Pizza’s Judgement of Birbin vs. FJ

Pizza’s Judgement of Birbin vs. FJ

Imagine my horror when I began reading this debate only to realize that Kirbin was making me look at scans of fucking Kimetsu no Yaiba’s art. Imagine my horror to discover that FJ was running a fucking Baki character. In the end, having it on both sides canceled out any bias I could have had against either.

Kirbin’s responses were structured in a way I can respect — feat dumps, but with explanations alongside them to contextualize exactly why they mattered. From the beginning, it was clear that Kokushibo and Saito were completely effective threats on the high end of the tier. Against many other teams, it might not have even been necessary to have a support character for the third — they could overwhelm with their capabilities alone. With Morel’s smoke support added in, Kirbin began with a strong claim for victory and strong tactical options beyond just a feat dump.

FJ’s response style of more paragraph-driven explanations with feats linked where necessary was also effective. Unfortunately, his arguments were held back by not actually arguing that Saito or Kokushibo’s feats weren’t good, instead opting for a failed OoT in the second response. The only character he meaningfully contested was Morel.

Some of those Morel arguments weren’t bad. The smoke is an incredibly effective tool to immobilize, manipulate, and facilitate destruction of his opponents. However, FJ successfully called out Kirbin’s arguments for not really justifying how fast Morel can fill the arena with smoke. Everything was “in a fast timeframe” but not actually quantifiable or contextualized. The only quantifiable example merely showed… a small amount of smoke starting to come out? Nothing for how fast it can fill a large area.

FJ’s arguments, however, lacked a key factor to capitalize on the lack of smoke speed: his characters are slow. You can’t just argue what your opponent does is slow — you need a real argument that you can take advantage of that. Solo can teleport, but Solo was also complete shit, and FJ didn’t actually manage to debunk Morel’s reaction speed well. The others didn’t have the travel speed to blitz Morel.

All the reaction speed feats for Musashi were unimpressive. Riki-oh’s were better, but not that great. FJ’s arguments relied upon Musashi’s striking speed. Were the calcs reasonable? Sure. But striking speed alone does not win a fight.

While Morel isn’t perfectly defendable, the arguments that they could easily take him out were lacking, and nothing changes that Saito and Kokushibo are much, much more all-around effective characters. Only Solo could actually get in close, and Solo is too bad for that to work. The assumption that Morel would be quickly taken out by any of the others relies on Saito and Kokushibo not even being there.

It almost feels like Morel himself was a giant, successful trap argument, focusing toward the idea that the smoke is a necessary part of Kirbin’s win condition. Is it an effective part? Absolutely. But even without it, Kirbin’s characters were simply better. Did FJ get trapped — or was it his own fault for focusing on an OoT claim rather than trying to debunk the feats better?

Oh, and the invisible blade argument was a meme and FJ didn’t actually successfully argue it was long enough range to matter. Though there frankly was potential there.

But yeah Kirbin wins this shit.