So You've Been Cursed: A guide to not dying

So you’ve been cursed: A guide to not dying

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Preface

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I’ll do my best to organize this guide into chunks, from the basic to advanced concepts. If you’re just interested in common curse mixups and video links demonstrating them on twitter they can be found at the Common Mixups section closer to the bottom.

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The bugs, the cloud, the invis, things to never do

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A bug- 2 can be on screen at once, massive massive blockstun, used to keep you in place while he runs setups

B bug- 1 at a time, multihit, used for lockdown and to cover options

C bug-1 at a time, flashes white on the floor for a few frames before jumping. Guard crush LEARN TO WATCH FOR C BUG you cannot survive arakune by just barrier guarding all the time so you have to notice the C bug set and prepare yourself to block it. Vacuums towards where arakune WAS not IS, useful for setups. Active as fuck.


D bug-1 at a time, long multihit from above then a small delay before 1 more hit (not a low though it used to be) don’t get hit by the 2nd hit when blocking curse at full screen cause he OD’d, it’s surprisingly common even at high levels.

236B-Makes arakune invisible except for a slight silhouette, it has no properties beyond this and lasts till arakune uses a non bug attack (meaning he can use specials this is important for later). Get good at tuning out all the noise and just watching what arakune (invis or not) is doing and watching for C bug, all other bugs are irrelevant towards getting opened up or not.



236D-changes from building curse to a sticky cloud that applies a negative scalar on horizontal movement. What this means is rolls, teleports, backdashes, etc. go nowhere. A super like Ragna’s carnage scissors will only travel ~1.5 character lengths instead of going full screen

With all this in mind WHAT NOT TO DO:
-roll, ever. It is always the wrong choice you’ll be covered by bugs and go nowhere. Maybe if it was a messy confirm into curse and he hasn’t gotten cloud out yet.
-Try to challenge anything. pressing buttons is a surefire way to eat a bug as kune has a million + frames and isn’t actually putting himself at risk 90% of the time anyways.
-Wakeup DP/Super/etc, arakune has a lot of invul specials and more often than not is nowhere near you as you tech, he’s behind your head or just standing away. You will die 100% of the time unless netplay is eating his setups or the player is misinputting.

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The Teleports

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Worthy of their own section so we can go in depth. Arakune has 6 fakeout teleports with varying properties and I’ll list them all here to help understand how they work for mixups.

A quick note, the proximity hitgrab connected to all 214X/j.214X specials is odd in how it’s frame data is seperate from the 214X being used and they run out their total frames simultaneously, making exact frame advantage after blocked ‘negating p’ difficult. In almost any scenario arakune will be safe on block



214X trajectories: http://www.dustloop.com/wiki/images/thumb/f/fa/BBCF_Arakune_GroundTeleports.png/350px-BBCF_Arakune_GroundTeleports.png



j.214X trajectories: http://www.dustloop.com/wiki/images/thumb/6/6f/BBCF_Arakune_AirTeleports.png/350px-BBCF_Arakune_AirTeleports.png

214A - 53 Total, 1-5 Throw inv/24-43 Throw inv, fake jump forward only one with no full invul. IMPORTANT in the corner arakune will be shoved behind you for a handful of frames before the game realizes he shouldn’t be there and immediately shoves him back out in front of you, useful for mixup.


214B - 83 total,  22-70 All inv, fake walk forward. Not useful in curse mixup
214C - 57 Total, 24-38 All inv, fake 6D (bell bug call) teleports behind and above you or mixup



j.214A - 51 Total, 24-38 All inv, fake jump forward again.
j.214B - 57 Total, 16-44 All inv, fake j.D. Not useful in curse mixup.


j.214C - 57 Total, 19-35 All inv, fake j.2B (straight down dive attack) teleports behind and above you, extremely important mixup tool.
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Common Mixups
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Most Arakune mixups revolve around setting C bug during a knockdown and forcing you to guess which side to block said C bug as it has odd interactions bypassing crossup protection essentially. Even though most videos will be on a standing opponent, know the situation will be after hard KD or a 6B groundslide or a 5D wallsplat (i’m lazy) and it functions identically anyways.

NOTE1: in any hard KD situation the C bug can be easily timed to hit before the crossup even occurs meaning you can be, the timing difference here is almost imperceptible.

NOTE 2: all of these clips are in the corner but all mixups works just fine midscreen other than 214A shove-out mixups.



*honoroable mention scrub killer j.2A (it’s literally just j.2A the forward bird dive. Crosses up in the corner even though it doesn’t look like it. Please block this and kill him for it)

214C interchangable for all j.214C stuff

*j.214C > C bug crossup/double crossup  https://twitter.com/Myesyats/status/1102257818076213248

*j.214C >  Heavy Delay C bug > double jump/IAD over https://twitter.com/Myesyats/status/1143606438704472064

*J.214C > C bug > iad j.236C (two crossups)  https://twitter.com/Myesyats/status/1143608013539827713


*any blocked mixup or pressure > ioh j.B https://twitter.com/Myesyats/status/1102262386348691456

*214A > C Bug > 2B crossup/fakecrossup + low https://twitter.com/Myesyats/status/1143609620977479680

*A bug vacuum > Forward dash crossup/fakeout https://twitter.com/Myesyats/status/1143610856560685056

*C bug D bug>CT setup (drains a ton of barrier if you have no meter or OD) this has a dangerous mindgame of you not wanting to hold barrier the whole time and lose more than necessary while the kune player can let CT go early to catch a barrier drop https://twitter.com/Myesyats/status/1143612647549460480

This list is not comprehensive but almost every mixup stems from variations of what has been listed and demonstrated here.

Remember, a kune playing at top form is ultimately forcing you to block true 50/50’s sometimes back to back, even with all this knowledge kune will open you up. Familiarity with what’s happening instead of sitting and freaking out about what’s going on will help you find pattern’s in the arakune player’s mixup and is how a player like Fenrich can block 4 L/R’s in a row.

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Bonus, punishing bad kune’s in curse

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Some scattered thoughts that will help you fighting more novice players, or take advantage of someone getting in their own head and messing up in curse.

-pay attention to D bug being blown early, it has a giant cooldown and if he uses it bad he can leave giant gaps in his “”setups”” and then you just blow him up



-2C, it’s usually bad in curse outside of corner carry in combos. If you block 2C you can OD>EA free if you still have it, or maybe just block and punish because kune is probably mashing at that point and not covering you properly with bugs



-Delay tech, willfully blue beating gives kune nothing unlike a susano’o but kune can adjust bug timings to just get a free reset on you if he knows what’s going on. It’s worth trying once or twice but stop before you just lose.
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Bonus, shit arakune actually has to deal with
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-Azrael growler, it’s not free but he can break a lot of setups and with this and force the kune player to make him respect other options before going back to more traditional mixup

-Yukikaze (and hakumen Drive in general), you wont really catch kune but you’re invul on catching a bug and waste a lot of curse timer



-Magna Tech Wheel from tager, to my knowledge it’s the only wakeup super wide and tall enough to catch kune doing almost any oki that isn’t bugs>backdash. As long as you input the MTW on the right side of course.