R4M7 Quality Delibs

Judge Superman (Snek)

To begin with PINDROP, I thought that this was a solid strategy! Let it be known that I am Steric’s biggest fan, and Jon’s total reluctance to be here was very funny throughout. Truly charming stuff, narrative-wise! Fortunately, your actual strategy plays to your strengths and executes its fundamentals without issue. In terms of those fundamentals, you cover your bases well when it comes to alibi creation, and I especially appreciate the care you take when it comes to learning from Chandi just enough to help her, while also aiding her in turn! Your distribution of alibis and their contribution to each step of the process is all cogent Logistics work.

Additionally, you provide a fun roster of techniques to supplement your central Planning with the alibis and carry you through each step. Steric makes good use of his normal offensive tech for pest removal, with the specific technique to track them back to their colonies being a clever one. I could have used a bit more detail about what makes Grim Reaping work the way it does, though I’ll grant that Steric can achieve it, given his skill. The scarecrow alibi and Jon’s camping trip are both very cute, always allowing both parties some way to help the process. I find this strategy excels at using varying parts of both characters’ kits, making sure no one is left out.

The only real issue I have with this strategy is its Elegance. This isn’t damning, but you have a huge counterplay section that (while robust) is unlikely to get any use, while some of the important steps for the silk-weaving process don’t get that same spotlight. You cover each step well enough, but might have benefit from better prioritization. Ultimately, this is a charming strategy that does what it needs to do. As such, I’m going to give it a low 8!

Now, onto IMPACT! Dear god you guys put a lot of research into this strategy, and it shows! Every aspect that goes into this process is woven (lol) into the strategy, and yet I never felt bogged down in extraneous detail. This was a good read, and it genuinely taught me a lot about silk-making that I didn’t know. But not only did you pay careful attention to every factor involved here, you elevated your strategy with clever use of your Stand powers, all directed around your core Three Es Plan. Where you don’t have quite as many bodies for an assembly line, you take this multifaceted approach that tries to ensure quality product.

There’s a lot of parts from this strategy that I can point out. Dawn’s Bailout is the core of the strategy, simple but effective and true to her character. Then, you’re able to add those moths to the breeding stock, while also gathering all of the cocoons. You also pay attention to little things that others might overlook, but which would be important to silk-workers, such as working around the poisonous plants in ways other workers could not. Dawn is a star here of course, making great Logistical use of her beetles and their flippers, as well as her own special fingers, in every stage of the process. But Konan also gets his time to shine, making constructs out of his plants, but also getting to experiment with things like pesticide and boiling solutions. You really make great use out of the extended timeframe to test out solutions and build on your process all the way through. That is one of the most important things about this strategy: everything connects to each other, uniting each step into an efficient whole. It’s readable, it’s well researched, and it even has simple but solid narrative showing how these characters have grown.

Much like your silk, this strategy’s quality is immaculate. You get a 10.


Judge Thanos (Archerous)

A pair of detectives and some park rangers walk into a silk farm… and completely revolutionize its work flow. Not what one would expect on face value, but we do have some incredibly hard workers putting in the hours at the Akshaya Silk Estate. In one corner we have Jon Kay Gor and Steric Lou Faerin from PINDROP, and in the other, you’ll find Dawn Hu and Konan Gau of IMPACT. Each team set out to make the best of this incredibly stressful workplace, and without going into too many spoilers (they killed it!) But, I’m getting ahead of myself. How did our teams fare?

For PINDROP, the name of the game is ‘numbers’. This is unsurprising, given the main function of Jon’s Stand, but the sheer amount of manpower the team is able to output is nothing to sneeze at, especially when they put said power to use. Jon and Steric have strict positions for their Alibis to fill throughout the match and are careful to not just throw large swathes of bodies at their work. Their work is not only faster, it boasts high quality results as well, given their focus on compounding knowledge early on and taking full advantage of Chandi’s lessons. Using these highly competent bodies, they are able to make light work of both the Cultivation phase and the Weaving phase. For all the reasons aforementioned, I’m giving this strategy an 8! Well done!

Moving on to the park rangers, Dawn and Konan have approached the task of silk farming with a quality I can really only describe with a single word: ‘thorough’. The team must’ve been paying extra attention to Chandi’s lessons, given the sheer amount of knowledge and understanding they present to the craft. What’s more, they expand upon this knowledge to reshape the very ecosystem of the farm, leading to higher quality silk at faster speeds.

What’s impressive is that this all stemmed from the work put in towards the beginning, starting from the introduction of the Bailout method that Dawn coined. This led to not only a more ethical means of silk farming, but also allowed for more moths to be available for breeding. With the foresight to ensure moths with poor qualities were weeded out of the farming system, IMPACT has ensured that they’ll be rearing healthier moths. These moths will rear healthy silkworms, and given the new Bailout cycle, those silkworms will turn into moths, creating a whole new cycle, leaving the very best of their silk as profit. They take on this level of reworking all throughout the match, innovating new ways to make the process more efficient, without sacrificing quality. From Konan developing a “de-gumming” solution to decrease the boiling time for cocoons to Dawn finding new ways to place the moths into trees to maximize protection and food consumption, IMPACT is certainly living up to its name. Thus, for the trouble and the incredible amount of care put into this strategy, I’m giving it a 10! Well done!

Judge Goku (Alphamon)

Here we are, round 4, match 7, where I face the final boss of purposefully screwing up team names in my delibs, two teams with ACRONYMS FOR NAMES! I’m never one to back down from a challenge- twice- so I’ll meet you both on this hill!

Starting with Porpoises In Need (of) Dry Radium Offer Pepperoni, we can see that these city slickers will do everything they can to learn how to do the job, be it from the environment or the overseer, and they’re pretty convincing with it! Between the many lingering Paper Alibis and the veritable crowd of other workers, they’ve got no shortage of opportunities to learn!

And, obviously, learn they do! The strat is practically built on the idea that every moment is used to learn, with each successive part building on the same foundation.

Backing up a bit, even with the constant and consistent learning, the pest counterplay section feels like the least polished- at least, in terms of overall time investment- out of the given sections. You will, ultimately, learn through iteration, that’s the name of the game you’re running, but masters aren’t masters from the first swing… that said, Jon’s incredible range on Paper Alibis and their night cover does a lot to mitigate my feelings here.

I have no qualms with the remaining sections, as Jon learning the loom coheres with the prior approach to the strat and narrative, while the harvesting methods clear similarly. Even in a gentleman’s agreement, having your bases covered is always a useful thought, and the general contingencies could’ve been better served in the related areas, but again, I have no real qualms here.

With all of that tabled, I feel that I can give this strat an 8! Good job to all parties involved.

Meanwhile, over on Ichthyic Moth Preaches Against Cartwheeling Theremins…

I’m going to give you a ten. I hate giving them out, mind, because I feel that giving above a nine is a loss of objectivity, but let me explain why I’m crossing that bridge here.

From the opening foundation, we see what is essentially the opening thesis of a college paper, one on the idea of making the silk production industry much more efficient and ethical through the use of stands.

Every single section seems to follow this trend, as if I’m not only reading a published paper on how silk moths are bred, but on the idea of how the industry can move forward, even if it is with psychic magical powers that most people won’t have access to-

To dial it back, I found myself astounded at almost every turn. Mostly because, at point blank, I was actually sitting down to learn something from a strat! I feel like I now know more than I’ll ever actually need to know about the silk industry!

To move back to the writing, Dawn and Konan use both their stand powers to do things like set up auto-looms, hide moths in places where predators can’t- or won’t try to- reach, open up cocoons without killing the moths or damaging the cocoon, create safe spaces to put the moths, and many, many more robust pieces of tech that essentially align with the idea: We’re here to do the best we can with the tools we have.

The players also take notes on everything they can from everyone they can, using the learning process to quickly acclimate to an otherwise labor-intensive job- not that it isn’t still, mind- and drive through the week, improving the farm’s overall quality of life in the process.

To go back to my gushing, since I feel like I may not have gushed enough, the efficiency of work provided through the strat is built upon to the point that further sections become shorter in the face of the work put in; the sheer amount of streamlining curbs redundancy, making for an absolutely breezy read, despite the subject matter and potential reader interest.

As I said at the top, take my *10*. This is a strat I genuinely believe tourney should read.