Neutral is when both players can act freely. It's used in contrast to situations where there's a frame advantage or okizeme. It's usually not used in contrast to a health advantage, resource advantage, or positional advantage from the wall.
Neutral most often occurs when both players chose a movement option in a mixup. Since these options are strong, this happens a lot, so being comfortable in neutral is a key skill.
Goal
The goal of neutral is to enforce your mixups and prevent your opponent from doing the same. To do this you have to:
- Interrupt your opponent's attacks with your own.
- Use movement to make your opponent's attacks whiff, then whiff punish them.
- Use movement so your attacks will connect.
Flow
The simplest way of thinking about the flow of neutral is as a rock-paper-scissors between three options:
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Waiting out of the opponent's range, which beats an attack being thrown out.
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Throwing an attack out into empty space (sometimes called okiwaza), which beats running in and doing a mixup.
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Running in and doing a mixup, which beats waiting.
The first step to a robust neutral plan is finding suitable attacks for these options:
- Whiff punisher
- Ideally a fast, long range move with good reward on hit.
- Okiwaza
- Ideally a safe move with good reward on hit or counter hit.
- Mixup
- A combination of a low and a safe-on-block mid, both of which ideally have good reward on hit.
Pokes
Things get more complicated when we start considering pokes. Unlike more high reward options, pokes can be thrown out into empty space without the risk of being whiff punished, which allows them to largely dominate all of the aforementioned options. Waiting around won't punish them, and attacking gets interrupted.
The big weakness of pokes in neutral is that despite being faster than higher reward attacks, they don't always win. It's possible to throw a poke out at an unfortunate timing and have it be interrupted by a slower attack or whiff punished by okiwaza (i.e. not whiff punished on reaction).
As such, even the safest attacks carry an inherent risk in neutral. Although pokes win more often than not, their low reward compared with this inherent risk may not be worth it. The degree to which pokes are dominant largely depends on how well players are able to lock out other options with whiff punishment.
Finding good moves
Although the broad flow of neutral is similar for all characters, a comprehensive plan depends on the exact nature of the attacks each player has available. One way of looking at attacks is the degree to which they are fit for a purpose:
- Poke
- Moves that are difficult to whiff punish.
- Mixup
- Moves that get through the opponent's guard.
- Approach
- Moves that are unlikely to whiff because they have forward movement and/or are done from a dash, run, or other advancing stance.
- Keepout
- Moves with a lot of range and/or high reward when interrupting the opponent's movement and/or attacks.
- Cheese
- Moves that are difficult to deal with properly. Most often this is throwing out random strings to bait the opponent into whiff punishing the first hit, which gets interrupted by the second.
Moves that fit more than one of these are particularly strong. For example:
- Lee's b+4 is a counter hit launcher with a lot of range, making it good for keepout; but it's extremely difficult to whiff punish, making it almost as safe as a poke.
- Generic d+4 is fast, has good tracking, high crushes, and has fast recovery, making it a great poke; but it's also a low, making is useful for mixups; and it has good range, making it good for keepout.
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