Phosphor

At Full Bloom 2024, sirmeris brought an absolute stunner of a major performance with an excellent 4th place in singles, fueled in part by a dominating 3-1 set over a mang0 back on the grind again. This set was notable for a couple reasons – not least of which is that mang0 beat sirmeris 3-1 earlier in the bracket to send him to losers – but most prominently for a decision made in game 2 of their set. See, mang0 took game 1 on Battlefield in a last stock, last hit situation, which means that sirmeris went into the next game with the ability to pick the stage, and to pick character after mang0 did. Since the set was best-of-5, mang0 wasn't allowed to ban a stage, and as such sirmeris instinctively picked Final Destination. Mang0 upon hearing this, just as quickly switches away from his trusted Fox that took game one. See, FD favors Peach against spacies because she can chaingrab them extremely easily and for a very long time, meaning that, moreso than the vast majority of situations in Melee, one neutral opening often meant death for the spacie player. In fact, mang0's spacies are, across all sets analyzed by the pgstats.com database, 3-15 against Peach on FD. This results in a lifetime winrate of 17%. This is a game where people bitch about 6-4 matchups, and mang0 was staring down the barrel of a matchup south of 8-2, so he switched to a character that didn't get chaingrabbed, because getting chaingrabbed sucks. In fact, while this does not account for stage, a community matchup spread from 2022 puts the Doc-Peach matchup at 4.5-5.5 in Peach's favor. According to the PGStats page for Phorox, a solid upper-mid echelon Doc player, he's got a 20-17 historic record over Peach on FD. While this obviously isn't super solid information, it does say that, at the very least, this matchup probably sucks significantly less than Fox-Peach in the same situation. But when push comes to shove, mang0 didn't have all these fancy stats in his head, he didn't have PGStats on his phone, he didn't get coached by someone, he just knew that spacies didn't have a good time against Peach on FD, and he didn't want to have a bad time. Did it work? Nah, but it might work next time, and it doesn't change that, at least in my opinion, mang0 was right.