One Piece (Bri)

Oh wow, this was a great match! I absolutely adored the character writing put into both sides here, and it’s definitely a fun note to end on right before our last boss match to close out R1. Wait, M11? What do you mean? I’m pretty sure we’d notice if something like that went missing.

In any case, both of these strategies are pretty easy and straightforward, so I think that my delibs should be relatively simple as well. Neither side did a poor job with what they put out in general, so picking a winner might be a little hard– but a winner must be selected either way.

Quality:

Starting with 8 Melodies, I can really tell that you guys had a lot of fun with this objective! I think that a big strength of your strategy is your interference plays; stuff like the exploding oranges, flashbangs, and shoving water into his digging sites are all very good ways of preventing him from digging into the ground and pulling out his prized treasure.

I also think that you do an excellent job at positioning yourself between chests for the first segment in order to lock down areas for yourself, which definitely can net you an early advantage if you play your cards right. You make a conscious effort to properly account for the loss condition, which is appreciated since ‘not hurting your opponent’ with an AoE ability like Val’s is a little tough. I also appreciate the effort you put into the actual objective of ‘securing enough chests to win’ and adjusting your route accordingly instead of simply trying to go for as many chests as possible. It’s that sort of goal-oriented resource management that matters in objectives such as this.

On the other hand, I think that a few of your plans are a little half-baked and lack the proper follow-through in order to reach their full effectiveness. For example, a lot of them count on happening at specific times that Lincoln is digging– sure, at maximum effectiveness, your plans can significantly impede him, but at dig sites where he’s not a few inches away from snatching something up, dirt or water is just less likely to cause as big of an issue for him as you state it does. Things such as the orange grenades are fun and annoying, but overall don’t really do as much to harm or interfere with him as is posited– after all, it’s still an orange at the end of the day. There’s also a good bit of pushing of the limits of your C Precision with the jet skis and big orange tree play, but that’s more of a nitpick than anything else.

Overall, I think this is a very solid plan with an emphasis on resource management, action economy, and completing the objective. However, it has a lot of frills and a lack of following through in some important areas, as well as a bit of overestimation of how well your plans work on your opponent. Thus, I don’t think I can give it higher than a low 7/10.

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On the side of Lincoln, there is a pretty interesting interpretation of physics and how it applies to digging within a sandy area. Ignoring the improper analysis of friction itself, the opener still phrases changes as if they push to their limit instantaneously when it’s stated on the sheet that the effectiveness is limited by how much time/effort is spent (ex: A punch barrage) on increasing or decreasing the friction of a stated area.

In terms of things I immediately liked about this strategy, I think that Lincoln does a good job of plotting his route out over the course of the match, and the principle of locking down areas to make them more challenging for Valentine to get at is pretty admirable on a foundational level. The use of a huge tree to amplify the boxer’s digging ability is pretty clever, although I do question the immediate effectiveness of it, especially since the circumference of the tree itself isn’t convincingly converted into the area of the surface you attempt to dig with. While the tree’s size does allow it to function as a good lever to wedge potential boxes out, it might not be more than marginally more effective than an actual shovel at removing dirt– and with A POW and B SPD, I question the time investment for this tradeoff, especially since a core of your strategy revolves around denying area before Valentine can get to it.

In terms of weak points, I think what’s already been mentioned offhand in passing should be more thoroughly outlined here. For a strategy that heavily relies on area denial and pathing, I feel like you do a surprisingly little amount to justify being able to keep up with an opponent who has greater burst mobility than you, and the detours you take in order to achieve your goal only leave space for you to be blocked in turn. You overestimate key parts of your kit and the time it takes you to perform certain tech and leave a lot to be desired in terms of actually locking down the areas you want to the point where attempts backfire.

I did say that time management and map traversal are very good ways to appease the judges– but when done wrong or when one starts overcommitting to them, it can throw a big wrench into their plans. For example, Valentine locking down the first couple purple chests you intend to shut out and quickly strip mining them will make this a game of catch-up, and a strategy that intends to predict what its opponent does and outpace them does not want them. While this has a solid base and interesting ideas, I feel like it does not carry them out in a convincing manner, puts all of its eggs in one basket, and stumbles over itself and the logic it uses too often to warrant more than a low-middling 5/10. Properly estimating your opponent’s speed and digging ability instead of simply planning two routes and placing everything on area management from the gold chest could go a long way.

Once In A Lifetime (Logic)

Simple collectathon, with different values for different markers corresponding to a sort of “time cost” for each. Lincoln has Stand-assisted mobility and can make traversal difficult, walling off entire areas, while Valentine has a swarm and explosive trickery for her. Easy enough to vote on, easy enough to delib.

Valentine does what any good chess/tic-tac-toe player does and seeks to control the center, using burst mobility to claim the 4 central purple spots, and their 8 chests (of the 23 total, thus needing 5 more). Solid Plan, the Competency/Logistics in how it’s done is strong given the Blank management, but my complaint is that the first section took a few read-throughs to understand—there’s a good amount going on and shuttled together between the accounting for Lincoln and the more technical aspects of Blank usage. I mused that “no contingencies” was an interesting direction, but given they are used later on, I think moving the Lincoln warning into one and tightening the digging methods would have been helpful, especially since they form the foundation of the strategy later on. (Formating).

If all goes well, then Valentine rocket jumps off the cliff in Section 2-A to claim the Purple and Gold chest for 2 and 3 to close out the match. I called this strong Planning, but given what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men, Valentine has smart conditioning on what Lincoln is likely to do and what is most damaging for her plans, the exact conditioning I insist is the most important.

However, this section isn’t as modularly tight as it could be. If Lincoln gets even half of the middle section (which is plausible given his B SPD Stand), then pivoting to the corner Reds results in being down 3 chests. Being able to pivot to nearby chests can suffice, but the relative lack of depth in this regard makes the strat less modularly robust as it wants to be.

Still, with its own interference plans (which could have been worked in a bit better given their reliance on various points on the map) and broadly accounting for Counterplay, the strat “covers secondary things sufficiently enough and the mistakes it makes don’t cut down what it does do.” Easy, solid 7.

Fun fact, when reading the interference plans, I thought you meant Orange and Vanilla, but Blanc seems to refer to ‘sauvignon blanc:’ “flavors of lime and grapefruit, passion fruit, white peach, and bell pepper. If aged in oak barrels, it will have vanilla and custard notes as well as a riper tropical fruit profile.” That said, Seville Oranges are actually more bitter/sour than usual, so Valentine might not appreciate those notes.

Onto Lincoln’s strat, as has been discussed in CMD, the friction of a surface doesn’t quite affect how resistant it is to explosions; friction is a surface force, dealing with masses moving across each other, while explosions are pressure waves. Hence the argument of strip mining outright not working isn’t held, but so it goes.

That said, Lincoln plays the first section “counter-defensively,” if that makes sense: making the plateau hard to dig before going to the beach to claim the Gold (3), Purple (2), and two Reds (2x1) for 7 treasures, only needing 5 chests of the remaining 5 spots, four Purple (4x2) and one Red (1). There are some Logistics concerns for how quickly you can get the plateau section done as well as prepare the tree, but given the order of operations and B SPD I think it’s doable, albeit a bit of a concern given your similar speed opponent.

Here, my comment on the friction warding comes back to bite the strat slightly, as it’s not as walling off as it needs to be to hold Valentine off and she could claim the four Purples (4x2) in Lincoln’s absence, meaning Lincoln needs to pick up the scattered 4. From here, similar to Valentine, Lincoln’s strategy goes into Counterplay, but conditions on Valentine having decided for the beach as opposed to the plateau.

As a result and from there things get...messy. Where it took a bit to parse through Section 1 because the friction and tree setup take up 99% of the strategy while the pathing was relegated to two small conditionals—I will praise Marioaddict’s maps and the paths shown on them are a step up from M26 and thus super helpful!—Section 2 uses indented quotes to get through what is rather dense and genuinely impressive work (Using a tree as a long range shovel to claim a dig site is a really clever piece of tech).

It doesn’t quite address the concern of the immediate clash at the center, which is how we get Section 3/4, which are a bit of a mess, the first being a set of brief contingencies on possible paths, the second being a last ditch series of fastball specials to pick up final chests. It’s a catchall that works, but similar to my concerns with Valentine, it’s a bit vague.

Scoring this was a bit difficult. We start with some of AM’s most technically polished work to date with two well Planned and pathed approaches on a condition that doesn’t cleanly address the Technical/Logistical slip of insufficiently warding the plateau, going into two sections that aren’t as cleanly Formatted. They don’t quite strike me as structural flaws (i.e. not covering bases or under/overestimating in a manner to make connection between parts less cohesive), more than just....weird.

I debated at length with my colleagues as to how grade this: although I find their arguments compelling, I think the Creativity and robustness of the tree techs as well as the quasi-conversational Narrative showcasing Lincoln and Boxer’s personalities beyond segmented flavor text suffice to shore up this strat to get a somewhat dusty 7/10.

Black Swan Project (Cory)

Starting with Valentine, the positioning here is super swish; Lincoln might be able to control a good deal of the map, but I think you can at least hold the center pretty well. Past that the plan here seems to work pretty well, though I'll echo other judges concerns on it being possibly light on backups if the purple and gold chests can't be grabbed. There's fun interference and a fun flavor theme spread throughout the strat, and I'll give props to the blast mining for being well thought out and effective as a means of getting stuff out of the ground no matter where in that ground it might be. An 8/10, good job!

Moving onto Lincoln, i've similar things to say with regards to positioning and digging technique. The visual pathing is super lovely to see (shoutouts to Marioaddict!), and the tree shovel is definitely something worth handwaving the specifics of due to how fun of an image it is. Been a hot minute since I've seen an A POW stand swing a tree around; last time, the player was swinging it at me!

I do have some major issues with the formatting of this strat however, particularly in its last half or so. I really like what's actually inside the nested quote at the beginning of all this, it's a fun flow chart, but regardless of Reddit's faults for not providing a better means of formatting that it still does not read well. Nested quotes were something I had to get my team away from T5, and I'll recommend the same for you guys now. As is, the quotes into a chart into several sections makes the last half of this strat harder to read than it needs to be. The genuinely effective digging and pathing of this strat (along with the fun flavor - this might be the first 4th wall break I've ever seen in a strat) means it nets good points, but it's dragged down by rough formatting and a bit too much time spent on an incorrect interpretation of friction. A 7!