T8 R3M9 Quality Delibs

Judge RocketLlama

A fate match is always an interesting challenge for players because it asks two things of the players: How do you interpret these events faithfully and how do you mitigate their effects? Sometimes that hinges around playing around your opponent. Sometimes that hinges on using the momentum from one event to burst around another. In this match booth players do well enough to above a 7 so instead of wasting time going play by play I want to highlight my favorite of both strategies before settling on some final scores.

Starting with Ian I want to give huge props for the formatting and narrative frame that you take for your strategy. Introducing strategy segments with short segments highlighting the teaching of the treasure and priming the reader for the tech that is to follow makes segments distinct, memorable, flavorful, and sets up the effect of a segment before laying it out priming the reader to understand it and keep not just the tech, but the role it plays in a larger strategy in mind. Priming the reader to understand how micro plays feed into the larger macro of the strat is something that I don't know if we have seen this tournament, but for it to be so seamlessly done without adding character bulk and building out the narrative identity for the strat is truly elegant, creative, and highly impressive.

Past that, I think that your focus on reinterpreting events to the letter of the omen and the mitigating using larger scale positioning and more reactive shielding and movement tech shows a strong core thesis and the detail to back it up. The play surrounding the redirection of the tanker explosion and positioning around the portion of the map going up in flames was incredibly clever and plays well into the spirit of the match! Other curses are dealt with more straightforwardly, with tech surrounding riding the sail down, affecting and predicting the path of and burst dodging the cars, and your management of large stage elements to act as safety against later effects in the match all give the strategy a strong, competent base of tech and a solid sense of momentum into the late game.

The ending is also masterfully presented. Reframing the knockout RETIRE as retiring from a job is super clever and a fun touch at the end with some clever skill usage to boot. There could have been slightly stronger counterplay surrounding Yoshi’s activities during the match but that is a relatively minor complaint in the face of all of the other fantastic decisions y'all made throughout the match. Ultimately I feel that a strong 9/10 feels fair for your efforts here. Other teams would do well to take note of your signposting and organization for their own strategies.

Moving on to Yoshi I similarly have a fair amount to praise! For one I think it is clever how you extend your ability to protect yourself and others using ropes and taking advantage of your stand’s precision. It is a novel application that I don't know if we would see in other maps outside of a few niche 2v2s. That leans into a more general comment where I think that you manage your talismans incredibly efficiently throughout your strategy which leaves you feeling in a safe spot with a fair amount of resources even when things get dicey.

I also appreciate how aware of your limitations you are throughout your strategy. FFrom taking the fall from the sail in a way that respects its danger and sells making it out with a nasty but not debilitating hit to the metering of your action economy to keep you from overextending and losing prep time for future events I think that Yoshi plays a logistically sound game that is honest about how difficult it will be to deal with the matches misfortunes. Past that you stick to bread and butter tech for avoiding hazards and keeping yourself mobile.

With that I really don't have much else to say. There was certainly room for a stronger narrative and counterplay but they are not so absent that I feel your efforts lose out for not having them as present. As is, I feel that a decent 8/10 feels fair for your efforts. While it is nothing transcendent it is a solid effort that got the job done without any notable mistakes, and that is deserving of great scores!

Judge Marioaddict

It seems the whims of fate have brought us together today, and so we shall face the trials they place before us! A series of preordained events have been set in the path of two characters on seemingly opposite ends of the mechanical spectrum, and they’ve been tasked with not only ensuring their own survival, but also saving as many as they can! It’s an interesting two-pronged objective, though given the latter is the Jojolity for this match, I’ll be focusing my Quality delibs on the matter of each player’s own self-preservation efforts. So, how did our players do? Let’s take a look!

Starting with Ian, and I can say right away that I’m very impressed with the logistics and technical understanding on display. Ian’s main plan for survival in this match is to use chunks of petrified, charged, and precisely shaped stones to serve as all manner of cushions and tools. Petrified cloths are used to shield from raining glass and roiling fires, barricades are made to direct traffic, the oil truck is set up to explode in a predictable manner; all ending with Ian standing on a stasis’d boat positioned just high enough to avoid the dangers of the final tidal wave.

I admit I initially was skeptical of the feasibility of some of these feats, but on a re-read of Ian’s sheet… yeah, he can kind of Just Do That, huh? There’s a very impressive amount of attention to detail here; making sure Ian isn’t moving around too much to mitigate the impact of his 1 skill, lots of precise shaping & energy release as per Bohdicitta’s B Precision, clever rules-lawyering of the exact wording of the Fated Events… this is a master class in technicalities, and I’m all here for it! I also enjoyed the narrative beats, and the look into the 9 Treasures on which Ian centers his philosophy - it was a nice bit of introspection to act as a centralizing point! Also, ending with the “counterplay” of convincing Yoshi to “retire” from Dexy’s Midnight Runners is hilarious, I have no notes.

I’ll quickly cover some negatives, since I don’t have all that many and in turn don’t want to linger on them. Firstly, for all your clever tricks, some plays struck me as a bit too ambitious - I don’t particularly buy that the irritable bystander is gonna help you out in exchange for a heavy staff and the promise of a cleansed soul, and I REALLY don’t buy that you’d be able to rip a massive fountain out of the ground, let alone move it to the wall - but ultimately, these are minor moments that don’t have a huge impact on the strategy. Weirdly, if I had to pinpoint any major critiques, it’d actually be with Readability; I don’t normally comment on this, but there were enough instances of confusingly worded sentences or simple grammar mistakes in the strat that I couldn’t help but notice this time around. I think you probably could have used another once over just to make sure everything read clearly.

Still, at the end of the day, this is one of the most solid strategies I’ve read in a while. I’m quite comfortable giving you a high **8** for all your efforts - nicely done!

Onto Yoshi; Yoshi’s aim with this match is largely to leverage the intangibility of Wayfarer to avoid as many hazards as possible as they secure the safety of various NPCs. Admittedly, the plan is a bit basic, with the answer to just about every hazard being “I ghost through it”, but that is what the build is meant to do, so I can’t knock it too harshly for that. And it’s not like it doesn’t work, either - the plan is simple, but passing through things does tend to make obstacles barely more than an inconvenience. The one hiccup here is the fifth event, wherein Yoshi falls from 15m in the air. I don’t buy that the 2.5m tall trees are gonna give Yoshi enough leeway to swing into them like he plans, injured or otherwise - best case, he whips into the tree at a much tighter (and rougher) angle than he plans. Worst case, he slams into the ground before the rope pulls slack.

Beyond that… honestly, there’s not much to say! Most of your efforts go into Jojolity, so I’ll dig into the NPC saving measures there, but for Yoshi’s end of things… yeah, it generally works fine. I did spot a few formatting errors (and your timeline seems to be off by about 30 seconds), but it’s nothing damning.

All in all, it’s nothing especially fancy or outstanding, but if it works, it works. **7**.

Judge Stream

LLC:

Ian’s overall planning throughout the strat was great. I particularly liked the narrative structure drawing on the treasures, and it made for a strategy that flowed very well through each challenge.

The core techniques you utilize take care to address Ian’s weaknesses and give you repeatable methods of protecting yourself and remaining stable throughout the many disasters you confront. The Bronze Bracers are a low cost, easy to pull off resource that greatly boost your survivability.

Each individual disaster you faced was addressed with a great amount of detail, and your execution consistently served to not only address the individual threat on a micro level, but make your surroundings safer and more controlled overall; When faced with certain unavoidable events, you demonstrated an amazing focus on all of the factors you *could* control, and it felt like nothing in that regard was left to chance.

I think the most remarkable part of this strategy is how concise it is compared to its depth. It’s one thing to show the attention to detail you did, but you also did so with an excellent balance of using exactly as much space as you needed to effectively convey your execution of each plan, while still allowing for some great character moments and narrative expression. This strategy is a masterful display of Elegance and Logistics, and while tactically it’s a less bombastic presentation than the kinds that tend to reach the highest ends of scoring, the skill on display here definitely pushes it to a solid 9/10 for me.

DMR:

Starting things off, I enjoyed the structure of your strategy, leaning a bit more into narrative with each section nicely touching on Yoshi’s thought process and giving things a nice pace.

I found your approach to each calamity to be fairly straightforward, but effective all around with minimal slipups. Logistically speaking you did pretty well, managing and implementing your resources well, and making solid assessments of how to effectively protect yourself while maximizing your intended civilian saving. I also appreciated some of the clever usages of your items in tandem with your intangibility, such as using the rope to increase the amount of people you can protect at once while not sacrificing too many of your resources.

I felt like the approaches were fairly straightforward and effective, and the key limiting factors that Yoshi needed to manage, being the limits of his endurance and his resources, were managed effectively. If I were to levy any criticism, I did feel like Readability/Elegance could use a bit of work, as while the strategy does not fail in conveying its intent and I did enjoy the narrative, it was a bit on the denser side and could have done with some improvements on the formatting.

I’m giving this one a 7/10