R1M26 Quality

Judge Rum and Coke (Arch)

Nothing quite like a bar fight, especially when Stands get involved in the mix. The Evergreen’s Disco D. Lune and Deacon Blues find themselves up against Brick Punchwell and Sunset City, who are certainly a Cause for Concern. Both sides are powerhouses in their respective fields, meaning that if this fight is going to be anything, its going to be entertaining! So how do our brawlers do?

Starting with Cause for Concern, Brick starts taking patrons out, while diverting their attention towards him. Sunset uses this opportunity to arm his Free Life units. Their aim is to separate the Evergreens, and they do this by throwing a man between them, Brick dashing right behind him. Once a wedge is formed, Brick focuses on cornering Disco while Sunset keeps Deacon busy. The strategy to rush the opposing team before they can properly scale is a smart move, and they waste no time in driving that wedge between the duo.

One in range, Brick engages in close quarter combat with Disco and King Silence, though he’s not alone. He has a few armed Free Life limbs to back him up. He seeks to use his endurance to outlast the architect, tangoing with King Silence while the limbs keep Disco distracted. Meanwhile, Deacon uses the knives he’s collected from the patrons and flings them at Deacon, bombarding the kid with a flurry of attacks from all sorts of angles. Combine these tactics with the ‘air jail’ technique, and Evergreen is left almost completely defenseless. Almost.

I’m going to give this strategy a 7 out of 10. I think that the pair’s aggressive rush towards Evergreen is an excellent play against their scaling capabilities. And for the most part, it works surprisingly well. However, one point of contention is that there could’ve been more counterplay against the enemy Stands abilities. While one could argue that their rushing doesn’t give them any time to set up, I don’t think that’s entirely true. During their own set up, it would be possible for Deacon and Disco to have a door or two set up, as well as Atomic Dog taking on a couple hits from the brawlers Sunset sent their way. While not a complete bust, I believe there could’ve been further counterplay against potential door techs. Otherwise, this is an incredibly efficient strategy. Well done!

Onto Evergreen, we start by launching Deacon into the crowd of brawlers, trumpet blazing. This allows him to draw some attention towards him (and away from Disco) as he uses their stray punches to charge Atomic Dog. Meanwhile, Disco uses a sliding door dash to maneuver not only herself, but the crowd of fighters as well all around the map. This is a strong first play, establishing some setup for the coming inferno, as well as laying out simple crowd control to manipulate the hordes to their favor.

Deacon then takes the time to absorb the heat coming from all around the bar, be it from the rising temperatures from the fighting, or from the friction of Disco’s door slides, Atomic Dog is able to absorb the heat, allowing Deacon to create the Disco Inferno, creating an aura of localized heat around the Stand, taking out any Free Life hands that get too close, as well as sending blasts to hands farther away. Meanwhile, Disco works to trip Sunset up with her doors, battering him and looking for a moment of weakness, leaving Punchwell to Deacon. Deacon uses kinetic blasts to land hits on him before he can properly react to them, with defensive support from Disco.

Finally, once Sunset trips up, he’s flung towards Atomic Dog, who works to restrain and disable him while applying kinetic energy to his throat. This puts Punchwell in a tricky situation, either option leading to him dealing with Disco’s chessboard of a bar floor. Once she’s battered him with enough doors and brawlers, Deacon goes in for the final blow, dumping all of his kinetic energy into the mountain.

Overall, I’m going to give this strategy a 8 out of 10. Disco and Deacon work very well together, covering each other’s weaknesses. They make great use of their talents, as well, focusing Deacon to take hits and direct attention while Disco operates as support. Though they aren’t nearly as tough as the fighting duo before them, they more than make up for that through sheer battlefield control and careful defensive slides. Well done!

Judge Moscow Mule (Flame)

Bar fight! Starting with Evergreen, they begin with Deacon launched into the center of the brawl via door, before using some…notable trumpet playing to distract the bar brawlers to bait them into charging up [Atomic Dog]’s bulbs, as well as taking from any nearby fights (Technical Understanding). These stored up bulbs are used to counter any attacks that do get past the Stand (Counterplay?).

Disco’s sliding door tech is a fun movement tech (you should have called it DoorDash, smh) as she moves to catapult the patrons into the center of the brawl to put their weapons into the hands of the fighters charging up [AD] (Planning/Logistics) before she joins the fray herself and terraforms the floor into a series of doors to maneuver herself and the brawl using her 4 skill (Tech)

Moving onto the next section, these moving doors are utilised to generate multiple bulbs of thermal energy which are used to turn up the heat (which in turn is used to fuel more bulbs) - this has Counterplay in mind, primarily against Sunset’s Stand hands, with Disco moving so that they will have to contend with the thermal attack to get near her (Logistics). The brawling crowd itself is also used to block off the main opponents, with Deacon surrounded by them and Disco’s area control letting her easily move throughout it and to counter otherwise with barriers of doors.

Sunset is the priority of the duo (Planning) - the crowd is moved (Deacon still the center) so the street fighter is surrounded with the goal of overwhelming him and separating him from his partner. Tougher fighters are shuffled so as to prioritize Sunset - them attacking him might not be a guarantee but they will still have to be dealt with by Sunset somehow. Either way, Disco slides in to engage in guerilla-based combat, aiming to take out his legs and movement (Counterplay) before catching him out and slamming him full force into [AD] to set up their finishers (we’ll get back to this the paragraph after next).

Disco is also accounted for - Disco pushing him away with her door networks while Deacon’s Stand works to negate the energy expelled by him moving, while the duo pepper him with ranged attacks and two barfighters to stall him. If all else fails, the duo have some more Counters - Kinetic energy blasts to the legs and door-based hazards to trip him up before sending him flying away from Sunset.

Finally, onto the climax! [AD] grapples onto Sunset, blocking vision and ability to summon hands on sight, while also using both strength and half the kinetic energy stored to keep him still. With the Stand moving away from Deacon, the duo aim to keep Disco between Brick and his partner with Deacon coming in to assist if he gets past her (Logistics/Planning), with a door quick to slam onto Sun if he tries to escape the grapple (Counterplay). The team plans on RETIRING Sunset through this grapple, while Brick deals with the brawlers being used as projectiles against him and Disco playing hit and run using the remaining crowd and doors as cover. The rest of [AD]’s reserves are also used against Brick to assist in wearing him down, before the duo catch him faltering and send Deacon like a missile to use all the rest of his energy in a final blow. Overall, a very solid strategy! **8**

Moving onto Cause for Concern, their Plan is to end things as quick as possible in order to counteract the scaling capabilities of their enemies while splitting both the attention of their enemies thin in the chaos - and that of their locations as well (Logistics). Sunset immediately starts redirecting patrons towards Evergreen’s starting position while grabbing weapons from any he can, while Brick equips Sun’s knuckle dusters and his Stand’s power to Flavorly (and Narratively) fight through the brawl straight to his main targets. Sunset follows suit by taking pot-shots at anyone approaching him, and looting from those not in the fight or keeping hands lying in wait (a pair hiding and a pair with weapons).

Brick leads their initial engagement with a patron tossed straight towards the enemy Stand users, before dashing between the two to pressure Disco into a corner alongside some armed hands covering the fighter’s dangerous position (Logistics/Competency) while the rest and their user harass Deacon - surrounding him and tossing stolen knives at him to push him away from his teammate. The separated attention is compounded with Sunset able to force the enemy users into the air, requiring their Stands to rescue them and thus redirecting attention away from their teammate or the battlefield: this however I feel may not be that effective in doing so. Their other option if this separation doesn’t work utilises this to distract Disco while Brick tosses Deacon away - the team recognising that [AD] may hit them in such a scenario and hoping to block (a small bit of Counterplay which could have been built up on, but otherwise fine for a backup option) - before he rushes back to Disco while Sunset goes back to focusing on the student. Overall the separation process feels a bit of a happy path: such focus is put on separating attention but none is put on what happens if they manage to get back together, and later parts of the strategy do hold similar problems in separating the User and the Stand (-Logistics/Planning).

Continuing on, with the duo separated the fighters start to brawl: Brick targets Disco’s Stand to remove her easiest defenses against Sunset’s hands, with the two fronts working together to distract from the other as they beat her down. Meanwhile, Sunset and his remaining hands aim to beat up Deacon and Deacon alone, using his Stand to attack from differing angles - either throwing knives or swarming him, while also being used to trip him up. That said, while Sunset aims to attack Deacon past [AD], there is no real explanation on how he himself gets past the Stand: while one can assume it would be because [AD] gets distracted with the flying hands, it is still an assumption and not a statement.
Brick then moves on to beat up the remaining patrons to get more weapons for Sunset, before kicking down Deacon from behind. All hands having stronger weaponry now, they charge their last opponent with a similar strategy to Disco: Brick deals with the Stand while Sunset goes for the User, with Brick specifically only striking if [AD] goes to take out any Hands. Eventually, he stops striking back and waits with 4 of the hands, hoping to further distract Deacon with a vanishing act until Sunset is the Stand’s target - at this point Brick rushes down Deacon to beat him up with a fist rush, ending the fight with an uppercut.

In the end I found this strat to have a strong start (mechanically and Narratively), but with some notable holes in what the strategy focuses on I’m having to give this a **6**.

Judge Vodka Redbull (Extra)

Starting off with Evergreen, this strategy gets an **8.** Well-executed movement and offensive tech combines with a pretty robust leveraging of the stage hazard to make a fast-paced and cohesive strategy that keeps good pressure on the other guys while keeping two powerful scalers pretty safe to scale in peace. If anything I think you overprepared for your opponents, which is unilaterally a good thing in a tournament like this, with plan after plan after plan to stop Brick's rampage. Once you get to the scaling, you definitely make the most out of your time, using the crowd itself as a resource to fill Atomic Dog's energy reserves without incurring serious risk thanks to King Silence's repositioning abilities; by the time you're ready to engage, you're *ready* to engage, and you're convincing that you can get all the time you need to prepare.

Moving on to CFC, the strat is, naturally, much more aggressive; when you have a guy named Brick Punchwell, you're gonna want to make sure he's punching as much as possible. I'll give this one a **6,** though, primarily because of a couple overestimations of how effective Free Life's crowd control is; that E DUR and D POW really does it no favors, and the smallest hand size makes it difficult to attack from different angles because of the pretty short arm length. The other issue is a surprising start-up time for a strat that attempts to quash scalers, with precious time being spent on haggling them with the crowd rather than getting in there and scrapping. I also think there are some elements of underestimating EG's ability to handle the crowd. A good strategy on the whole, but one that could've been tightened up a little more.