I shouldn't have written 6-4 and I'm going to edit my list as soon as I finish this post.
I used to think the MU was 6-4 for Astaroth, but I forgot what Sawazuma and Decopon told when talking with me and Rikimaru at WGC: Viola has a 240 combo against Astaroth. This surely change the MU so now I don't know how it is.
Without considering this killer combo, I would say that Astaroth has in his favour the range (zoning her is not a problem imho), the fact that Viola lacks a good whiff punisher, and 66kbe that upclose beats a lot of her moves.
That said, I admit that my knowledge in this MU is old, because the last time I played against Viola was in October.
What do you think about this MU?
Viola has ToD combos against most of the cast but a lot of them are, in my opinion, not very practical in every round of every match against every opponent.
Like you said, I can only speak from my own experiences but she has all types of things that just give Astaroth a bad day. Like you said, most people's approach to Viola is to try to space her out. But the fact is that Viola can at least keep you reacting to what she does from a full screen away with things like WO Orb: B+K, 2B+K, and 6B+K. And, basically, she can harass most of the cast from full screen much more than they can.
In my opinion, getting close to opponent's with Viola isn't the problem (so much as staying close). But, once she is close, Viola can pretty much frametrap Asta to death or make him do things he doesn't necessarily want to do. She can basically make everything that he does a choice between playing defensively, trying to interrupt her, or throwing. And, if he guessing wrong, he gets put into a high-damaging situation + put into her wakeup game. I feel like his only really strong out against Viola is 1B+K, but even that, along with most of his stuff that stops her, can be whiff punished with 44A+BE.
Speaking of 44A BE, it's almost completely spammable against him because of the above reasons (not to mention it completely kills and makes people not want to use 66K BE because it's an easy confirm to beat the armor). Most of Viola's pokes will lose to 66K BE, but almost all of them recover fast enough for her to JG the second hit and launch him for good damage as a punish.
Astaroth can try to keep Viola out but, like I tell most people, Viola doesn't really need to chase any character. With that, most of Astaroth's attacks have stupid long recovery when they whiff (allowing for either 8A+B + oki or 44A BE whiff punish).
This is just my opinion, but, yeah, I also practiced reacting to overuse of 22B (which can also be 44A'd).
