R5M2 Qual Delibs

Judge Ala (Bri)

Starting this off with the harder of the two to judge, I think that both sides put out some phenomenal narrative work and some seriously solid underlying strategies. While neither are completely perfect, they definitely represent how high the standard is for matches when you’re this deep in the tournament. I’m a little surprised at the voting being as one-sided as it is since both sides clearly deserve acclaim-- but ultimately, Pop is a fickle beast, and doesn’t oft reflect the actual state of the match.

Beginning with AE, this is a very good minionmancing strategy that relies deeply on scaling and overwhelming your opponent with sheer numbers. The prime goal of this strategy is stage control, and corralling and distracting your opponent while whittling them down over the course of the match. The overall game plan is simple enough for Izuru; turtle down and avoid direct combat with Wah, and eventually scale and overrun the opposition. This strategy’s greatest strength is in its overwhelmingly great narrative; it really does feel like the crux of Izuru’s character arc coming at a clash of ideals with an old friend, and hits in all of the right ways. In terms of formatting, it does have a couple of readability issues where it’s very dense in certain areas, and could have been trimmed down or parsed out. As far as technical understanding, competency, and elegance goes, I don’t see anything major to complain about either. This really is just a solid baseline for a scaling, defense-oriented strategy.

Overall, there isn’t too much wrong with this strategy beyond two concerns-- first of all, I think you underestimate how small the arena is, and thus overvalue your ability to keep to the shadows away from your opponent. This feeds into the second, which is a lack of a contingency for if your opponent really does manage to put pressure on you. As it is, it feels a little bit happy path-- if you had done a bit more work in covering your bases fully and accounting for being in a disadvantaged state, I could easily see myself giving it a higher score. However, I have to resort to giving it only a high 7/10 as it is.

On the side of COLOSSI, I think there’s an equally great narrative-- both of the players’ I’ll get into more in the Jojolity section, but since it’s a part of Qual regardless I still found it fitting to mention. For starters, I think this strategy is a clear example of learning from your mistakes in the last round-- as far as readability and conciseness went, R4 was definitely not your best work, but this has made leaps and bounds as far as efficiency goes, and it clearly shows marked improvement. As opposed to your more defense-oriented past three rounds, you’ve chosen to utilize the inherent deadliness of your kit to its fullest extent here, and as such, there’s a bunch of creative and coherent tech that was absent from your past strategies. Weaponizing and improving upon your past mobility tech is a sight to behold, and even if I question your survivability skills in a war of attrition as well as your overall positioning, it’s clear that that wasn’t the goal of the strategy, and thus I’ll be weighing it less in my deliberations.

That said, I think this falls into a similar pitfall as AE’s. While you do explicitly plan for a disadvantage state, I also think your strat is a bit too confident in its ability to acquire the bear pelt to hinder Izuru’s scaling and lacks thorough defensive options in case you get swarmed. Aside from these logistical nitpicks, I don’t have much else to say-- I think it’s a very solid 8/10 strategy.

Good work to both teams!

Judge Bukavac (Dice)

Wah:

This was a solid strategy, touching all your bases with a strong opener and covering most major aspects of the match. However there are a few overestimations and holes I would like to cover.

The main one is with the papers. While under Wah’s Stand they can support more weight, their Durability and leverage is questionable. I could also call their Precision and Wah’s accuracy into question here in specific cases such as versus Izuru having his gun out. It is a neat trick that could in theory jam or take out the gun from the match in the best case, but it's hard to call the odds of it working as stated in the given scenarios.

The opener is fairly self explanatory, get down to the first floor with objects as cover and have an opening attack to lockdown Izuru. The opening assault could have gone into more detail, the barrel and broom you picked up don’t seem to be mentioned past the initial maneuvering and are assumed to be destroyed by the end of the opening. That said it was not the main priority of the opener so it’s only a minor gripe. The crux is getting the rug and forcing Izuru’s positioning. There is a slight conflict here though, or an odd side effect of doing both tasks, forcing Izuru away from the magic circle to his left brings him closer to the right where the bear skin rug is and leaves it potentially contested. It may be possible to have it both ways, though it is a bit optimistic and burns through your resources. But suffice to say, the worst case presented is a bit off from the potential worse cases on the table.

Onto the first three mid game subsections we have general movement, general targeting, and general attack patterns. Nothing too impressive in the first two sections, but the effort to explain their thought processes and utility is appreciated. Then we get the stakes in the third section. While this section presents itself as a micro level strategy in some sense, the plays here are still on a more macro scale, aiming towards general goals and generalized fighting tools with implied mixing of different patterns. The drill stakes and saw stakes are all well and good, but are presented ‘raw’ for lack of a better term. We could be here all day if I wanted to get into the myriad of tricks and set-ups, but the strategy is still foundationally solid and its tools well elaborated.

The next three mid game subsections we have the defensive plays, how to manage minions and playing around the stage. Here the bear is the main line of defense against minions and ACT 2 and is likely the best option to have close on hand. Then you have the Stakes and letters to block for you as auxiliary defense/offense. Overall what is presented here is well described and explained for the general cases. Onto playing around the stage itself though, that’s where the generalistic strategy can tend to suffer, worst case is losing track of Izuru entirely. The strategy does aim to finish the match before Izuru can scale or escape and makes attempts to prevent escape, but in the event Izuru does, the room to room play is a bit lacking.

I’m going to give this strategy an **8/10**, for my criticisms of it, the strategy itself is fairly clear in understanding and explaining how they play the match. It has some sore spots that could be potentially exploited, but it tries to prevent them where they can and keeps them in mind. Fundamentally it is a very sound strategy and it is formatted in a way that is easily understood for the most part. It does overestimate and overgeneralize, but it’s nothing too major and each tool’s use cases are explained well enough.

Izuru:

Here we have a very different style of strategy, both in style and gameplan.

To start off the opener we have a moment to moment defensive and offensive plan, using the rug for cover and laying down cover fire to force Wah’s position. Intertwined with that is your setup of skeletons for your minions and their attack patterns.

Then onto the mid game, creating snakes to lie in ambush while trapping and destabilizing the house. Kiting them around and creating openings for yourself and various minions to attack.

Then the late game setting the place ablaze while piling on larger minions.

All of this is a brief mechanical summary, but it’d be pretty unfair for me to summarize it as such without mentioning the narrative flow weaved through it. It is often very difficult to have narrative and mechanics presented at the same time, it can be difficult for readers to parse the relevant information and easy for details to be missed. Here I have to say that while the narrative text was strong, it can run a bit long and make rereading for key text a bit difficult. Part of it may be the shift from the moment to moment opener to the much more generalized midgame. But, while it's a bit difficult to chew through at times, most of the strategy makes sense and is presented well with long prose.

I’m going to give this a **7/10**, as a mechanical strategy it is not too impressive, and the narrative transition between sections and even sometimes paragraphs can be jarring. Still it is a good showing of narrative and strategy, using narrative to focus on the more important beats of the strategy and how things within the strategy work.

Judge Baba Yaga (Cory)

Starting off with Izuru, we've got a really fun narrative (that I'll talk about more in Jojolity) wrapped around a solid mechanical plan. I will echo other judge's concerns on the flavor text being somewhat hard to parse at moments, but I was ultimately able to understand most of what you've got here.

And what a plan it is! This is pretty well-executed minionmancy around the midgame bolstered on both ends by well done kiting and crowd control. I may argue that its a deal easier to dispel shadows than is stated in the strat proper, but I dont think this is anything that scuttles it.

As a sidenote, this is the 2nd of two different R5 strats that have ended with map conflagration; funny how that goes, huh? Overall, this is a good strat only limited by some issues with readability and some tactical overassumptions. A 7!

As for Wah, I've got similar praise for the narrative, and I'll also give praise for how easy of a read this is. Individual plans get their own little micro-sections, something I super appreciate as I read through a longer than average strat, and I enjoy how concise the mechanics therein can be.

But that only goes so far when it comes to what's actually in the formatting here; luckily, that's good too! The general game plan here is a somewhat standard move to prevent scalers from scaling, an innately troubling challenge. You want to get into Izuru's face and prevent him from getting too many minions, and you use every tool in your toolbox to do so. There's a lot to appreciate here in that regard, from well-done repeatable mobi plays to close combat stuff.

If there's any issue with the strat that I'm seeing, it's possibly the lack of a backup plan in the event of being in a disadvantage state; Though, i will admit, I think that much is understandable given how scaling and anti-scaling strategies tend to play with each other. Overall, a good strat, and it nets an 8!