Hey so here's my clueless 2 cents as an useless mk11 player:
Command Grab is insanely annoying and got tons of ragequits because it looks the same as b2 on startup.
However, playing against some good players, they guessed wrong a ton of times, but when they guessed right, capitalized with shitloads of damage.
Then, even if i got them 3 or 4 times with the mixup, I wasn't able to catch up the damage.
It implies you do less mistakes than your opponent, a lot less, if he has big combo punishes and you mess up.
That's why I skipped this for gutted.
Then, the air spikes are a god sent, new player destroyer move. Great damage and converts, and borderline safe on block if you do it so it doesn't whiff.
However, against said good players which never jumped, at ALL, it became a waste of slot and it also removed my chop chop. Against a heavy neutral good player there literally was no way to use it the entire match, except in a corner combo.
However, starter gutted -> f4 chop chop does a shhhhhhittttton of damage, so I ended up skipping spikes completely.
I replaced it at first with blade charge, so I can have a 3/4 screen whiff punish and link after f44 krushing blow.
However, against turtles I just ended up minus in their face and having to guess, If i failed the neutral read.
Again, it noted that I had to mistake less than my opponent, a lot, and against good players it felt lacking.
That's why I tried to put the leg skewer in the last slot.
The b3,b3,b3,b3 stagger in b31 in the safe 50-50 is pretty insane.
Then I found out that even if you have the slots free, you still can't combine all abilities. There are conflicts and gutted conflicts with leg stab even if it would fit. That's pretty nice, you can't have 50-50s and big damage on the same char.
So failing miserably, I tried to use the barrage d3 spam versus other random crap until I found the flag low move.
So I started ending my gutted combos-f4 and f44 krushing blow in flag plant, which left me at the perfect spot to still do the same b31 mixup from above in the low flag or d1 in the low flag which is +6 on block and 21% damage on hit. It took a while to get used to the spacing to get db4 to come out after b31 but once I did it's the best thing ever. In the corner you can still b3 b3 b3 stagger and still be in place to do the low flag once you commit. It looked insanely good and safe and it grew on me a lot.
So I ended up using this as my main variation and loving it ever since.
(saw in old k&m vid said blade charge was just in a punish but doesn't seem to ge the case now
