R2E1 Quality

Judge Kyoshi (Logic)

Exhibition matches exist to give retired players who have remained engaged the opportunity to show their stuff, and so we start with two kits and players who have grown greatly over the course of T6 and who I was sad to see eliminated from the tourney.

But what a matchup remains! Saisei has been in my “ones to watch” for having the highest max damage output and having the highest effective range, but needing very particular setup for it to go off, making him a mage par excellence. Winona is one tough nut to crack, with mobility, defense, and healing, but needing to manage her resources and range to pull it off. With both sides having capable terraforming and a flat map to themselves, both sides get to “go crazy (aaa), go stupid (aaa),” so let’s get into it!

COL:

Demon King Daichi starts off taking advantage of his high range and precision to get some strong set up off: dust clouds, mountains, and mortars. It’s a strong establishment of offense and defense, but I have a few Logistical/Technical comments. First is the text that “AFRICA can only affect 5 surfaces at once;” surfaces can then have multiple plates which can be moved according to B PRE and 3 Seismology. Saisei can then churn the surface into multiple smaller ones for finer control, as seen in his R1 appearance.

A charge of overextension can be made towards how many plates are thus available for use at the start, which I don’t fully agree with, but given many techniques require the movement of two plates, some general mapping and signposting of how many plates are used for what can help establish a priority structure to get everything setup and explain some of the techniques. (An even more minor point following this is that I didn’t quite follow how the mortar worked from “letting [AFRICA] overtake [the equipment]”, but that just took a bit of inference from the updraft.) Second is that I’m not sure that AFRICA’s vibration sense extends through dust clouds. Claiming a dust cloud is a part of the original surface is a strained interpretation, and treating individual particles as surfaces is infeasible given you can only control 5 at once. Ultimately, these are minor complaints that do not impact the core of the opening section.

Section 2 focuses on using Pagodas within the dust clouds to further confuse and ram Winona while Saisei remains hidden within one of the collapsed houses and takes pot mortar shots; a reasonable enough midgame plan given the early game. The emphasis on angled shots as anti-air methods are cogent, if a bit overstated of a concern, but I’m surprised that more specific measures weren’t made to cut at Winona’s bike, leaving the damage and harassment at general potshots. Of course, given this wasn’t a goal of the strat, that observation is dicta, but I do think it is a missed opportunity for Logistical/Technical Counterplay; even just making the ground rocky and uneven can work wonders.

The late game, however, is a bit discontinuous. The narrative from Winona’s perspective is an interesting twist from the usual writing style (which I’ll say more about in the Jojolity section), but while I think sending her on a goose chase is plausible albeit tenuous, the presumption that Winona will play to his Arena is strong, especially when her 5m chainknife means she wants to be right on him. (Planning/Counterplay). That said, the techniques on display within this CQC/Finisher section are a strong culmination of those seen within the strat and beyond, making Daichi into a tricky, deathtouch styled fighter using his terraforming for his own coverage. (Competency)

With the core structure intact, I’ll speak briefly to some Formatting/Planning points. Dice goes into this a bit more, but with the wealth of tactics and tech used, it might behoove you to signpost when tactics are setup, used, and discontinued, partially for readability and for prioritization and emphasis. Regardless, despite some bumps along the way, the emphasis on stage control leading to strong Narrative and Competency give this Rugal rumble a high 7. Good job!

BTA:

Winona’s plan is straightforward as is often the case when playing as Melee vs Ranged: just walk up quickly and downsmash. The lynchpin of Winona’s approach is a smart reading of the text: semisolid gel is not solid, and thus cannot be affected by AFRICA. However, I have great Logistical concerns for the resulting tech. First, Winona’s C SPD gelli/terraforming is “three feet per second on nonliving objects”, which is a good clip, but not enough to render SotW a first response, parrying dagger to Daichi’s attacks, especially the projectiles.

Second, I’ve often spoken of the difficulty in spanning space, and Winona’s gel and especially fire spreading efforts raise that concern. Given SotW’s max radius of 2.5 meters horizontally, and 1 meter inwards, gellifying the 30x50 field to the point of being resistant requires moving at a somewhat slower speed and covering it outright is very difficult. Fire is unlikely to spread quickly throughout the whole map or the whole house from an A POW fire attack (one augmented by the truck exploding). We’ve emphasized that spreading fire requires additional attention and setup, which isn’t seen here, especially given the sheer size of the map.

Even if I grant that the fire is likely to spread from those two, not much is said about how the fire is actively spread beyond an intent to burn the remaining houses. Given the midgame’s goal of “surrounding” Daichi in fire, more detail is needed to establish how Daichi is put in disadvantage, especially when he can literally move mountains and terraform the stage in his favor as well at greater scale.

As a result of these underestimations, the mid game and late game finisher are tenuously setup and executed given the barriers Saisei can put between you two. This isn’t to say the tactics used are bad, but that they could have been further augmented with emphasis on pathing, scaling in armor, or smart use of SotW’s healing. But as is, a structural gap is left that results in this strat getting a 6.

Judge Roku (Dice)

Quality:

First Exhibition match of R2 interim, I know that both players here were somewhat short-handed on the stratting side, but I think both sides should feel good about what they managed to put out. Neither strategy is without flaws, but I believe there are still strong merits for both and things that can be learned from still.

Saisei:

A rather lengthy strategy, it’s been a while since stealth has been actively employed for combat. The strategy though could use a bit more guidance for the layman though, as it takes a few good read throughs to get the jist of, tracking and line of vision obscuring set up, decoy pagodas, underground bunker, to a personal stealth kill finisher among different projectile attacks fired. Part of it is how the strategy is interspersed with its narrative, but another reason is a lack of priming of continuity which is not an uncommon bad habit of longer strategies. Each section is somewhat nebulous in its continuity between how many different set-ups Saisei is juggling between, everything that is explained before needs to be reexamined to see how it fits with the things after and details can be misunderstood at times especially with vague aspects of certain plans.

The diagrams are pretty well put together, however if you want to link a diagram you should explicitly state that your link is to a diagram on or next to the link. Especially when you have strategy relevant text inside the diagram itself and is only found on the diagram. You do reference that you have diagrams within the strategy, but even labeling them so when you reference them later would help immensely for readability. Having to comb and hunt down the diagrams individually otherwise though can be a pain.

The foundation of the narrative and the mechanics of the strategy are generally solid overall, although I think the way they are formatted together could be better. Probably an aspect more due to time, but you at least have them more side by side than mixed which helps parsing.

Mechanically this strategy is fairly straightforward at its core, but a very rare approach that I think could be better expanded upon or tweaked. Stealth is something that Daichi is uniquely suited for with the ability to tunnel, block line of sight, and still be free to attack, although the corralling of Winona and the positioning could have been a bit better explained. Buying yourself time for more set up and opportunities to attack is the name of the game here and it is a strong win condition he has access to.

Overall I’m going to give this strategy a **7/10**, for the strength of Saisei’s potential victory condition we also need to talk about his methods of getting to that condition. The biggest thing we need to talk about is how much can Saisei do at any given moment with his ability, what do you prioritize and how do you make the most of your structures. Similar to your Round 2, you overestimate your capabilities in how much earth you can move at a time. The dust cloud set up I could also use some more convincing on, where it seems like your plan of using topsoil/dirt to erupt into fine dust clouds to spread over decently large ranges.The strategy also has the formatting issues above to consider.

Narratively, generally commanding over the opponent’s actions is not a good idea, where you are assuming courses of actions that might not necessarily happen for reasons in the opponent’s strategy, this is notably more relevant for narrative of what happens during the match where the cinematic finisher is more something that’s done when a win is more or less confirmed by the point you pull it off.

With that all in mind, you had a lot of good things going for you, diagrams, strong narrative, and a solid strategy line that’s broad picture was very well planned. All these are things I hope you can keep in mind and have learned from for the future.

Winona:

This strategy is fairly generalized under the premise that getting in on Daichi will give Winona the win. So the matter to look at then is how to deal with obstacles between carving them into gel, getting through them on bike, destroying them, and/or throwing off Daichi’s aim.

The pigpen play gets you a couple of distractions you can use, but it’s hard to say how effective it will be in general. The weight argument is sound enough, but there are arguments for using the speed/moving pattern of the motorcycle to differentiate it from the pigs. I’m going to overlook that for now because that’s more or less banking on when Daichi realizes what he should be looking for. The bigger factor I want to point out though is that there seems to be a bit of a lack in how this distraction is utilized. This decoy only buys you about as much time as you can keep the impression up, where the next part of the strategy more or less assumes Daichi will be able to target Winona. Part of it is reasonable for “If/When” Daichi sees through the ruse, but I don’t seem to get any indication that Winona has really tried to keep up the ruse beyond letting the pigs loose and forgetting about them.

From this point you have contingencies on getting around general obstructions and focus on replacing earth with gel. The parts here decently cover your basis, but it’s a bit vague on how fast you intend to be moving with some of these contingencies requiring you to have been going slow enough to see these in advance or taking enough time to gel the obstructions.

And for the finale, the firecracker punch. It's a nice piece of tech and a cinematic lead up to it, but I won’t go into much detail here since mechanically there isn’t much to say. The reverse volcano naming is a bit misleading to me, but that’s a more personal thing where the narrative of it isn’t built to sell what’s happening as well as it could have. The way it sets up to conjure up the imagery of how this punch and the force of the firecrackers shoot out just isn’t quite there for me. The build up on the power behind the force isn’t quite there, I don’t know how else to describe it.

I’m going to give this a **6/10**, you have good ideas present, but the meat of the strategy is fairly bare. You have a number of contingencies and a loose gameplan, but there isn’t really much in terms of a sense of time scale or moment to moment action. Granted that you were playing a long game of turning everything into gel and/or burning it all down, but it’s all tenuously connected and its pieces feel like they are moving independently from one another.

Judge Aang (Bri)

Alright! Just like last time, I feel like the exhibition match is a great demonstration of what both of these players are capable of to the highest order, accompanied by a really strong narrative and showdown as well. That said, I don’t have a lot of time to write-- so let’s hop into it!

COL:

Starting with Saisei, I felt like your strategy was unnecessarily long and wrapped up in itself-- you told me that you didn’t really have any time to pare any of the extraneous bits down, and I think that it does impact your readability here. Outside of that, I feel like the most prominent errors here were an overestimation of what your ability is capable of-- B Pre is very good, but it’s not so good as to be able to track Winona at all times, and I believe your own attempts at stage control through jettisoning dirt over the field to block vision might actually prove counterproductive in regards to that. Finally, I feel like your assertions of how Winona would act steps a bit too far past the line of ‘narrative flavor’ into ‘making assumptions’.

On the topic of things I like, I believe you had a very strong close quarters game that I wouldn’t have initially expected from your kit, and your emphasis on stage control complete with diagrams and everything marked commendable effort on your end. You definitively show off an aura of control over your opponent, and interwoven with a very strong narrative makes this a really fun strategy to read.

Overall, though, I feel like I have to give this a middling 6/10. I think you certainly have very good aspects of your strategy individually, but other weaker segments that miss the foundational basis for these moves (such as your overstatement of the speed at which your plates move, or your ability to sense your opponent throughout the entire match) coupled with grammatical errors and run-on sentences makes this a textbook ‘pretty decent’ score.

BTA:

Moving on to Winona, I think that your strategy faces the opposite problem as Daichi’s-- you have a solid groundwork for an ultimately ‘safe’ strategy that doesn’t make any major missteps out of its boundaries, but in doing so, I think your strat forgoes a lot of higher-level play necessary for a ‘great’ score. There’s a distinct lack of a strong narrative beyond short sections interspersed throughout the entry, and against a terraforming opponent, a lack of an emphasis on action economy, time allotment, and pathing throughout the match.

As far as things I liked, the firecracker was a neat little finisher from your end punctuating a theme of overthrowing god, and your strategy was solidly in the readable and nicely formatted territory. Being able to mete out your fireballs without throwing them with reckless abandon shows a good sense of resource management, and being able to gel the environment to prevent Daichi from having control over it is a creative way of dealing with a terraformer.

I’m going to give this a middling 7/10. I felt like you had a strong base plan for winning the match that paired well with a couple of creative plays such as freeing the farm animals and gelling the land to prevent your opponent from maintaining control over it. What knocks this down to me is the lack of an attempt to take it a step further-- I think that with a few more factors added to this strategy such as pathing and time allotment as well as making the sections flow together more easily, you could easily bump this up to an 8 or a 9.