BT|Viscant’s Mailbag – His UMvC3 Team for Beginners, Zero’s Lack of Championships, Match Structure, and More

Jay “Viscant” Snyder of Brokentier recently wrote up a new installment of his Viscant’s Mailbag series, which focuses on a wide variety of topics thanks to letters sent in by players looking for advice or possibly just wondering what’s up with his Celine Dion obsession. This latest article contains some great tips for a beginner team in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (Magneto-A/Doom-B/Sentinel-A), a discussion on Zero’s lack of tournament wins, and a dissection of match structure.

We’ve included one small excerpt below, but be sure to visit the Brokentier website for the entire article.

David Sheehan asks: For teaching a friend of mine AE, I took the approach with him of “Regardless of what character you like best, I’m teaching you to play Ryu until you’re comfortable with the game, and we can move onto other chars later”, because Ryu is such a good beginner character. Have you got a similar sort of advice to get a non-Marvel player started?

For Marvel my advice is to start with Magneto-A/Doom-B/Sentinel-A. Most people would tell a beginner to start with something different like a Wesker based team where you can learn everything right away and win a little bit while you learn. I don’t agree. I think that as long as the person is committed to learning the game they should bite off as much as they can chew.

With Magneto/Doom/Sentinel you have a team that has 3 strong assists and a team that has both flexibility and rigidity. The team is flexible in that you can play many different styles. You can zone with Magneto and Doom or you can attack hard behind Sentinel assist. You can play a more air based game behind magnetic blasts or photons or you can play a ground based game around EM Disruptors, plasma beams or missiles. You might find you really like Sentinel assist. You might find you don’t need it that much because Doom missiles fits your play style so much better. You might find you really like changing the team order and putting Magneto in the back. Or maybe you’ll like Doom in back. Lots of options here.

But then you look at what the team makes you learn. Missiles and drones are both outstanding assists but you have to be smart about how you protect them. Triangle jumps and square jumps are great opening tools but you’re going to learn real quick how to deal with someone up-backing you or you just aren’t going to win much. Magneto requires work to get his combos down. Doom requires work just to move around the screen. If you’re going to use TAC combos (and you should, all 3 of these characters have great TACs and infinites if you want to go there) you have to learn that also. The rigidity comes in how you have to actually sit down in training mode and work at the game. You’ll see results fast, it’s not like anything here is on Viper levels of difficulty but the team will make you put some hours in on training mode. So really the absolute best part is that the team will teach you how to play Marvel and how to improve your game. The biggest lesson a new Marvel player can learn is that it’s supposed to be hard. The moral of Marvel is that it’s pretty easy to pick up and play but the cutting edge stuff is always much harder than it looks. If you really want to get there you have to put in the time so you might as well start with that mentality.

And a great benefit of the team is that it’s a team you never have to leave. You may find you like something better and want to play other characters and that’s great. But you never really have to leave the team behind.  

Source: Brokentier