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[MetroidPrimeRib]

By a matchup I mean when two skilled people play to the best of their abilities who has the best chance to win. Regular matchups are usually 5-5, 6-4 and sometimes 7-3. 7-3 is a pretty bad matchup, but there are those rare times that go beyond that.

So what are the worst matchups you have ever seen, experienced or had to try and overcome?

As an avid Hearthstone player, I think the worst matchup I have ever seen is a Control Warrior vs a Freeze Mage and it is easily considered to be bar none the most futile matchup in the entire game. At best it has been an 8-2 in CW's favor, but with each new set the matchup has gotten worse to the point where I think it's a legitimate 9-1 or higher for CW. With every new card like Emperor Thaurissan or Forgotten Torch that helps Freeze Mage out, Warriors get a Shieldmaiden or Justicar Trueheart that just makes the matchup even more laughable.

Freeze Mage's gameplan revolves around the card Alexstrasza which can set either players life to 15, half of the maximum. They then burst down the opponent from there. Warriors have the ability to go above that 30 hp using armor, which is like a secondary health pool. Control Warriors take a massive advantage of that by stockpiling armor and pushing a heavy late game by armoring up and then in the late game dropping a monstrously strong card every turn. The problem for a Freeze Mage here is that they will never have the burst damage possible to wear down all that armor. Freeze Mage plays very few minions and none of them are for actually trading (having one minion clash into another) and has a lot of spells that stall or wipe the board. The most powerful cards run in CW are Battlecry, meaning that when played on the field they immediately have an effect. These include the cards that generate a massive amount of armor like Shieldmaiden (+5 armor) or Justicar Trueheart (changes your hero power from 2 armor to 4 armor.) The only way to win as a Freeze Mage is through a combination of godly draws, insane luck, perfect plays and above all a reliance on your opponent being a total idiot. Considering all it takes to win as a Control Warrior in the matchup is to hit the little shield next to the hero portrait and both decks are control which are usually only run by seasoned players due to the amount of expensive cards needed, its suffice to say that that scenario will never happen.

Other matchups I can think of that are terrible, the only one I can think of that is that hopeless are some of Iron Tager's matchups in BlazBlue CT, mainly Carl Clover. vs. Nu-13 is pretty bad too.

 

[antitrop]

Zerg vs anything on Steppes of War, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty.

Many pro players just automatically 6-pooled on it, because the map was so small there was no way to get the Zerg economy going in the way it needed to.

 

[Regulus Tera]

Super Smash Bros. Brawl


Not Meta Knight vs Meta Knight

 

[Linkark07]

Zerg vs anything on Steppes of War, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty.

Many pro players just automatically 6-pooled on it, because the map was so small there was no way to get the Zerg economy going in the way it needed to.

Shouldn't it be ZvZ, regardless of map? Dunno if the meta evolved, but back when I played, it usually was this: roach war, then muta war. Or somebody cheesing with a 6 pool.

 

[pizzacat]

There's some 8-2s in 3rd strike. Makoto v Q, chun li vs everyone in d list. Dud and 12

This is just off the top of my head I remember much more

 

[Icyflamez96]

Sly Cooper vs Radec

Playstation All Stars

 

[Stone Ocean]

Nu vs Tager in Calamity Trigger

I think that was a 8-2 bordering a 9-1 lol. Tager only had to hit you once but boy did he have to work for it.

 

[Majine]

Zerg vs Zerg in SC2.

 

[ChrisD]

Old Awesomenauts patch, Froggy G against Derpl. Froggy has an ability that reflects ALL projectiles. Derpl's main damage was a Nuke, which could only be fired from a stationary siege mode that had a pretty high Cooldown to swap between walking/siege. The Nuke was basically THE reason to even siege up. Well, Froggy says screw you by reflecting the Nuke, making Derpl waste his siege Cooldown and main damage.

What this meant was that Derpl was now stuck in Siege mode, waiting for Froggy to either leave or die to his teammates. As shooting his turret fire or Nuke would put him and his entire team at risk.


Derpl also has traps, which was the only reason the matchup isn't 10/0 and is more 8/2 or 9/1.

 

[Azuran]

Talonflame vs anything that's weak to flying.

 

[@MUWANdo]

Ivan Ooze vs. any other fighting game character

 

[Manbig]

Bison (Dictator) vs Honda in Super Turbo is an absolute nightmare for Bison. No proper reversal outside of super to deal with cr. Jab into Ochio throw, and even when you manage to get him off if you, he has zero issues sitting on his lead. Good luck opening him up without dying.

 

[SalvaPot]

Ditto vs Ditto in Pokemon, the first ditto always wins, no matter what.

 

[Dictator93]

Dawn of War II
Chaos Marines with Chaos Lord against Lictor or Ravenor alpha Tyranid was nigh impossible when I played the game.
-----
CM would only need to - melee attack move the Chaos lord against your nearest brood. This was literally all they had to do to secure their first position and grab tier 2 first.

Then the CM player always brings out the bloodcrusher while the nids have next to no chance of causing vehicle damage any time soon.
To finish it all off the CM player grabs the combi / flamer upgrade, with perhaps armour of the inferno for the CL to make life a living hell for the 'nid player

--------

Any and everything the nid player has cannot deal with the chaos lord. Just getting the chaos lord to retreat invariably costs the 'nid player all his hero health and probably a number of gants/gaunts. This forces the nid player to immediately play high attrition costs with his gants/gaunts constantly just to stay afloat to not become behind in the res / VP control.

Nid player essentially has to micromanage the hero and often borderline let the hero tank / die to just deal with the chaos lord

As soon as tier 2 rolls out the nid player has to give up and at best, play for the late game or hope the chaos player does something silly with his blood crusher.

 

[Toxi]

Ganondorf vs a competent Ice Climbers in Super Smash Bros Brawl is 9-1 or even 10-0 in favor of Ice Climbers. Anything Ganondorf does is going to be grabbed or shielded into a grab, which is an infinite combo into kill. It's literally unwinnable unless the Ice Climbers player makes a mistake.

 

[fhqwhgads]

Street Fighter 4 2012 patch had Blanka vs T Hawk being the only 8-2 matchup in the whole game.

Smash Bros Brawl was pretty horrible for match ups too, considering it has 9-1 matchups for a bunch of bottom tiers vs top tiers

More recently, I'm convinced the worst match up in Smash 4 is Sheik vs Little Mac. Combos that can literally carry Mac off the stage and leave him to die due to his horrible recovery is just the tip of that iceberg.

 

[Rockk]

In Ultra Street Fighter 4 there are some pretty terrible matchups. Gouken vs Hugo and Cody vs Rufus are both 8-2 at least.

 

[Beautiful Ninja]

Hugo vs Fireballs in Ultra SF4. The Gouken matchup in particular is miserable for him thanks to things like MP fireball. The man wants to parry in a world of focus attacks.

But I agree with the OP that Control Warrior vs Freeze Mage is one of the worst matchups in any competitive game ever, especially now with Justicar. I would pretty much refuse to play it if I played Frost Mage, as soon as I found out he's CW it's time to concede and play another game against something else because the only way I'd win is if the person on the other side disconnected or died in his chair mid match from the boredom that is CW vs Frost Mage.

 

[To Far Away Times]

Nu vs Tager in Calamity Trigger

I think that was a 8-2 bordering a 9-1 lol. Tager only had to hit you once but boy did he have to work for it.

I played as Arakune and I think it was somthing similar against Tager.

I played against one of the top ranked Tager's in the world and though he was clearly better at the game, I could beat him with cheese tactics.

 

[MetroidPrimeRib]

Oh yeah I forgot Smash. The low tier vs the high tier in that game is far more a massive gap then nearly any other fighter I can think of, besides maybe like Sean in Third Strike compared to Chun-Li

 

[petghost]

ST has a lot of fucked up matchups, like 8-2's etc. i think james chen argues that honda v cammy is 10-0

 

[fhqwhgads]

Sly Cooper vs Radec

Playstation All Stars

Oh yes, this too. Pretty much everything in Sly's arsenal can shut down Radec's projectiles and it leaves him with only a pitiful amount of moves he can use to attack Sly with, all of them requiring Radec to be up close. Not the best idea for a zoning character.

In general PSASBR was a pretty poorly balanced game.

 

[Metaternal]

Gold Lightan vs Tekkaman Blade in TvC. Blade basically shuts him down with a long-range projectile grab and a rare level 1 super that works on giants. For added futility, add regular Tekkaman as an assist for another long-range projectile grab that leads to combos.

 

[Jelly Rajah]

 

[KidB]

Any team vs M.Sableye+Gothitelle stall

Competitive Pokemon

 

[Vital Tundra]

This. There are bad match ups, but Kirby against anything is a mess, Fox is just overkill on the poor pink guy. Still don't understand why Sakurai made Kirby so bad, it's not hard to notice, that's for sure.

 

[Dahbomb]

Yeah Freeze Mage vs Control Warrior is definitely among the worst match ups I have seen. That shouldn't happen in a game like Hearthstone where you should be able to win with some luck (though I guess that's why the match up is 9-1 and not 10-0). What's also funny is that both of those decks are pretty damn strong, at least tier 2 level so it's not like a low tier vs high tier situation.


In Divekick on release, Shoales with the Red gem vs Jefailey was a 9-1 to 10-0 match up. It was patched to be better since then but it's still a bad match up.

 

[SixMachine]

I remember hearing from JChen that it might have been the original SF2 or maybe it might be Super where it was literally a 10-0 for Zangief vs. Honda. Something about how at the start of the round, Gief can spd Honda at the start, then do a jump in tick throw setup over and over, beating all of honda's options.

Also Magneto vs. solo Haggar is pretty much over. He just gets trolled by repulsion all day.

 

[Sixfortyfive]

As far as fighting games go, no other character I've come across is as busted as Kenpachi is in this game:

In the original JP release, he had:

- a teleport that (1) instantly put himself next to the opponent, (2) had no start-up, (3) had no recovery, (4) was fully invincible while active, (5) used no meter, (6) could be used by mashing a single button on the touch-screen, which meant that it was easy to keep up indefinitely without leaving any window for a counterattack, and (7) could break out of throw attempts (throws were the fastest moves and the only thing you could reasonably expect to catch him), putting the opponent in a throw-break animation that was easily punishable; it was an unbeatable tactic, whether he was using it to either find an opening to hit you or to effectively run away from you for the entire round.

- a meterless special move that could extend the range on his normal attacks to fill literally the entire screen, out-ranging all other characters

- a super move (that could be mashed in succession and stacked repeatedly for a short period of time due to the power-up system) that allowed him to chain normal attacks in any order for extremely flexible combos, an effect that could last for the entire match due to said infinite meter power-up

He literally could not lose unless the player messed up. "Matchups" didn't matter. He's a half-baked MUGEN character in an otherwise solid game, and he was heavily toned down in all other versions of the game.

 

[Stone Ocean]

I played as Arakune and I think it was somthing similar against Tager.

I played against one of the top ranked Tager's in the world and though he was clearly better at the game, I could beat him with cheese tactics.

Tager vs the top 3 - Rachel Arakune and Nu - was simply hell. Arakune and Rachel were probably straight up 9-1s lol vs Nu he still had some openings but Arakune and Rachel had so much vertical shit everywhere he couldn't even move.

That said, fighting a good Tager that could make me sweat as Nu was one of the best experiences I ever had in a fighting game.

 

[Phediuk]

Ivan Ooze vs. any other fighting game character

And we're done here.

 

[SatoAilDarko]

As far as fighting games go, no other character I've come across is as busted as Kenpachi is in this game:

In the original JP release, he had:

- a teleport that (1) instantly put himself next to the opponent, (2) had no start-up, (3) had no recovery, (4) was fully invincible while active, (5) used no meter, (6) could be used by mashing a single button on the touch-screen, which meant that it was easy to keep up indefinitely without leaving any window for a counterattack, and (7) could break out of throw attempts (throws were the fastest moves and the only thing you could reasonably expect to catch him), putting the opponent in a throw-break animation that was easily punishable; it was an unbeatable tactic, whether he was using it to either find an opening to hit you or to effectively run away from you for the entire round.

- a meterless special move that could extend the range on his normal attacks to fill literally the entire screen, out-ranging all other characters

- a super move (that could be mashed in succession and stacked repeatedly for a short period of time due to the power-up system) that allowed him to chain normal attacks in any order for extremely flexible combos, an effect that could last for the entire match due to said infinite meter power-up

He literally could not lose unless the player messed up. "Matchups" didn't matter. He's a half-baked MUGEN character in an otherwise solid game, and he was heavily toned down in all other versions of the game.

I think Dark Souls (the 2nd one) has the most complete joke characters I've seen in any fighting game.

 

[Renekton]

Warlock vs Mage in late vanilla and TBC.

DK vs anyone in WotLK.

 

[DoublePayje]

Warlock vs Mage in late vanilla and TBC.

DK vs anyone in WotLK.

RMP against anything in 3p Arena. This combo destroyed everything for several years and almost all top-level-teams played it for gladiator ranking.

 

[JediLink]

I don't think Fox Kirby is even the worst matchup in Melee. That would go to Sheik Bowser (in NTSC anyway). At the very least Kirby has some tools that could catch an unprepared Fox off guard (although obviously a really good Fox would easily have the upper hand). Bowser kind of just can't do shit.

EDIT: Ivan Ooze is 10-0 against every other character in the game.

 

[TacosNSalsa]

Blanka vs T.Hawk (Blanka'sfavor) was pretty damn fucking horrifingly rough in Super Street Fighter 4.Some said it was about 9-1 ..now in Uttra it's only just fucking rough... Dictator (M.Bison) vs. Guile (Guile's favor) is still a test of testicular fortitude ..both of these match ups you gotta get very creative to win against a competent player ...