Mik vs Mergly Tad Judgement

####Mik vs Mergly:

###Mik 1:

* TBG's scanners detect enemy VIP across the map.

* TBG has huge stone shredding guns and is accurate enough to shoot small floating targets.

* TBG has fast and agile flight. Can carry his VIP into the air.

* TBG is much stronger than Szeth is durable.

* TBG can weather limb loss, and his giant body is too thick for Szeth to hack through all at once. More durable to piercing than his own bullets are strong.

###Mergly 1:

* WOG, Szeth can use his powers to bend bullets.

* Mik's portrayal of TBG is unrepresentative to how he acts in the show. Small agile enemies close and get several hits in on TBG before he can touch them. Fails to track slowly weaving bug. Guy standing completely still on a platform doesn't get tagged by both TBG and his partner firing at once for a long time. Out of shape general is able to escape from him without his scanners warning until it's too late.

* TBG suit will be torn apart - "The Metal will be vivisected by the honorblade's magic matter severance in a flurry of wrist flicks."

You need to provide feats for this property of the sword within the debate.

* The sword is long enough to bisect a giant with one swing - TBG being huge isn't enough to protect from oneshot.

How big is this giant? Would be nice to get direct size ref to compare with TBG.

* Szeth closes too fast for TBG to track. TBG has no reason to back away from a smaller opponent like him, and tends to prefer melee fights to carpet bombing.

###Mik 2:

* The Sanderson WOG just says lashing could theoretically bend the path of a bullet, not that Szeth specifically as a practitioner of this ability could do so. Even if he could, isn't a strong enough statement to show he could divert a whole spray of machinegun fire away from him---how *much* could he bend the bullets?

* TBG doesn't get pulled apart by the endoskeletons and lands a hit after taking two.

I think the contention is that in those androids' positions, Szeth would fully bisect TBG with the blows he got in instead of just doing surface damage.

* "TBG unloads automatic gunfire on him first" before the endoskeleton closes.

Tempered by the fact the android is seemingly standing still and taking it.

* Aim antifeat has context - TBG was stunting on them by downing trees to land on them, not just missing.

* In mad scientist antifeat, "the opponent is behind cover and returning fire."

I'm not seeing the cover in this scene. He's got the high ground but he's kind of in the open.

* TBG's scanners are fine.

I more or less agree. The imposter is an exact copy built from his schematics, and the general running away is more TBG being distracted by his video call than the scanners being insufficient. The cockpit CRTs seem sufficient for Dwayne to know what's going on around him.

* TBG is too thick for Szeth's sword to cut through all at once---cutting through the giant isn't comparable.

* Any melee hit is too much for Szeth to take.

* The endoskeletons that fight TBG are faster / stronger / more durable than Szeth.

Citation needed on stronger / faster, but without Merg statposting for szeth in his responses I suppose it's difficult to say.

* Map starting distance gives TBG more breathing room than the endoskeleton fights.

* Scanner statposting. Some of these scans are broken.

* Arya loses the initiative battle because she has so much more to adjust to as a character from a low fantasy medieval setting.

* Arya trying to assassinate her opponent exposes her to danger and isolates her.

* Even just the collateral of TBG smashing up buildings could kill Arya by accident from flying debris.

* TBG is piloted by an experienced combat vet with relevant tactical knowledge. He opens with attacks from range and would be smart enough to prioritise the VIP. Closing to melee frequently is contextualised by him being forced to ground.

###Mergly 2:

* Cosmere magic is identical between users. Sanderson's reply is in the context of being asked if bullets having more force is the problem, so if it isn't, then Cosmere people should be able to deflect bullets the way they do arrows.

Aside from wishing there was a citation on cosmere magic being identical and not subject to relative skill & practice, my lingering question would be, what about the bullet's speed?

* Rusty lands the shot in scientist fight, not TBG. The opponent is stationary and not behind cover.

* If TBG can accurately scan through skyscrapers why bother having a flashlight or footprint scanners or a search blimp?

* Endoskeleton fights show TBG gets hit before he can hit back in fights vs small agile opponents.

* Szeth is agile and fast. Consider 1x falling speed?

I'm not sure what the falling speed stuff is about but blitzing two dozen men is a fine showing of combat speed that puts Szeth above the endoskeletons.

* TBG can't survive one hit let alone two. In the endoskeleton's place, Szeth would kill him.

Again, I believe there are scans to back this up, but you haven't posted evidence within this debate for the shardblade being able to cut through huge amounts of metal.

* "Now think of the all the times something reaches him without actually being hit."

I'd like to see linked examples here to really showcase this.

###Mik 3:

* TBG benefits from superior mobility given starting distances.

* Restating scanner advantages - he uses them competently in canon if we consider the number of times he swoops in to save or intercept specific people.

* Team Mergly have nothing comparable to scanners to give them battlefield knowledge.

* Restating - TBG's collateral damage is an imminent threat to Arya. "Radius of lethality."

* Szeth has to execute flawless defense against unfamiliar weapons lethal to him and his VIP. "This is not a boxing match."

* Even if Szeth "can" use an application of his power to deflect bullets, he's not experienced doing so and doesn't know what a bullets is.

* TBG has redundant scanning tools for practical reasons.

* The endoskeletons have demonstrated physical superiorities to Szeth

Maybe in their ability to take a hit from TBG, but nothing shown has put them on his level of speed blitzing 2 dozen men at once.

* TBG can still win fights with missing arms, has a gun in his head, could just disarm Szeth's sword.

* TBG doesn't let enemies get into melee fights without shooting at them.

*

###Result:

I'm honestly blown away by Mergly's instincts as a first time entrant to one of these tournaments.

Doing the research and demonstrating how Big Guy frequently falls short of Mik's ideal fight behaviour was exactly the right call. You had Mik on the back foot, and even where he was able to offer mitigating context, I still felt by the end of the debate that a more agile opponent like Szeth could probably close through his screen of fire given his demonstrated deficiencies tracking, and have their way with him for at least a couple of blows before he was able to respond. Credit to Mik, he did a good job pressing back against some of Mergly's points---Big Guy's sensors evidently have adequate range and precision for scanning the map, Big Guy doesn't just barge into melee without using ranged options.

That being said, Mik is a former champion for a reason, and he persuasively reoriented the debate as a search and destroy mission with TBG vs Arya Stark rather than, as he put it, a "boxing match" between the two bodyguards. Within this context, between scanners, flight, tracking missiles, and a general radius of lethal collateral damage, TBG absolutely has better tools to succeed than Szeth, especially given Arya's characterisation separating from her bodyguard to "slink away to try to play the assassin" rather than staying with Szeth.

One thing I would like to highlight is that while Mergly had good instincts picking apart his opponent's character, he suffered from neglecting to statpost for his own. While Mik broadly did not contest the shardblade's ability to cut TBG outside of TBG weathering sword-length cuts through size alone, Mergly didn't actually link any evidence showing the shardblade's ability to ignore inorganic matter. Mergly also effectively conceded the durability argument by failing to share feats for Szeth's armour, and could have possibly been even more persuasive arguing Szeth's ability to close if he'd linked feats showcasing more of Szeth's agility, flexibility using his powers to compensate against ranged foes, use of skill to overcome reach advantages, etc.

In the hypepost and signups for this tourney, I linked an orientation guide I think is useful for people coming from forum style debates into a tourney like this, and I'd like to quote from it now.

> "Oftentimes for expedience, battle boarders will reference characters and their abilities by reputation rather than posting scans of feats every time. Ex: "Doomsday scales to Superman."

> It may be enough to simply leave it at that in an average forum post, and rely on a consensus zeitgeist of what that implies, but in-tourney, nothing exists until established, cited, and qualified.

> This is to ensure that a judge's particular background with any given media does not unduly influence the outcome of debates---contestants submitting more obscure characters should not have to work harder to convince judges of their abilities compared to popular ones the judges will likely have pre-existing knowledge of."

https://redd.it/1d6428g

In a typical WWW thread featuring Cosmere characters, it'd be appropriate to simply argue taking for granted readers know that a shardblade can cut through any mundane inorganic material. However, in GDT, because judges are meant to take in arguments from the perspective 'blank slates' as much as possible, if you don't cite these taken-for-granteds, they functionally do not exist for the context of the debate. In the past I've personally won a match off the fact my opponent forgot to link any feats for the Marvel supermetal adamantium while I contended they had not demonstrated sufficient evidence their armour resisted my character's attacks.

With that being said, even with Mik conceding Szeth's ability to cut TBG, the only feat presented to showcase his ability to one-tap through the bulk of Dwayne's mech suit is the example of him bisecting a giant: https://pastebin.com/tFF4cbbx

We're told the creature is "enormous" but there's simply not enough context for me to be able to tell how much material is being cut through. I could describe Andre the Giant as "enormous," or I could be describing a Godzilla sized kaiju. I think even splitting a taller than average man head to groin could do decent damage to the suit, but as Mik showed, it's bigger than cars to the point it'd take basically a blind straight thrust to reach the pilot in one go and there's enough room in the cockpit even that could miss..

I think in a slugging match I might be willing to give it to Szeth. However, Arya is simply too vulnerable a loss condition for me to say that more often than not Szeth closes and kills TBG before TBG fatally wounds his VIP.

**Mik wins.**

Excellent showing mergly. I hope you join the discord and stick around for future tourneys because you've got a lot of the right instincts right out the gate. You went up against a GDT veteran on your very first match and put up a great fight.