One of the most important aspects of a fight is the strategies that fighters actually use in the battle. But unlike stats and abilities, this can be really hard to figure out in a satisfying way, especially if you want to make the strategies feel true to the character. And it gets even harder when you know that one character has a chance to win, but only they act in a very specific or obscure manner. I’ll be laying out the points that Smash Bracket uses to evaluate characters and the strategies that they use.

• Fighters are going to be very experienced with their own powers unless specified otherwise. This means that many things we think of as obscure would be natural to them. In general, even characters who have massive arsenals aren’t going to forget that they have some specific tool and they’ll be familiar with the situations that are best for each of their tools.

• Composite characters are assumed to be as familiar with their composite arsenal as they were with their separate arsenals. Just because they may have never been shown to use all their abilities and items at once doesn’t mean they would be less familiar with how they would interact or which items would be better than others.

• Highly intelligent/experienced characters will likely think of any strategy our research team can think of near instantly. This is also true for characters who are generally portrayed to get most of their strength through strategy. Treating characters this way accounts for experience, higher intelligence, and is the best way to represent these traits.

• Characters will likely start out using any go-to strategies and operate mostly in character, but they aren’t trapped to only be able to use strategies they’ve shown before. They are allowed to think outside the box or “skip” to unusual strategies if their usual stuff doesn’t seem to be working.

• Characters who have some means of gaining extra information (e.g. mind reading, very keen observation, technology that analyzes an opponent, etc.) will likely narrow in on the best strategies they could possibly use extremely quickly, even when these strategies are weird or seem unlikely.

• Unless a weakness is extremely and intentionally difficult to figure out, most characters will eventually be able to figure out what they need to do in order to come out on top. For most situations, we’ll assume that a character is able to figure out the best strategy to use after a minute at most. This will heavily vary from character to character, but using this as a rough guideline helps make sure that most matchups are actually interesting to debate (and is fairly reasonable given how competent we are assuming characters will act).

• The knowledge that characters have of being in the bracket will likely influence starting strategies slightly. What this actually means will vary from character to character, but in general it means that they will usually be treated as fighting in their most “serious” mode.

• Characters are also aware that they can win through means other than killing their opponent. Since winning is their goal, this means that many characters might start out with less common strategies aiming to pacify or incapacitate their opponent if these options are more reliable or more in character for them.