrab. Mario is also a decent edgeguarder, with Fireball (a solid projectile), and his cape which can easily and efficiently gimp almost every other character's recovery. While edgeguarding he can propel himself deep offstage as well as occupy/threaten a space through his pseudo-float side b. Unless you are creative, Mario lacks a reliable finisher, and his recovery is decidedly average (though slept-on), he can extend it with his cape, wall jumps (up-b and regular) and extended up-b. Mario can still be easily gimped however when using fireballs to protect the descent, reversals and coin spikes can occur instead.

Strengths

Weaknesses

Edgegaurding - Mario's edgegaurding is very strong with his cape which can reverse the direction of characters during their recovery. Recovery - Mario has numerous moves he can use to prolong his recovery with his Cape acting similar to Marth's sideB stalling him in the air and mitigating lost height, his downB that can gain him some height with a good enough mash, and his quick upB which has an active hitbox. Tying this together with what is colloquially known as his "magnet-hands" property which allows him to grab ledge further than many other characters, his recovery works out to be very solid. Defense - Mario has a lot of great defensive tools with his great crouchcancel, fireballs for stage control, Cape to throw off his opponents, and decent out-of-shield options such as uAir, nAir or even bAir. Chaingrabs Galore - Across a surprising amount of characters, Mario has a very solid chaingrab on high-tiers like Fox, Falco, and Sheik, and even numerous chaingrabs across a lot of the midtiers such as Ganon, DK, and Yoshi.

Lack of kill moves - While he can be hard-hitting, Mario lacks good kill confirms, as he is limited to his dSmash and fSmash and occasionally, fAir offstage. Alongside this, dSmash and fSmash are very weirdly disjointed where dSmash has hitboxes only along the sweeping feet making it fairly easy to flub it completely, and fSmash's strong hitbox is comically small. Because of the lack of guaranteed kill moves, it is not atypical for him to get his opponent to the ~200% range, especially on bigger stages.