Which of those players there are Ike mains though? Yea m2k, lee, doom, and inui are all great players in general (probably elevated somewhat by their character), but that doesn't necessarily mean that its representative of Ike's capacity in the matchup. It would be like if Link decided samus was an advantaged fight with them because Legan was able to beat Ally, DEHF, Reflex, and X playing samus (just an example btw, not that this actually happened). Yea they are great players, and maybe even good with samus, but not really representative of what she can do at the highest levels like they are with their mains. Also mks are not very good with dealing with spam walls in my experience when they have to switch to characters that take skill to get through it, because of how easy it usually is for them to approach (i.e. tornado goes through almost our entire moveset, their aerial approaches, low height, speed, etc...).
If you do write off what san has shown Ike can do though in the matchup I think its only fair that we at least write yourself off too. ADHD could say in the same way that Diddy has an advantage on Mk if it weren't for m2k, etc.... without taking both out of the matchup it tends to skew the matchup because we are pitting an extreme example of our character to a player of theirs that is adjusted for that.
I have seen the videos though (some pretty kwl wins on your part btw), and I really do think you guys are pretty close to even in skill, but I suppose that is hard to prove really :/ How really can you tell if one person is on an equal skill level in general? Its a really subjective definition. I think the reads he did were typical of what you'd expect at that level really, and their were times where you were clearly outpredicting him too in his approaches and offledge game (and you had some really beautiful ledge guards btw as he tried to get back up
). Yea he punished some of your habits/messups well but that really is an area that all Ikes really have to learn to evolve, a lot of their matchup strengths involve taking advantage and doing heavy dmg when the opportunity finally comes up. I understand that like your mk v ganon example it really comes down to what the characters can do to each other, and that's true, but its about the players too because that is what allows us to see the capacity of those characters. Characters rankings do usually come down to what the highest representative of the classes are able to do against others (as you can see from Ikes move this tier list) and I think the matchups should reflect this too, and I don't think we have a lot of data on the matchup yet and I think our perception of the matchup is still evolving. I don't think we should write off those matches as just being San. I really think they need to contribute to our perception of the matchup, or at least motivate us to beat him up next time
with both ike and link and other low tiers you shouldn't be surprised that you beat most of the ones you've faced though beforehand.
When character matchups are at least slightly close disadvantages for the losing character are only really apparent to a high level player against the very top players. On a side note, watching all those vids makes me want to play san now lol it looked so fun, maybe someday he'll come to norcal someday heh
Edited*