JJOCT7 R2M17 Quality

Judge Right Hand Man (Ceep)

I feel that both of these strategies dealt with the guards fairly well. Starting with the Wisps, the overall trajectory of spending a little bit of time early and converting use of both characters to first scale Nojus to the moon and to then use Nojus’ object creation abilities to scale Raspberry to the moon, converting that into wide scale area control that would be impossible for either character individually.

Nojus and Raspberry very much brute force the match once they get going; I feel that once things are really started, it’s very difficult for the guards to stop. The sheer amount of area control was utterly oppressive. That said, while I didn’t have much issue with anything that was here piece by piece, I do feel that it was often unclear the strategic link to a lot of your individual techs. It seemed that you wanted to have an unrelenting rain of nonsense while being able to track individual people by their trails, have several massive options to hit people, hide yourselves, have visibility, obscure your location….

Put simply, I feel like this strategy has a ton of really good tactics, but strategically seems to want to have its cake and eat it too. While it has oppressive ability to keep from being caught for a long while, there are quite a few areas where I feel like the Precision of one or both Stands are stretched. I’m not certain where these sort of sections would lead to the characters actually being caught, but it is a notable mark against an otherwise wonderful strategy. I think I’ll give this a high 6/10; a small bit of tightening up or making the sort of midgame more clear are really the only things holding this back.

As for Gallery, I have very little to say about your strategy. Lucil is used very convincingly to focus on the main points of the objective, while Paranoia’s interference is solid and doesn’t try to overplay itself. I think that the misdirection is very well done, and though there were points I was a bit concerned with treating the stage hazards as more trivial to deal with, overall I think this is a strong showing. I have nothing much to say; 8/10 here.

Judge Reginald Copperbottom (Arch)

We have a stealth match on our hands! Well, on paper anyways. With our players, Paranoia and Lucil Caravan from the Gallery of Wayward Reverie and Nojus Ipolitas and Raspberry Beret of the Willow Wisps, we bend the definition of stealth to “don’t get caught”. A good thing then, given the explosive strategies they’ve come up with.

Starting with the Gallery, Lucil goes into a crate, fishing out a kitchen knife. With this, she’s able to form a network between all crates that contain kitchen knives, thus creating the Kitchenware Network. This serves as a versatile means of getting Lucil around the map with relative ease while avoiding the scrutiny of patrolling guards. While Lucil is going after the contraband information, Paranoia takes a support role, throwing pens around the map to set up a network of her own, this one serving as surveillance. This allows Paranoia to keep an eye on not only patrolling guards, but the Willow Wisps, as well. Armed with this information, as well as a few shadow balls, Paranoia throws her shadows onto the Wisps, knowing that they’ll take effort to dispel all while sticking out to the guards as moving shadows, directing attention to the Wisps. This Reverse Spotlight is a particularly solid move, taking advantage of the heat generated from Paranoia using the shadows, as well as any time the Wisps are taking a breather to generate items and setup.

Beyond the setup, the Gallery employs their various networks to further escape attempts and cause mischief for guard and Wisp, alike. Once they destroy the contraband, it's time for the pair to escape. Since Paranoia doesn’t have the luxury of teleporting away, Lucil causes a distraction by throwing the guard she knocked out in the beginning into the air, using his fall to distract the guards long enough to let the pair get away.

Overall, I’m giving this strategy a 7. There’s solid setup and execution employed all around. If anything, I would’ve preferred if a little time was spent on contingencies for if Lucil were to lose her base item for teleporting, but the strategy ultimately works without it. Well done!

Onto the Willow Wisps, Nojus starts us off by selling their possessions and purchasing a gold necklace. They then hand this to Raspberry to create a rain of necklaces, allowing Nojus to sell those as well. This forms a money glitch, and allows the crew to be especially disruptive. Nojus then purchases a crate filled with Purple Rain smoke, then buys more crates, creating more than enough smoke to fuel their schemes.

They get right into the disruption by creating a Foam Storm, creating an environmental hazard that covers a lot of ground. The foam is used to cover pens, blind (and potentially poison) guards, and even follow footprints to know where their foes have been, while using the storm to cover their own. Combine this storm with Raspberry creating mini explosions throughout, and the guards are surely disoriented. As they use their fog to evade and conquer, they finally come across their contraband, which they devastated with a combined attack.

Overall, I’m going to give this strategy a 7. It starts out slow, with setup taking a minute. But once the storm is up and running, it's nigh impossible to stop, allowing the Wisps to make efficient use of their foamy environment. Well done!

Judge Dmitri Johannes Petrov (Extra)

First off, Nojus and Raspberry. From the outset of R2 Match Select, I could tell these two would be a force to be reckoned with, and you did not disappoint. Putting an item generator and an item replicator together is peak shenaniganry. You deliver by bringing the miracle of Frosty the Snowman to life, coating the ground in mass quantities of fire extinguisher foam and releasing copious amounts of Purple Rain smoke to create a winter wonderland of death and taxes.

The overall gameplan is solid, but there are definitely a few points where I feel like you overextend a little - while you definitely get full points for being flashy, your opener probably takes a little longer than you make it out to be, and a couple parts of the strategy (such as the stun gun tactic) read as a little hand-wavey. It's not so simple to just leave the foam when you're committing a sizable amount of time to covering the arena in the stuff, for example. It also feels very meandering at times, with little actual mention of doing the objectives until the end of strategy - considering the match is a race of sorts, eating time hurts, and picking up the pacing would have done you a lot of favors. On the whole, though, what needs to be there is there, and while there are a couple of flaws, they mostly just boil down to tightening up the strategy and getting a little more nitty-gritty with the details to make it cohesive. **7/10.**

As for Gallery, your strategy is much more blunt - there's not an abundance of flashiness, but you are brutally effective at what you do, and you do it fast. Lucil is now in her second straight "go places and do things" match, and she's just as efficient here as she was there, just with slightly more murder this time. You elect to divide and conquer - a wise choice, given that it lets Paranoia play to her strength of area control and trickery while Lucil gets to fully leverage her mobility. I really don't have much else to say - you did exactly what you needed to do here. **8/10.**