Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 – BT|Viscant Breaks Down the Nova/Spencer/Doctor Strange Team

Brokentier’s Jay “Viscant” Snyder recently updated their official blog with another in-depth article on Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. This time, he takes a close look at the Nova/Spencer/Dr. Strange team used by well known Japanese player Nemo. This is a team that Nemo has boasted is the best in the game, able to overcome any others placed beside it. While this statement may seem a bit forward at first glance, IFC Yipes (also of Brokentier) used this team to take first place at Youmacon Battle Opera this past weekend, lending even more credence to Nemo’s words.

To further explore this team, Viscant breaks down both its pros and cons. Among its pros, Jay lists strong team synergy as that leads to good damage, including easy access to Dr. Strange’s Flames of the Faltine loop.

The most obvious benefit to this team structure is easy access to Dr. Strange’s flames of the faltine loop. You can get to FoF off of Nova/Spencer’s crumple at the end of the BnB combo. This combo builds enough meter to always get to level 3 off any common starter (air throw, ground throw, air-to-air hit, bolts starter, low A, etc etc). This makes structuring a match considerably easier. No matter what you touch, no matter how you touch them, if you land the first hit you are going to kill them and you can get Nova back in to reset the match and set up a strong incoming setup.

Among the team’s cons, Jay points out how extremely front loaded the team is.  The team’s options decrease significantly once characters starts getting knocked out.

The biggest negative to this team is that it’s extremely frontloaded. As a 3 character unit it can stand up to almost anything. But as you start losing characters your options start closing up. Spencer/Dr. Strange as a two man unit is a good combination and has some obscene damage but you wouldn’t classify it as better than a lot of other two character shells that are common to the metagame. And finally, Dr. Strange as an anchor is not on the level of other dominant anchors like Vergil, Magneto or Strider and probably isn’t even on the level of the much maligned Doom anchor. He does have a nice matchup against Phoenix for what that’s worth (not much) even though that wasn’t reflected in this weekend’s tournament matches.

Of course, there’s much more to this team than that. To see the rest of Jay’s breakdown of the team, including a detailed analysis of matchups against other teams, check out the entirety of Jay’s blog over at Brokentier.

Image c/o Brokentier