Cloud vs Yoshi

-Welcome to pain, population you. This is THE most important part of the match up for yoshi. Failure in neutral for yoshi can result in death or extreme damage in multiple ways. It may not be Clouds best mu, but it is Yoshi's worst.

-You should be looking to parry and punish and box cloud into a corner, and doing this is different on every stage. Egg follow ups are risky as if you miss, you WILL get punished hard for them. Use eggs at a longer distance to break clouds neutral and use that to get in close. D-tilt from cloud can be punished by yoshi down b, jab to up smash doesnt work until late, up tilt into ladder off top works almost at any % and can even connect upwards of 170 when cloud has limit.

- Recover high and avoid touching the ledge if you have to. Ledge roll is not very safe. Many people expect yoshi to drift in and try to use Double jump armor and parry, or just attack. Double jump and fade back/ b-reverse egg lay to the corner of the ledge can be a good mix up.

-You can bait coming back to the stage and ground pounding to the ledge as well, often creates a scenario where the opponent backs off to cover landing allowing you to do standard get up.

-If you haven't used egg throw yet, ledge release into immediate egg throw will get you high enough to get back on the stage. Recovering high, ground pounding to the ledge, than release into egg throw to get back on stage is often the way I use this as after the ground pound the opponent often rushes to the ledge.

-Egg Lay drag off stage is a great way to put cloud off stage and either have cloud burn limit or set up for a simple edge guard. a second egg lay is often death, if cloud has limit he will sink faster allowing for earlier egg lay kills.

-To use Fair to hit cloud out of his Up-b you need to be hitting him from behind or you will get hit out of it. The very ending low part of yoshis fair can hit over cloud's up b, but its very peak range and not very consistent.

-Egg's are pretty good if you dont have a whole lot of time to set up the ledge due to yoshi's fall speed. This in part plays into your mix up from going off stage for the fair, or doing a drop egg into fair combo. Egg's are also the safest way to try and force cloud to drop low to use his limit as he can straight up beat yoshi coming at him from almost any direction.

-The worst thing to deal with for yoshi in this match up. Do not try to land on cloud while in the middle of a juggle combo. You cannot beat him to the ground and he can land and get another up air out before youre out of end lag from air dodging. Use your floatyness to your advantage. B-reverse egg lay and egg throws to mix up where you are coming down. This situation gets monumentally worse when cloud has limit and can pursue yoshi horizontally in the air. up air will straight up destroy eggs without risk, nair will as well.

-The other side of this coin is cloud gets shredded by yoshi's combo's. Watch how the cloud likes to land, most dont mix this area up to much because a lot of the options are safe, and use that to reset juggle combos. You can up air cloud while he is in dair from either side and peak range trade from straight underneath (careful, a misplaced up air could end up as death for yourself off the top from clouds dair). Up-tilt is the most consistent ladder string combo, if you start to early, finish with nair and not a final up air or cloud will beat you to the ground and punish you.

Fair into up air connects almost to 200 %, and gets easier when cloud has limit. This can also form a ladder juggle start up starting about 40-50% without rage, if you have rage can start as early as 20%.

Some important things to learn for yoshi that will help you fight cloud:

1 - Learn how to B-reverse everything except egg roll. Grounded b-reverse down b is the most difficult but there are many things cloud does on shield that are not safe that this can punish and kill.

2 - Jab canceled attacks are very good and the most reliable way in multiple stages of attack. Down smash is frame 7 while down tilt is frame 8. Use down smash to not only build more damage early but to send them farther away. heavies get knocked down pretty hard for a longer % gap and create good scenarios. Against cloud, hitting him off stage at a lower angle will allow to set up edgeguard and burn limit. Jab-upsmash is a great kill, but heavier characters it doesnt work on until late. getting heavies to a ledge and using jab-fsmash will not only kill much sooner than jab upsmash, but heavies cant get away from it.

3 - Fighting a cloud with limit is almost disadvantageous in every scenario and has many ways to kill yoshi early. Focus on your routes to getting cloud to burn it and pressure cloud into a corner when he doesnt have limit.

Final Destination - Not the worst stage, but can be pretty hard to break neutral against cloud.

Battle Field - Many options to land and get out of juggle combos which is the worst thing about the match up. Yoshi also gains a lot of traps that are difficult for cloud to deal with. With most of yoshi's tools leading into ladders or gimps to kill cloud anyway, the ceiling benefits you more than it does cloud. Be sure to do full hop dair to punish cloud on platforms, push cloud to the edge of platforms and fall below and use up air after. cloud and other characters have 3 options due to the low end lag of dair: release shield and get hit, keep shield up and get shield broken, roll. they do not have time to jump and all of clouds out of shield options dont hit low enough or fast enough to hit yoshi. rolling allows yoshi to set up another advantage scenario.

Lylat - Very great yoshi stage in general, slopes help yoshi's egg game and keep cloud from dashing under eggs. the wide stage coupled with low platforms means yoshi has the same benefit as battle field for shield breaks and landing. Due to yoshi recovering high and double jump armor, Yoshi is at low risk of getting stage janked compared to cloud who has a very small area to get around yoshi.

Smashville - great for yoshi to recover, bad for neutral game. cloud can really trap yoshi hard here and the platform can make ledge guarding him hard.

Town and City - The worst stage in the match up. You have the negatives from FD when the platforms leave, cloud gains extra recovery options like Smashville, but cloud also gains an even earlier kill window with just juggles because of the low ceiling. Cloud can also flee and camp the platforms to charge limit as the 3 platform variation forces yoshi to burn double jump to even try to punish him.

Dreamland - Close to Battle field but worse for yoshi. smaller platforms allow cloud to pressure harder, the wind screws with platform pressure for yoshi. If you are picking the stage, always pick battle field over dreamland.

Omega - Lets say you won on battle field last, and they banned lylat. Choose an omega before regular FD. The extreme flat FD are great for yoshi to fight characters who use wall jumps or have trouble snapping to the ledge. Halberd and Lylat are good choices.