Paul the Octopus
Slow Starter
In my opinion, new reptile does far worse in the zoning war than he used to. Ex pounce could be done on reaction to ice ball or clone throw (not a difficult reaction at all), and led to great damage and knockdown setups/mixups (which were also better due to ex invis flash parrying sub's wake up). I never saw any reptiles play it that way but I think pre patch reptile did fine against grandmaster if he played lame. Reptile definitely won at 2/3 to full screen in my opinion. He could sparingly spit and throw force balls and sub basically could do nothing from that range. The problem was always after sub knocked him down and put him in the corner. One reason for his corner struggles was that ex claw didn't reach vs a bunch of clone cancels.Reptiles say then can compete with GM in the zoning wars after the spit buff. Gotta see how that plays out.
In the current meta, reptile also really struggles to antiair sub zero (no more ex claw).