- Variable playstyle: Shadow Jago has all the balanced tools of a shoto - a fireball, a forward-advancing move that can call out buttons and enemy projectiles, a strong low and decent, confirmable buttons. Shadow Jago also has extremely disrespectful moves, including a teleporting cancellable forward dash, that let him run into his opponent's face and dare them to deal with what he's doing. This allows for a switch between a balanced, grounded playstyle and the nutty playstyle of a madman to mess with your opponent's mental and catch them off-guard.
- Fireballs!: Unlike Jago, who can only throw multiple fireballs in Instinct, and Omen, who can only ever have one set of regular fireballs on the screen, Shadow Jago has no limit to the amount of fireballs he can have on a screen. Although they are faster than most fireballs, making it a little harder to approach behind them unless he spends meter on a Surge Air Fireball, this also means that flooding the screen with annoying hitboxes for your opponent to deal with is easy. This is on top of the fact that Shadow Jago can confirm off any fireball hit with a bar of meter by using Shadow Dark Demise, making him that much more of a threat.
- Slippery: Shadow Jago has many unique movement options, on top of his regular movement speed already being decent. He can use a low recovery (on whiff) dive kick to change his air angle, an air fireball to stall himself in the air, and a teleporting dash to get him out of sticky situations, making him exceptionally hard to pin down, let alone guess where he might be hitting you from.
- High damage, situationally: Because of his Combo Trait combining Omen's and Jago's traits, when Shadow Jago earns a lockout, he can dump heavy and medium autodoubles to rack up the damage. In addition, his instinct gives him access to Annihilation, a Raging-Demon-type move with relatively fast startup that chunks about half of your opponent's healthbar (less as his instinct is spent), allowing you to even the odds off a single punish.
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- Unsafe: Shadow Jago only has one meterless safe opener in his overhead, which is incredibly slow, interruptible when cancelled off some buttons, and is still negative on block. You will otherwise have to spend meter to open somebody up safely, and you will never be able to get an easily confirmed safe grounded opener, meaning you have to learn to confirm your normals.
- Low damage, usually: While Shadow Jago's lockout and punish damage is incredible, his damage outside of such leave much to be desired. His DP isn't as chunky as Jago's, and his projectiles don't do as much damage as any other character does. This is off-set by his strong vortex, but it means you have to hit your opponent with a setup many more times than they probably have to hit you.
- Meter management: How Shadow Jago uses his meter will make or break a match-up due to his Surge mechanic. Shadow Jago is incredibly strong at any space of the screen with two full bars of meter, but has trouble controlling the pace when he doesn't have any to spend on a Surge.
- Tricky combos: Shadow Jago's linkers and autodoubles are all reactable to someone with a decent enough eye, meaning you will have to rely on their long cancel windows to delay combos and mess up your opponent's timing, or resets to catch them trying to break rather than just dialing in linkers and auto-doubles hoping for a lockout.
- Edgy: His theme, like Omen's, is a darker, growlier form of Jago's theme, and most of his named moves have "Dark" in the name. This might actually be a pro for the reader.
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