Introduction

Anyone that has been a part of the Melee community for a reasonable amount of time is familiar with the statement, “Do you just want to go to Battlefield” as a means to skip past the time it takes to strike stages for game one and just get right into the action as Battlefield is believed to be the most neutral stage. While I agree with that sentiment most of the time, I also think there is a lot of information to be gleaned by going through the striking process, such as learning your opponent’s stage preference and knowledge of match-ups, so today I want to talk about how I reach my conclusions when deciding what stages to strike.

What is Stage Striking and Counterpicking?

For players new to the Melee scene, I’ll give you a quick rundown on how a typical tournament set goes; for everyone that understands stage striking, feel free to skip on down to the next section. Tournaments have six legal stages, five starters, and one counter pick. For the first game, each player reveals what character they will play and then determine strike order. Player one will strike one stage, player two will strike two stages, and then player one will pick which of the two remaining starter stages game one will be played on. After the first game, the player that won the match will ban a stage they don’t want to play on; the losing player will select a stage from the remaining five. Then the winning player will pick their character, and then the losing player will choose their character. If there is a third game, repeat that process. Below is a diagram of Melee's stage select. In green are starter stages, these can be played on any game in a set. The stage highlighted yellow is a counter pick stage and can't be played on the first game. All stages in red are banned from tournament play.

So how did we land on these stages and this system? The community landed on this particular stage list due to these stages being the least intrusive for competitive play (ie. no major stage hazards) and are relatively balanced for all characters to play on. As for how we arrived at stage striking and counter picking, the system ensures that neither player ends up on a stage that is overly favorable for them for game one; the counter pick system gives a slight advantage to the loser of the first game by letting them pick the stage that gets played on and see the opponent’s character choice, but it also gives the winning player an option to ban a stage that is not favorable to them before the losing player picks a stage. It gives them an opportunity to switch character if the stage selected is not great for their character either rather than being locked into their character like traditional fighting games. For more information on the history of stage striking you can check out this video.

With that out of the way, let’s dive into some tips.

Be Comfortable On Any Stage

The unfortunate truth of competitive Melee’s strike and counter pick system is that you may never get to play on your best stages in a tournament set. The only time you are able to pick a stage unrestricted is in a first to three set, since no stages are banned for games two through five. Let's use Fox vs. Jigglypuff as an example here. If you’re the Puff player, you will likely strike Yoshi’s Island; then the Fox player will strike Fountain of Dreams and Dreamland as these are more favorable for Puff in the match-up, leaving you with Battlefield and Final Destination/Pokemon Stadium (ruleset dependent). If they win game one, they’ll more often than not ban Dreamland, and if you win, you’ll ban Yoshi’s, and they’ll take you to any stage that is not Dreamland.

The answer to this problem is to be comfortable playing on any stage, even the ones that are bad for you. When you play friendlies, just keep all tournament legal stages on and just random between them. You’ll have some rough times, but you’ll put yourself in a position where you won’t be caught with your pants down even if your opponent switches characters to take advantage of your counter pick.

Know What is Best For Your Characters and Your Opponent’s

Here is the bread and butter of striking and counter picking. You have a character with strengths and weaknesses, and you want to play on stages that lean into those strengths while mitigating the disadvantages of your shortcomings. For example, Jigglypuff is a super light character with an incredible horizontal recovery, so you want to try to play on stages that benefit you in that regard, like Dreamland. From the other side of things, if you’re playing against a Jigglypuff, you want to strike away stages like Dreamland and take advantage of her low weight to try and get KOs off the top blast zone.

Another factor to keep in mind is whether or not your opponent plays multiple characters. As I mentioned before, Melee is different from other fighting games as a player doesn’t have their character choice locked in after a win, so It’s not that uncommon for many players to have two to three other characters in their back pocket. At a local level, this is easy to figure out as you will likely be playing against the same people quite regularly, however, at a regional and national level, this gets a little more difficult to figure out. At larger events, the best thing you can do is research players by looking up past tournament performances on smash.gg or, if you’re lucky, finding some VoDs of them on Youtube. If your investigation turns up no results, it’s probably safe to assume that they only play one character, but here are a couple of red flags.

• Fox players typically have a pocket Falco, and vise versa
• If an opponent picks a blatantly terrible stage for the match-up, they may be trying to bait you
  
  

Focus On All Benefits and Don’t Be Afraid To Deny Conventional Wisdom

This is where we get into advanced layers of striking and counter picks and some potential hot takes. Players will look at stage choice in match-ups on a very binary level. My character is better on this stage than your character; therefore your character is worse on this stage, which doesn’t paint the whole picture. You have to look past that base layer of thinking and think about what this stage truly brings to each character.

For those of you that have no idea who I am, I’ll let you know that I main Samus. Once people figure out this information, their first response is to strike Dreamland against me for game one and ban it for games two or three. Conventional wisdom taught them to do this because Samus has a plethora of recovery options and takes years to kill thanks to her weight; what they don’t know is that I despise playing on Dreamland for most of my match-ups. Why? Mainly because I’m looking at other factors and interactions that are more important in the matchup, like how Fox has much more mobility than Samus, and if they want to shoot lasers and run around the whole match, I’m going to have a hard time beating that. I also trust that my recovery and Survival DI is good enough to make me live for a while regardless of stage choice, which makes it more alarming to the same Fox player when I give them the option to go to Yoshi’s Story for game one. Everything they’ve learned from conventional wisdom has taught them that this is a poor choice for me, but unless Fox is killing me off the top on Yoshi’s, I don’t have a lot to fear.

The platform layout gives me more mobility, which lets me keep up with Fox, and the small arena size makes it easier for me to apply pressure. Samus has a lot of KO power that can take advantage of the small blast zones on the sides; I get extra recovery shenanigans thanks to shy guys flying around; the long stage walls allow me to recover from lower. While we’re on the topic of the walls, they also allow me to edge guard from super deep as well. Fox’s upside is terrific in the sense that his up smash and up air will kill me at lower percents on Yoshi’s than any other stage, but Fox isn’t going to have a problem killing me with those moves regardless of stage choice. By giving them the option to take me to Yoshi’s, I can anticipate that their game plan will be more linear and that they’ll be fishing for those moves more often.

A vast amount of information is going to tell you not to do things like this, and that’s okay to follow; it’s conventional wisdom for a reason. My point is that stage selection isn't as binary as people think it is, You have to be willing to look at every detail of not just the match-up, but your own personal preferences and biases as well. I personally hate playing on Dreamland because my poor personal movement automatically puts me at a disadvantage when my character already has trouble reaching the top platform of the stage. I'd rather duke it out on smaller stages that I can move around easier on. I'm sure once you give it some thought you can find a few more overlooked advantages your character has on their "bad stages".

What Next?

This article should be a good starting point for getting you in the ride mindset of how to strike and ban, you can also find a lot of helpful information for character-specific match-ups by searching up character guides on youtube or joining character-specific discords. Keep in mind, the stats and numbers only go so far, get out there and play some sets and develop a feel for what is best for you.