Street Fighter 6 is the first mainline entry in the series to feature a ranking system that seasonally resets for those at the top with exclusive levels, which has led to some interesting shifts in characters and players over that time.
As the game enters Phase 3, the great Cat Cammy recently dug through the troves data and put together a couple of match up charts for SF6 focusing on Legend vs. Legend and closely ranked Master sets.
Starting with the Master ranked players, Cat Cammy attempted something a bit different to try and make the numbers more evenly matched with less disparity between player strength.
This chart only uses players with at least 1,700 MR points from matches where their opponent was within 30 MR of their points to keep things close together.
Even with the adjustments, Luke and JP were still rated at the top and given an S tier ranking while Ken had just below a 50% win rate and placed fifth out of the cast.
Interestingly, Luke does not have the best win record overall, however, since he’s only at 50.16% while Marisa has 50.65% like JP, but she’s only in B tier — so why is that?
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Well, Cat Cammy also assigned these tier rankings based on the quality and amount of games making up their total match ups against characters, so Luke has a better time against the stronger / more popular fighters like JP, Dee Jay and Juri.
The third S tier pick that might be a bit surprising here is Rashid, who has a slight edge over JP, Guile, Blanka and others, and that was apparently enough to get him a high spot despite being slightly below 50% total.
Another point of interest is actually Dhalsim, who has some of the best match ups by the numbers with Lily and Zangief giving him a 60%+ win rate, but the fighter himself is down in D tier.
That seems to be due to the low popularity of all of those characters, so there’s fewer games to count on as well as his bad spread against those popular / strong fighters.
#StreetFighter6 #SF6 1700+ MR Matchups table, this time adding a filter to only count games where the players had a difference of 30 or less MR, to try to match the skill levels better. If you appreciate my work, you can follow or buy me a coffee pic.twitter.com/TMmbFH45fl
— Cat Cammy (SF6 Stats and Data) (@CatCammy6) February 3, 2024
A.K.I., for what it’s worth, is rated about the middle of the pack in B tier right under Dee Jay.
Moving on to the Legend vs. Legend match ups from Phase 2, Cat Cammy actually gave Rashid the top spot overall in S tier, and he does indeed have the highest overall win rate in this one with 52.66%.
The first DLC character does have fewer matches than say Luke, Chun-Li and JP, but his match ups themselves are all positive except Luke, A.K.I. and Guile being his only pairings under 50% here.
Dhalsim is around the middle of the pack as far as Legend players go apparently instead of being at the bottom, and Zangief is right there too.
The stretchy yoga master even has the only match up with a 70%+ win rate against poor Lily to boot.
#StreetFighter6 #SF6 Matchups table, based on ranked/custom room matches played between Legend players. Please consider that for some characters like Jamie, the sample of games is very small! If you appreciate my work, you can follow or buy me a coffee pic.twitter.com/eHd92Mc74Q
— Cat Cammy (SF6 Stats and Data) (@CatCammy6) February 1, 2024
Ryu and E. Honda are the ones bringing up the rear in this chart, and they’ve both got some pretty dire match ups like the Shoto losing 65% of the time against Guile.
So there’s some more disparity in terms of the spread across the board for the Legend players compared to the Master ranks, but there’s also fewer games to count on.
As far as Master ranks go, things are still looking pretty darn even for the whole cast, which is nice to see, even if there are some larger holes showing up in among the top 500 players in Legend.
It’s going to be interesting to keep an eye on this and see if things change much for Phase 3 over the next few months, but this is also making us very curious to look into how these match up spreads compare with players who are down in say the Platinum and Gold ranks too.
There’d presumably be some wide differences in the characters being used and who’s winning sets.