I've always been a big fan of Screw, and I'd be lying if I said watching such a good wheel (and Screw is a good wheel – it's heavy, externally distributed, and has big contact points with all of the wheel's weight behind them) being completely eclipsed by the rest of the maximum series wasn't a big contributing factor to my desire for something like Limited.
Screw is a good Attack Metal Wheel that does its best work when it can catch opponents in the dips in its wings, and while it has decent side-on smash, height matchups are quite important to it. The main reason I love Screw is that while its ability to launch opponents using it's strong Upward Smash is nice and consistent, every so often it decides it wants to make a hole in my roof and/or face and launches something skyward with more power than I've ever seen the famed Pegasis muster.
On the whole, I expect it to get a spot on the competitive combos list for Attack, and I would recommend people try it out, as while Gravity may put up better numbers thanks to its Dual Spin, Screw is much more exciting without the risk associated with the similarly appealing Pegasis.
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Important: Clear Wheel Choice
Screw is the source of my neurotic obsession with unobstructive clear wheels. Its slopes are not that far out from the clear wheel and it needs them unobstructed as possible, more than it needs matching weight distributions or anything. Stick to the following recommendations unless you want it to perform poorly:
Pisces: My old favourite and a great choice, though I do worry about the spikes in the centre perhaps making contact with significantly taller opponents instead of the slopes once in a while.
Horogium: Probably not as good as Pisces especially against opponents of closer height, but just about everyone owns one and it does work just fine.
Uranus: Juvenile sniggering aside, Uranus provides fantastic clearance for Screw's slopes and is my personal choice of CW for it.
I don't have every CW, so as a general guide anything that is more raised at the edge and like 3mm in from it compared Horogium (and tbh even horogium itself) will reduce effectiveness. If you think you have a good clear wheel for it, take clear side-on and top down pictures for me and I will try to assess it based on those.
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Track Choice Notes
Given the factors that affect Screw's effectiveness, Track Height is obviously very important. Here are the tracks I tried in pre-testing:
R145 is amazing against 230 but not very good against GB145 and meh against lower opponents so it depends on your meta. Generally the improvement over CH120's 145 height is not enough for me to use it seeing as one of my CH120's stays in place nicely in that mode.
85-W105 work well against GB145 and do okay against LTDC (though "okay" against LTDC is still quite poor), but can't do much to 230. 90 was my favourite of them, also being my go-to track for Screw back in the day.
TH170 doesn't seem to work well against anything.
CH120 works quite nicely against GB145 and 230, and very well against the latter if you have one that will reliably lock in place at 145. It does okay against LTDC, going for anything lower track-wise doesn't seem to make that big a difference to how well it does against them, at least. 120 does seem like the tallest you can go while still hitting GB145 users nicely.
As such today I focussed on CH120. I used RSF on my defensive customs and RSF generally does well against Right Spin, so winrates against CS should be and appear to be higher from informal testing.
TESTS!
Other track tests will be added when completed (likely when I've done some other major wheels in the format and am back home so I can edit this post easily), however the RF I used for these tests is now pretty much dead, and most of my RF's are either very worn or completely mint, and my RSF is getting worn pretty quick too, and I only have one more regular one and one slightly softer one from the Beat Lynx Random Booster that I don't like as much. I might throw up some CS tests if I get time, as Screw does significantly better against it than RSF (perhaps moreso than most other wheels).
As for benchmarks, I'll do some more tests on other wheels tomorrow so you can get an idea, mainly Leone as I intend to make the part thread for that too (it's my other favourite Metal Wheel in the system), and I personally think Leone is much more suitable for benchmarking than Screw is haha.
Obviously, I'd appreciate other people testing and experimenting with it, but there are more interesting and potentially broken things to test at the moment so no rush.
Screw is a good Attack Metal Wheel that does its best work when it can catch opponents in the dips in its wings, and while it has decent side-on smash, height matchups are quite important to it. The main reason I love Screw is that while its ability to launch opponents using it's strong Upward Smash is nice and consistent, every so often it decides it wants to make a hole in my roof and/or face and launches something skyward with more power than I've ever seen the famed Pegasis muster.
On the whole, I expect it to get a spot on the competitive combos list for Attack, and I would recommend people try it out, as while Gravity may put up better numbers thanks to its Dual Spin, Screw is much more exciting without the risk associated with the similarly appealing Pegasis.
-=====================================================-
Important: Clear Wheel Choice
Screw is the source of my neurotic obsession with unobstructive clear wheels. Its slopes are not that far out from the clear wheel and it needs them unobstructed as possible, more than it needs matching weight distributions or anything. Stick to the following recommendations unless you want it to perform poorly:
Pisces: My old favourite and a great choice, though I do worry about the spikes in the centre perhaps making contact with significantly taller opponents instead of the slopes once in a while.
Horogium: Probably not as good as Pisces especially against opponents of closer height, but just about everyone owns one and it does work just fine.
Uranus: Juvenile sniggering aside, Uranus provides fantastic clearance for Screw's slopes and is my personal choice of CW for it.
I don't have every CW, so as a general guide anything that is more raised at the edge and like 3mm in from it compared Horogium (and tbh even horogium itself) will reduce effectiveness. If you think you have a good clear wheel for it, take clear side-on and top down pictures for me and I will try to assess it based on those.
-=====================================================-
Track Choice Notes
Given the factors that affect Screw's effectiveness, Track Height is obviously very important. Here are the tracks I tried in pre-testing:
R145 is amazing against 230 but not very good against GB145 and meh against lower opponents so it depends on your meta. Generally the improvement over CH120's 145 height is not enough for me to use it seeing as one of my CH120's stays in place nicely in that mode.
85-W105 work well against GB145 and do okay against LTDC (though "okay" against LTDC is still quite poor), but can't do much to 230. 90 was my favourite of them, also being my go-to track for Screw back in the day.
TH170 doesn't seem to work well against anything.
CH120 works quite nicely against GB145 and 230, and very well against the latter if you have one that will reliably lock in place at 145. It does okay against LTDC, going for anything lower track-wise doesn't seem to make that big a difference to how well it does against them, at least. 120 does seem like the tallest you can go while still hitting GB145 users nicely.
As such today I focussed on CH120. I used RSF on my defensive customs and RSF generally does well against Right Spin, so winrates against CS should be and appear to be higher from informal testing.
TESTS!
MF-H Screw Uranus CH120RF (Click to View)
Other track tests will be added when completed (likely when I've done some other major wheels in the format and am back home so I can edit this post easily), however the RF I used for these tests is now pretty much dead, and most of my RF's are either very worn or completely mint, and my RSF is getting worn pretty quick too, and I only have one more regular one and one slightly softer one from the Beat Lynx Random Booster that I don't like as much. I might throw up some CS tests if I get time, as Screw does significantly better against it than RSF (perhaps moreso than most other wheels).
As for benchmarks, I'll do some more tests on other wheels tomorrow so you can get an idea, mainly Leone as I intend to make the part thread for that too (it's my other favourite Metal Wheel in the system), and I personally think Leone is much more suitable for benchmarking than Screw is haha.
Obviously, I'd appreciate other people testing and experimenting with it, but there are more interesting and potentially broken things to test at the moment so no rush.