A-TIER
- 65-35
Tails may not be the most common character, but he packs quite a punch when the player uses all of Tails’ attacks correctly. If Tails has proper spacing and timing, his powerful and high priority moves will most certainly make of a challenge for Lloyd. He can take advantage of your recovery and drop you offstage, down below, with U-Throw fastfalls (which aren’t too hard to do and setup). If Tails stays in the air most of the match, Lloyd will have struggle to start up combos with the use of Demon Fangs and Grave Blades, and will have to rely on SH uairs or SH fairs. Tails can run circles around Lloyd after baiting him into the air. He can combo him back and forth and Lloyd won’t have much say after he’s put in the air (or lost his jump) Tails has decent range and decent kill power on his attacks, so he can kill Lloyd at early %’s on top of all of this. Tails 4 jumps are (fortunately for Lloyd) short, so Lloyd, if persistent, can edgeguard Tails relatively easy in comparison to Tails edgeguarding Lloyd. Tails struggles edgeguarding Lloyd, because his main edgeguarding tools, bair and fair, all have to be perfectly spaced and timed to hit through Tiger Blade. Despite this, Tails’ dair is extremely useful and easy to hit vs Lloyd’s Tiger Blade. An easier option is the high priority cannon-ball. This sends Lloyd up, straight into anyone of your 3 edgeguarding options, Bair, Fair and Dair.
The only good part about this matchup as Lloyd is your range. Lloyd will have to predict everything Tails will do, and that will prove hard as Tails can Tailsdash across the stage at anytime, stop the charging of a Tailsdash with an early jump, cancel the slide of the Tailsdash with a walk. He can keep Lloyd guessing half the time and usually it’s a good situation for Tails. Lloyd will have to be patient and precise with his attacks as running straight into Tails’ spindash will usually cost a stock, vs Lloyd anyways. Lloyd has to keep himself on the ground and stay as mobile as you can.

Lloyd will lose to Tails’ moves most of the time if he chooses to challenge it head-on so Lloyd is forced to play defensive. Keep enough distance, space with fairs and correctly DI and SDI out of his combo moves, which lead to big punishes and usually (vs Lloyd) the stock. Capitalize on your punishes as well as you can. But, lucky for Lloyd, most Tails players (including me) have predictable patterns. If Lloyd can find a rhythm (hahahaha) for their attacks, Lloyd can time his dash dances and punish, usually with a fair or dash attack.

Tails lacks reliable combo breakers, combined with him being lightweight and a fast faller, makes comboing him (as Lloyd anyways) extremely easy.

Yo fellas just found out another cool trick/tech with Lloyd. (ty devdraco for verification)
So when you down b, there's about 2-3 frames before you can move again. In a high pressure situation, that's quite a bit of downtime that you don't want.
So what you wanna do in this clutch situation, is press down b and immediately hold down shield. This cuts off those last few end frames and goes right into your shield.
On top of this, starting up and leaving your shield is pretty much no frames at all, so from here, you can cut straight into movement again.
Now try this: Down B > Up B. You'll notice a short space of down time. Now do this: Down B > Shield > OOS Up B. This cuts the end frames of the Down B and the start up frames of the Up B.
It'll take some practice to get used to in real matches, and I literally have just discovered it a few minutes prior to posting this, but hopefully you guys can try it out offline and in your online matches and give some feedback on what you think of this.

Have fun gaiz