Or use Marth

Black Mage is one of my two favorite characters to play alongside Ichigo.

What I love about Black Mage is that when you fully charge a smash, it becomes an ultimate. This spruces up the gameplay so much and it makes it so fun to play him. his kit has so much to offer and is honestly a rewarding experience to even play him. It is just pure excellence to find a 1v1v1 match and 1v1v1v1 to play him in. His full-charged smashes unravel the fabric of the match for every side.

Why Marth?

Does he really? BM has good zoning tools, the tools to deal with Marth's recovery, and decent combos, while Marth has trouble edgeguarding.

Basically this. I do find it to be a MU that BM loses, but not by a lot.

Good marth's can edgeguard black mage well

bm can space well but marth can space better, and he gets more reward off of it, and he combos you harder than you can do to him

Max distance Warp can't be punished by Marth without him SDing, and Marth can't space better than Meteor. Not only that, but Marth options to approach are not exactly scary for BM, so even if he combos harder, he won't be getting those combos that often.

Max distance warp doesnt matter much when he can just read your teleport and hit you before you can grab ledge or land

Marth is fast enough to get around meteor with relevant ease

I do agree with you about marth's approach being not the best but ur still gonna take around 30+ every time he hits you in neutral while you would be insane to get the same amount of damage as consistantly as marth can

Uhh...

UThrow>UAir>UAir does 27% at the very least, and it can start some pretty powerful juggles. Then there's also Stop shenanigans.

The Warp thing I don't quite understand, since if he hits you, unless Marth uses DTilt (which is not exactly a scary move) or kills you, he's going to send you upwards, which lead to a lot of mix ups for the BM (Stuffing with meteors, trying to reach the stage, you can even risk Haste shenanigans if he fails to space it's moves). And that's a lot more than what Marth can do if the BM decides to edgeguard him.

Also, Marth is fast while accelerating. If you force him to stop and turn around in the middle of the air, it will take him a while to start moving backwards, and this is a huge thing since this means that Marth has no way to safely use FAirs without getting hit by the meteor, therefore killing it's momentum and combo oportunity. And that's if he touches the Meteor before release. If you add the KB of the meteor while thrown, it will cost him a lot of stage control, and that means that the flow of the match will come back to neutral, exactly what you want as BM.

Yes, Marth will get a lot of combos if he catches you, but that's why the game is to not get caught in one of those. It's easier said that done, hence the reason I find this MU to be like 60-40, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. BM has a lot of tools to deal with Marth's moveset.

As someone who's trying to learn black mage, can I get some basic ideas on what his gameplan is? Here's what i've gotten so far-

Stop- useless except for projectile reflection, or if you can get a charge(best time seems to be after KO or maybe a small one at spawn?). I still need to test what sort of punish you can get off common charge levels.

Haste- combo/punish fodder due to the down time.(i'm surprised at how much worse it is this version).

Meteor- seems better in air than on the ground? Great approach/pressure tool in that case, ok zoning on ground?

Teleport- My main thought's were 1. It's awful for recovering against an opponent, but awesome for getting back after aggressive edge guarding. Kinda screwed if you get knocked off, but can really commit to chasing/gimping if you get them. 2. Maybe some mild gimmicks with grounded tp into haste/followup on platform levels.

A/Ftilt/Dtilt/Utilt- all decent spacing tools with significant knockback.

Dsmash- Almost completely worthless? It seems atrocious in basically every category. Am I missing something? New charged form is meh(better, but still meh), since I feel like you're better off just charging a stop.

Fsmash- Pretty bad. The charge seems predictable and takes forever and the regular has tremendous windup for really eh payoff. I

Usmash- The absolute worst supercharge as far as I can tell(i've never figured out a way to land this besides high stop levels), but the normal smash is actually very very good, and seems like his go to kill move.

Nair- surprising damage potential. Good close quarters option.

Fair- feels worse with the new engine, but still easily one of his best options and main combo tools(I think?).

Bair- Another awesome move. Reminds me of pits bair.

Uair- It does what it needs to, but seems kinda meh.

Dair- Feels a LOT worse. Its more in line with other sweet spot moves where if you miss the sweet spot you get very little, but unlike those moves the payoff isn't instant, or even guaranteed. I also have yet to figure out a way to combo into it at all which really hurts. Thankfully the hitbox is huge, but one of my main strats pre b version was chasing and looking for good dair's to kill, or landing a dair into throw to setup the second spike. Neither seems very good now.

Dash- Seems really really bad(and did it get worse in the new patch?)

Throws- Forward was mostly to setup the second dair hit, down seems good, back feels pretty garbage, up might have combo potential, but i've yet to be able to do much.

Combos- i'm having input issues(can't shorthop easily with my current setup for some reason), so I've yet to really find anything outside of stop and shorthop fairs. I'm guessing theres more?

So yeah that's basically my breakdown as is. I feel really awkward because his air game seems to say "get in there" but almost all of his specials are mid/long range tools, and the awful smashes(besides up) doesn't help. Anyone care to share some basic strategy?