I want to shed light on a playstyle I've been experimenting with lately. As the title suggests, it relies on Phalanx + Katana with lots of feint. I feel like feint is currently an underrated ability that should be explored more, not just with Phalanx but with all characters. I'm writing this guide as a case study for feint, leaving room for you to explore the possibilities with other characters, attacks, and combos.

With Katana, right click becomes a 'fake move'. Something not commonly known is the fact that feint can be used to cancel active moves. Any move can be canceled before its tracer comes out.

I'll label the two types of feint differently, to avoid confusion.

Type A feint I'll call "Full Feint", the kind where you create a fake move entirely via right click.

Type B feint I'll call "Feint Cancel", the kind where you stop an active real move via right click.

Why is this important? For starters, the two can have different timings.

Full feints take 35% of any attack's locktime.

Feint cancel can stop 10 milliseconds after triggering the button press, though never after tracers appear. The exception to this are air attacks which, according to the current implementation, apply its entire lock duration of the air attack before feint ends. I'll cover below why this is important.

In most circumstances, you'll probably want to perform feint cancel for perfect control. You can almost always cancel feint faster than a full feint, again with exception to air attacks.

With the lack of Block, it's important to note that players MUST be good at breaking distance. I'll talk about this in the Weaknesses section.


Type A, "Full Feint" timing for Heavy Left.

Type B, "Feint Cancel" timing for Heavy Left.

Note the timing differences.

The main goal of feint is to create openings.

This means you need to be actively thinking two or three steps of your opponent at all times. Each feint should actually serve a purpose, and that purpose is, most of the time, to create openings.

The expectation is that you're creating what looks like an opening, then triggering your opponent's reflex to counter your play. You then counter their counter, and via successful parrying this synergize with Katana's 2x damage ability on out-parrying your opponent.

When feinting, your eyes need to be on your opponent. What are they doing in reaction? Are they closing distance? Are they charging? Are they blocking?

This looks really easy on paper, but takes quite some time to perfect. Here are some examples:

The distance you begin your feint from also matters. Obviously, the further away you do it the more telegraphed it is, and less likely your opponent will react. On the other hand, starting feints too close will most likely get you hit by a fast or a stab, since you won't have enough time to cancel out of it.

The secondary goal of feint is the abuse of air cancels, animation movement, to propel yourself in ways normally not possible.

This is extremely fun to do, but also incredibly powerful. For example, Phalanx Full Feint A1 -> Real A1 travels you nearly twice the distance than normal.

We'll see below how to utilize this on Feintlanx.

The Feintlanx has no block, however his greatest strength is mindgames and range.


This is the bread and butter of this style. Heavy side for Phalanx is pretty good for what it is, however it's obnoxiously readable and no good player falls for heavy right.

When paired with feint however, this set becomes mind-game heaven. Heavy left feint cancel into heavy right, or the opposite heavy right feint cancel into heavy left, or hell even heavy left feint cancel into heavy left. The sky is the limit here, with how you want to dupe your opponent into countering.

Sometimes grounded feints are too obvious so consider throwing in air canceled heavy feint to make it look really convincing.



T3 feint cancel also works, although I don't recommend full feint T3 as they don't create particle or sfx and good players will basically never fall for them.

One huge caveat to this: if your move is likely to connect, you have a split second decision to make on whether or not to cancel feint. This is where a good trigger-finger on RMB is useful. Why cancel a move if it was going to hit anyway? Obvious in hind-sight, however this comes with a lot of experience in whether or not your opponent may or may not counter your attempt. This is also why feint cancel is 99% of the time better to use than full feint, and why you should practice it. Full feints will never hit, even if your fancy air-canceled heavy left feint goes through your opponent, it's all just thin air.

This is a useful Feintlanx tool to close gap. It has the bonus of being able to change direction should you need to, via Full Feint A1 -> Air Left/Right landing. Incredibly strong against heavy play. The danger from using this actually comes from overshooting your opponent as A1 has quite some cooldown while your back is totally exposed.

This takes some practice. It propels you forward with fast in the air, then immediately A1. You'll see in the video how deadly this can be.

This combination is really scary, though I have not gotten good enough to use this consistently. Air side is a really good gap closer however the cooldown time for Air side is its greatest weakness. However, you're only using this gap closer to deliver a Heavy, most likely left (since right takes too long).

I recommend air left full feint here because the timing for air right leaves you on the ground for too long.

Another important note is don't try this with feint canceling. The timing doesn't work out and it just leaves you eating the cooldown.

Admittedly I haven't incorporated this into my play completely, and good players might tech out of them anyway, however I'll put this here for others to explore.

There are much more you can do with this! I strongly urge everyone to explore this mechanic and come up with innovative ways to play the game.

Experimental B1 Feint Cancel into Fast 1

Using feint for air control via double air side attacks

When learning how to feint as bait, it's tempting to throw out a fake attack and immediately attempt to blind counter. This is the wrong way. Instead, always leave about half a second of leeway before attempting to reverse counter your opponent. I suspect that both lag, and human psychology is at work with this delayed reaction. This amount of time is definitely reduced, the better your opponent is.

Blind countering after a bait is bad practice anyway, for specifically the feint cancel bait type of play. The blind counter simply rolls a dice for you, and in most likelihood will miss since it's way too early and leave you open for anything your opponent wants to do.

To recap, a good rule of thumb is: the higher level your opponent is, the less you need to delay your bait and switch follow-up. The opposite is also true, the lower level your opponent is, the more leeway you need for them to read into your actions.

It's common wisdom that feints don't work on beginners since they don't read your moves anyway. While this is true to some extent, I've found that using feint as maneuverability still helps a great deal. In any case, the lack of block can be a real pain vs spammy type play (see Weaknesses). These situations will call on your OG basics, spacing, timing, stances. STS. STS!!

Play mind games. Use their expectation for how far they can counter you against them, because you can do some really really weird stuff with feint.

Mind games galore. Surprising amount of mobility. Looks ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cool.


Lack of a defense tech really hurts, and transitioning to this weapon will take you some getting used to. The first 50 duels are painful, especially getting defeated by things you normally shouldn't.

Things to watch out for, and this goes for general Katana play, are Ryoku Fast 123, Phalanx Fast 123, Judge balanced 123, Pure balanced 2 and fast left. Things that close distance and hit you fast are not your friends.

I found myself backing up quite a lot via Shuffle + Back. Getting stuck in that 3 hit loop is not fun.

Learning to deal with this, and prevent it from happening by properly initiating combat and never letting it happen in the first place is most likley the way forward with this style.

Feint has a huge competitive advantage that hasn't been tapped yet. Again, I urge you the reader to explore Feint with other characters. Already, Ryoku Air 1 Feint Cancel to real Air forward/left/right sounds pretty intriguing and worth checking out.