Marth is competent now.
So competent in fact that he's probably towards the best degree of neutral balance one would want in a character.
He beats just about everyone weaker than him, evenish with everyone around him, and loses to just about everyone better than him.
But Marth's results, while starting to look really solid, aren't exactly a far cry from what Ike was doing for a while before, and their mains do not have much in terms of top level player take downs to hype over. The people who've essentially never lost to Marth before in tournament, still don't ever lose to those marth players in tournament.
Ultimately our character being able to use our aerials in a way that is scary (KO power) has allowed us to be able to compete with what set of options our character was given on release - as in, they should've been doing that the entire time.
The only thing that's changed for the better is jab, which is honestly a pretty awesome move and there's more that could come from it.
But we're still cumbersome, we have fantastic footies/pokes (always have), but we still lack the neutral transitions into a real advantageous state in contrast to most other high tiers. We get nearly all of our damage through reads/traps.
Marth's range being increased to me was kind of a bad idea, it's highlighted what we're supposed to do, but it isn't stopping the likes of Sheik, Fox or Sonic shielding and punishing everything we do with impunity - we're just walling out worse characters more effectively. If we were given abilities that would correlate to our weight class now, we'd be pretty stupid and character nullifying.
The more I play Mewtwo the more I feel like that's essentially where an almost-ideal Marth's numbers, design and balance reside. He's lighter than us, more range than us in a lot of good pokes, a lot more damage than us, competitive disjoints,
and obviously the much stronger frame data for advantageous state, plus neutral winning tools with a reflector and a silly strong and safe charge projectile. He's always been a similar design and style to Marth (at least in Melee), but now he's sitting exactly where Marth would like to be. If Marth did not get the range buffs but rather the Mewtwo styled ones, he'd be high/top tier swordie who still has to compete with most character's footsie tools rather than approaching binary interactions like he does now.
Still, can see Marth doing better and better. Mr E and Pugwest are newer players in the grand scheme of things, and we probably haven't pushed the character as far as he could. Here's to hoping.
