Though it’s not even been a day since the release of Mai Shiranui in Street Fighter 6, the fighting game community at large is already diving deep into figuring out optimal damage, combos and setups for her, as is commonplace whenever a new fighter drops.
X user Kasai has found a devastating punish from her already which clocks in at a whopping 6,850 damage and also seems confident that this is her max damage possible, which would be a very grand find so quickly after she’s become available.
You can see Kasai’s combo below which, as max punish combos often tend to do, starts off as a heavy punish after blocking a big move, in this case Terry’s Buster Wolf.
SF6 Mai (6850) #SF6_Mai pic.twitter.com/1goMM8yqKO
— Kasai (@Kasai_AU) February 5, 2025
Most likely to the surprise of no one, it’s quite a resource intensive combo where you have to spend all of your Drive Gauge as well as end it with the Critical Art, meaning you have to already be sitting at max resources and low stamina when the situation presents itself.
Not only that, but if you pay attention you’ll see that it’s actually a sequence that incorporates four Overdrive moves, with some room at the start to rebuild the Drive Gauge briefly in order not to end up in Burnout too early, so you ideally need to parry whatever you’re punishing in order to make sure that your Drive Gauge will last to the very end.
Fittingly for the juice required though, the squeeze ends up pushing out almost 70% damage on a character with regular stamina values, so even though it might be a statistical anomaly as far as whether we’ll see it in a real match or not, it’s definitely not a bad one to have in your back pocket if you want to bring maximum efficiency to your game.
In regards to the combo itself and discovering it, Kasai remarks that immense research and theorizing was put in before Mai was even released and states that they managed to find this combo and if it would work, finalizing it a mere 37 minutes after Mai had become available for play.
Before she was even out I had notes upon notes about what max damage might be. So basically… I put in the work and if you see anyone else doing this combo. They got it from me. pic.twitter.com/Ui8pjyI9yD
— Kasai (@Kasai_AU) February 5, 2025
Clearly, a lot was put in to this meticulous digging for Mai’s optimal routes and Kasai seems confident that this is the max damage you’ll be able to get from Mai Shiranui in Street Fighter 6, stating in the post above “I nearly found Terry’s max damage so I wanted to find Mai’s. And I did”, before elaborating the point that because of all the prior research, 37 minutes was all it took to end up with the combo.
Obviously, given all the prior preparation work, much more than 37 minutes was put in to this and Kasai really went out of their way to try and bring out the maximum potential from Mai’s damage. However, as anyone who follows fighting games knows, in a lot of cases something is only optimal or maximum until another person manages to find something even greater.
At the moment, Kasai can stand proud as the one who found Mai’s maximum damage at 6,850, but only time will tell if someone else manages to find an even more gruesome combo down the line.
Source: Event Hubs
