staticjack
Noob
Forcing a Reaction
Yet Another Ice Puddle Thread
The bane of Sub-Zero and his Fans…… Ice Puddle is a move that people love to hate. I have been playing around with the Ice Puddle and have found a couple of cool situations that makes this move a little more useful - granted any use is better than none, which is what has happen to it since NRS removed his Ex Reset.“Blown Up” Whiffing an Ice Puddle due to long start up frames, it’s like a greeting card screaming please punish me when you open it. Everyone already knows that on reaction you can jump and do a full punish when Sub-Zero throws out an Ice Puddle. I like so many other Subzero players, we try to condition the player to respect Subzero offense with (B2) cancels to (2, 2) Freeze, cancel to throw, clone, fully charged (B2) and (D4) so on & so on just to sneak a ice puddle in. So here we are…. the other player must respect our Sub-Zeros by now because we have been doing all kinds of fancy cancels with (b2) and dancing around the screen etc….. Well the moment seemed right; we thrown out an Ice Puddle and guess what happens? “Blown the F*** Up on reaction would be correct. Errr F***ing Ice Puddle!
Training in the Lab with Sub-Zero for Final Round- I discovered a couple of things that I thought was a mistake at first. So I set the Training dummy to jump and I worked on imaginary situations in my head. Interestingly enough I found a setup that the player couldn’t jump out of the Ice Puddle on reaction. Wow that’s great an all but what if they do a wakeup attack or tech roll during the same setup? This led to my 2nd discovery; the Ice Puddle does stuff certain wakeup options.
Now we are getting somewhere for sure. Noob Saibot was my first victim….. Shadow upknee, charge and slide all stuffed by Ice Puddle but not the teleport smash. I like the idea of removing some of Noob’s beloved wakeup options and baiting for the teleport smash. In my heads the numbers are starting to shift in Sub-Zeros favor. I reworked my approach to the Noob match up and moved on to the next victim. In my testing Ice Puddle works against a majority of the casts wakeup options but blown up by others. I won’t list all of the whos and whats just yet because discovery is ½ the fun.
But let’s look at Scorpion because his wakeup moves take down and teleport punch both beat the Ice Puddle setup or do they? Forcing a reaction is really what the ice puddle setup is doing. If the player decides to jump or block they are trapped in the puddle reset. Will a scorpion player risk a naked teleport with the potential of a full punish? He might but odds are a skilled scorpion will use the Take down which has the least amount of risk or EX Teleport.
Let’s tackle both options without considering tech roll of the above examples at once. Using the same setup minus the Ice Puddle- instead we (B2) cancel semi dash back to (D3 option select EX-Slide) then if the Ex slide does not come out we held up forward jump punch to (2, 2). IF we guessed right and timed everything right we just beat either both versions of the Take down or started a full punish to an EX teleport on Scorpion. Why would I (B2) cancel off the same Ice Puddle setup........ I will make an example video showing how and why it works at some point maybe but a little secret a (B2 Fully Charged) off of the same setup stuff certain wake up attacks and forces a reaction as well. A mini Vortex inside a Setup etc..
Now people are going to ask/say what about the Tech Roll? That’s a great question but let me answer a question with a question- What about EX-Ice Puddle from the same setup? It gets even more convoluted when thinking of corners and tech rolls Enough talk about this and possible Vortex options at the moment- whats the setup?
End any combo with a proper (D3) to Ice Puddle. The timing is strict but very possible with practice. Make sure to hit the (D3) right before the player hits the ground. When I was learning the timing I would hold down the 3 and negative edge the Ice Puddle motion while letting off of the 3 button. Don’t take my word for it…. Get out there and practice the timing and create your own flow and style with Sub-Zero. I can make a vortex video of Sub-Zero pressure off of the (D3) setup to either Ice puddle or a Full charged (B2) or a canceled (B2) to (2, 2 or 2, 1) or clone or (D4) pressure etc…… but whats fun is that" monkey see monkey do" ?This is not a be all fix all for Sub-Zero with a 100% success rate. There will always be a risk/reward factor to anything not broken but it is another needed option to force a reaction for Sub-Zero. This is just my way of trying to take Sub-Zero to the next stage of development while leveling up a few on the way.
Thanks for your time,
~StaticJack