Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Spencer vertical grapple setups by CrouchStrong

This is probably of limited interest to anyone who doesn't play Spencer, so fair warning. Don't expect anything super flashy.

I thought I'd compile a series of combos for Spencer ending in a vertical grapple. I see far too many Spencer players using sub-optimal combos so I thought it could be helpful to illustrate a few examples of how to best convert stray hits into a full combo. None of these rely on assists to get to the corner.

Vertical grapples are important for Spencer's combos because they aren't subject to damage scaling, allowing him to inflict about 750k damage on average for no meter if you tack on assists at the end. For each L followup to a vertical grapple, you will inflict 80k damage and put your opponent in a hard knockdown state, permitting you to set up mixups.

Further, vertical grapples and their followups aren't subject to hit stun decay either, so as long as you manage to tack one on at the end of a combo, you can use assists to add more or combo directly into a super.

Lastly, some characters have particular prone animations while being juggled which allow a snap back to be linked after the L followup. A small number can even be hit by an armor piercer which can then be cancelled into a super.