This is the second installment of my gameplan creating series. If you’re interested in part 1 of the series I implore you to check it out! There’s lots of nuggets in there to help mid level players get over that plateau they might be stuck at. Anyway, this installment will focus more on using your strengths to achieve something. Remember: Multiply your strong points, do try to eek out small additions by trying to improve your character’s weakness.

Now that we have established what the character is good at, we want to try to find a scenario where Yang’s pros are effectively used, while mitigating most of his weaknesses. So I stated before that Yang has good normals for punishing attacks and a lot of tools that make his footsies game very effective, including a divekick. If you’ve been playing street fighter, you know that if a charater has strong footsies, they typically want to put their opponent in the corner. Why you ask? Well, midscreen, you are able to walk back and forth, to use your space to play footsies.

Now imagine for a moment that, midmatch, your controller breaks and suddenly you’re not able to move in one direction. You can see how that is a huge burden for you to actually win. That is essentially what being in the corner is like. You can’t move backward anymore, which makes footsies difficult. Now Yang has good footsies, and can punish enemy attacks with his fast, far-reaching normals. We also know that midscreen Yang’s damage output isn’t that good. In order to get more damage, we need to put the opponent in the corner. Suddenly we’re building a strong case for where Yang is at his strongest. The straw that breaks the camels back comes in the form of Yang’s potent mix-up game. Using all of his offensive tools, we can dive kick opponents, command grab them, or just continue to play footsies. I hope that after all of this information we are in some form of agreement regarding Yang’s most effective area of usefulness. We can use the simple diagram below to mark the points where Yang wants his opponent.

So now you’re probably thinking “It’s great that I know where Yang does best, but what good does that do me.” Aaaah. I thought you would never ask. Now that we know where our opponent needs to be [and Yang for that matter], we can start to channel our resources to achieve this goal. This is how any strategy is made, from big business to street fighter, it’s all the same.

So now we should take a look at some of the specifics of how to put an opponent into the red zone, so to speak. We want to figure out the fastest way to do that so we can maximize how much time Yang is in a strong position. We need a way to move the opponent back into our area of effectiveness using Yang’s tools. Again we should go back to our list of strengths. What can Yang do that do well? Remember before I said he has good footsies that allow him to buffer into rekka. Through some quick testing, we can see that Yang’s rekka’s can actually move the opponent back quite far, so this looks like a good place to start. What else allows yang to move the opponent back far. The combos close s.mk, close s.mk, hk rollkick is also really effective at move the opponent toward the corner. So let’s start building a list.

Yang Strategy

1. Put the opponent in the corner
   1. footsies xx rekkas
   2. combos involving close s.mk, close, s.mk, hk rollkick

So now you’re asking, what about spending resources like super meter to put the opponent in the corner. A good example is using fadc to push the opponent back. At first glance, this situation might look difficult, but after some rationalization, it becomes an easy decision to make. Currently our goal is to put the opponent in the corner, where we can maximize our damage using at least 1 meter. Before spending the meter we need to ask ourselves two questions.

1. Does spending the meter put us closer to this goal?
2. After spending meter, do we have any resources left?

If the meter used puts the opponent toward the corner as far as possible AND we still have the minimum resources left over, then we’re still achieving our goal. In simple, if we can answer yes to BOTH of these questions, then I believe it’s worth it to spend the meter.

So let’s assume our plan has worked. We’ve gotten the opponent into the corner using our footsies, and far moving combos options. Great success! You’re in the big time! Movin on up! So then uh……. now what? You can finally go on the offensive! What exactly does that mean? Well I mentioned earlier that Yang doesn’t get good damage midscreen. That means he gets good damage in the corner, but I’ve been neglecting to tell you how. If you’re interested hop into training mode and see what combos you can find in the corner that are practical and give you more damage than any midscreen combo. For the purposes of this guide see what you can find for 1 meter and for 2 meter.

*CHALLENGE*
Find good corner meterless, 1 meter, and 2 meter combos for Yang that do more than midscreen combos.