I posted this in another thread about Johnny and I think it's more appropriate here. So here you go =D
Honestly it doesn't matter if Dizzy or Tom Brady or my next door neighbor tested Johnny. It's up to US the players, the Johnny community to help develop his long term strats and tactics. Sure NRS will step in and fix somethings as they see fit based on the community be it hard core competitive, non competitive, or simply just MK enthusiast, feed back is feed back. That aside Johnny does have his fair share of problems in this game as does many others. His inside game just about requires you (the player) to decipher what's right for the given situation at hand. Do you want to corner carry? End your combos in Shadow Kick. Do you want the 3 way mixup (high/low/throw)? End in Nut Punch. Do you want to bait reversal wake ups and punish? Don't end the combo with a special ender and stay next to them. The point I'm making here is that you have options.
Now as for closing the distance, you have little to no choice but to play the footsie game till you can get inside your optimal poking range of F3 and D3/4. It sucks but you have to be patient. Johnny is really strong in the corner as that's where most of your GREAT damage comes from. In mid screen you get GOOD damage that's consistent. You should try to check your opponents with F3, D1, D3, D4, canceled into Force Ball or even EX Force Ball to gain some respect when playing footsies. Its not fool proof that's for sure but you can't start much of anything without that. When they start to respect it then you start mixing in the Run Cancels and Dash Cancels, the most important aspect of A-list. You have to be mindful of your stamina gauge as when you RC from say F3, the gauge isn't consumed has heavily as opposed to using Shadow Kick RC's. You may want to mix in some dash cancels to offset the RC's and make them guess the pressure game from that point. It's not free but the goal is to create a panic scenario for the opponent. You can in THEORY crouch guard him all day in maybe most instances because his low starter game isn't all there. So you HAVE to CONDITION them to crouching if you want that F2,4 to connect, and even then you can keep pressuring them with EX FB if available to gain some frame advantage.
On block yes his punish game could be better but you gain pressure that corner carries which again is another strong point of A-List which is corner carry. If you can execute F3, 4 RC x2 you've pushed them substantially closer to the corner than almost anyone in the game. You also have to consider that the carry is not only on hit but also on block...pretty strong if you ask me. As for the T-Rex arms, yeah I agree on that one in terms of using 1 as a starter. I've defaulted to using 2 as a starter as it's the same speed (9f) with more range. On the note of damage again, there are a ton of posters posting great damage inside the corner so keep that position again in mind. Even his throw sets the enemy up a far which on one end seems bad but when you consider the ground you gain from it, its pretty substantial. To top it off when they get thrown into the corner it automatically will make them think "Oh snap, I'm cornered" right away. But now that you're there you can really put on the pressure and force the mistakes. Most characters (I've fought) can hardly contest F3 when you know how to use this move which will take some matchup exp training to know the instances.
Either way, I could write a dissertation on how I think you should approach A-List but the above should be a great start. He's strong, just hang in there it'll take more time to develop him than say Jin. Just gotta put in the work and don't let a tester not maining him throw off what YOU enjoy.
-Cheers mate-
