i got to play a little bit of shinnok today at my friends house. i have zero experience with MK so im still getting the hang of movement and shit. i messed around mostly with his necromancer variation. ive also had very minimal solo lab time with him, i really just found one combo and then started playing with my friend, but i got a little bit of a feel for how his shit works.
first thing to take note of is that any of the bone sepcials if your opponent sees it they can just run past it. i was mostly using it from full screen and as soon as they got in the range of hell sparks i used that. hell sparks from certain ranges is safe on block but up close the last hit will whiff and you get punished. i also noticed that to a degree shinnok has frame traps of of his EX flick which is +6 on block while the regular one is -3. i dont remember the frame data on the ground hand but i recall it being safe.
as for his normals, i had a hard time finding out which ones are good but i noticed that d1 is 5 frames and d4 is +20something on hit and was safe is block and gives a really low profile hitbox. seems to be your go to poke to get people off of you since on hit the pushback is pretty silly. there is also b1 which is a 6 frame low, however there is no string off of it. you can cancel it right away into a special move, i was doing it with EX ground hand to get a capture state but the damage you get off of it isn't much. his d2 is 6 frames and from what i can tell anti airs pretty well anything directly on top of him. doesnt have much forward range so a lot of times i had to walk forward a little bit to get my AA. he also has f2 which is an 18f mid that lunges quan forward that i have been using as a mid screen whiff punisher. shinnok also has no overhead starters and does not have any lows that go into strings. it should also be noted that he only has like 3 or 4 universal strings. in this variation, he does not have any unique strings.
the combos i were doing were the following
112 EX ground hand nj2 f22 hell sparks (fastest starter, however it is off of a high so it wont punish anything that ends in crouching, dont remember how many frames)
- f22 starter for a long range whiff punisher (18f startup)
- b3 directly into EX hand (low starter, not much damage)
- there was a mid string that started with 3, dont remember the sequence i think it was 314 or something likk that, dont remember exactly.
anti air hellsparks, flick (leaves them full screen, can definitely optimize this when i have a chance)
full screen EX round hand, flick