JJOCT #8 R1M26 Quality Deliberations

Judge RocketLlama:

It would not be an understatement to say that this is one of the most anticipated matches of R1 on the judges' side. The thematic and mechanical interplay here was beyond potent, and both teams did a great job on taking a swing at that. While neither hits the mark 100%, both certainly have plenty of interesting moments to talk about.

Starting with Mikey I think, for the most part, that you have done a good job here. This is a matchup that demands you play around your strengths over an opponent who admittedly has a more straightforward play pattern. Your focus on chip damage, area control, and mobility all feed into a strategy that has an incredibly strong tempo and feels like it has good options to address a lot of what your opponent has to throw at you. Notably I think that you have very realistic expectations for your defensive options, and mitigating blows that you cannot dodge instead of outright tanking them plays well into your skills and is more believable for me as a reader.

I do have a few small gripes though. First of all, I think that when your blood boosts are first introduced they seem to follow the limitations of Mikey’s D power, but at later points in the strategy it seems like their effect is a bit overstated, especially once in the water. Beyond that, I also think that even with B speed production there are a few moments where I question if Mikey can produce enough blood to do everything he says he is doing at once. This might have been mitigated by having a bit of language surrounding resource prioritization going into the late game, though this is an overall minor gripe.

Going into this match I could not have guessed how you would tackle this match, but whatever I would have thought yall have done some solid work! Your creative combinations of mobility, defense, and map control set you up well, and your offense has enough variation to keep your opponent on her toes. Overall I am feeling a strong 7/10 is fair here.

Moving on to Kaiserinma we have a strategy that, while it bleeds character and style, and has a lot of interesting ideas, has a singular flaw that unravels a lot of what it has going for it. The assumption that the ocean, which is the base of the map and I think would fairly be called terrain, was assumed to be processable is a mistake that this strategy cannot recover from.

Without the necessary mobility many of the things that the strategy tries to do happen on such a slower time frame that it is hard to see them happening before Kaiserinma takes too much damage to recover from. If she can not get to her objectives on the map then things quickly fall apart, as mikey would still have plenty of terrain to stand on, and her marks could conceivably escape her.

The part that especially pains me is that there is a version of this strategy where Kaiserinma processes material into swimming apparati like fins and uses their ability to heat water to jet around the map. The concept here is not a lost cause, but a flub in execution makes it hard to talk about the many good ideas in the strat because the lack of mobility that the failure of this tech does makes it hard to consider their success.
In cases like these where something in a strategy has gone wrong I will defer to the language in the delib rubric to justify a score. In this case, it feels that: “The core of the strategy falls apart, though not in a catastrophic way” and “it fails to complete the objective but has other merit”. Based on this I feel that a 3/10 is the only fair score I can give.

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Judge AtomicPeace:

CARC:

This strategy sees Mikey playing a more ranged strategy than his kit would initially have me to expect, but showed a lot of great understanding of his capabilities against a very powerful opponent.

The name of the game here is pressure, and Mikey spares no time getting his output of blood going, using it to bolster his defenses and apply scaling environmental pressure throughout the match (Planning/Logistics). Of note, he starts spreading his blood in the whirlpool to passively increase his control should he or his opponent end up there, and constructs his armor in a clever way to use pressure to empower his output for offense and interference at a difference (Technical Understanding).

His maneuverability throughout the strategy is bolstered by this initial setup, and he does well to not overextend the capabilities of his hamon water-walking by employing the blood boats as a more stable means of traversing the water (Technical Understanding/Competency). The jets, I see as less likely to be very helpful unless you’re underwater, but they do also provide for some slightly potential stabilization as well as just being additional keep-away tools.

For your general strategy of fighting Kaiserinma, I enjoyed the variety of constructs and tactics you employed to slowly wear her down. Covering her with blood and using your hamon pulses are a good option for heart-targeting full body damage, the hooks and lines, as well as projectiles disguised in sprays of blood, do a great job of not just hitting her, but making for lasting nuisances. I particularly liked the way the hooks had the potential to weaponize her heating options by giving a means to deal reliable damage when she’s at her least durable. (Technical Understanding/Competency/Counterplay)

At times, I do question the efficacy of these plays depending on the exact distance Kaiserinma is at. There’s a fine line to tread when keeping your distance, and there’ll be some definite falloff on the efficacy of your projectiles, so it gets harder to justify with your E Range and D Power the further you get. I think a little bit more detail on your general positioning and the more micro elements on how you play your range against Kaiserinma would have served you well here, even if I think by and large the tactics you implement are effective. (Logistics/Technical Understanding)

Defensively, he relies a lot on the blood he’s been spreading around the arena to bolster his physical defense and maneuverability, playing keep-away from Kaiserinma for the most part. While again I think the capabilities of the blood jets for movement here are slightly overstated (Logistics/Technical Understanding), I think you make a good case for your efforts towards environmental control throughout the match providing good options for getting away from her (Logistics/Counterplay)

The ending of your strategy sees you making some efforts to save the civilians on the map, and use this to set the stage for your finisher, which puts a pretty stylish cap on the whole thing.

Overall, I feel Mikey has a solid plan of action against Kaiserinma the whole match. He uses the quantity of his blood output to great effect to establish his control over the stage, and uses that to bolster his mobility and apply ranged pressure with a variety of creative options. The main weaknesses present are in the overestimation of certain mobility options and the need for a bit more detail on positioning. Still, Mikey’s capabilities are demonstrated quite well here and it was a very creative strat with a nice narrative throughline. 7/10!



LKA:

I need to start this delib by addressing this strategies’ most unfortunate foundational weakness, its reliance on Kaiserinma processing the water on the map throughout the strategy.

Kaiserinma’s sheet states as a limitation on the ability, in no uncertain terms, that terrain cannot be processed-

“PROTOMARTYR and the AUTOMATIC SINNER may Process objects (but not terrain) on contact, physically remolding them to fit her needs into simple shapes or pulverizing objects into debris.”

I can see no interpretation of the ocean water on the map as not being terrain, or of it being defined as an “object”. This was a key balancing factor when creating the match, and if Kaiserinma’s ability is allowed to be interpreted this way, it not only violates the explicit limitations of her ability, but completely throws off the balance of the match.

The problem this poses is that this is a core technique utilized constantly throughout the strategy. She does it from the very beginning of the match, and every subsequent part of the strategy relies on this as a reliable source of fuel for her to process.

There was a great amount of effort put in here to make a compelling strategy from a narrative and mechanical perspective, and I would like to take the strategy at its merits and assess how things might go despite this, but this core assumption holds together so much of the strategy that there doesn’t seem to be much of a path to do so. Based on these facts, I’m going to give this a 3/10.

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Judge DSOddish:

I think I’ll start with LKA here. I don’t think this is a conceptually bad strategy, and there’s some good decision making here. Mikey is in a much worse position if he has to fight Kaiserinma in close range, so capitalizing on Kaiserinma’s massive A Power to destroy as many of the already limited places to stand to limit where Mikey is able to safely move to is a smart way of going about this match. Dragging him underwater isn’t a bad call either, and I think there’s some decent target prioritization going on by going for his lungs specifically to drown him quicker. I like that you’re mindful of how the whirlpool will move any blood traps Mikey tries to set up in the water and avoid them by moving with the flow of the water, and I also think you do a good job of making sure you kill all of the Priority Targets as part of your 1 skill. There’s a lot of good decision making here, but unfortunately, all of that is marred by some severe mistakes.

The foundation of this strategy is the idea that Kaiserinma, by being able to process water, is at a great advantage over Mikey while in the water, and thus by destroying the boats and other wreckage to force Mikey into the ocean, Kaiserinma will win easily. And I’m sorry, but there’s no other way to say this: this flat out isn’t something that Kaiserinma can do. To quote from her sheet directly: “PROTOMARTYR and the AUTOMATIC SINNER may Process objects (but not terrain) on contact, physically remolding them to fit her needs into simple shapes or pulverizing objects into debris.” For the water movement that Kaiserinma displays throughout the entirety of this match to be legal, then “the ocean” must both be considered an object (which it isn’t) and also not terrain (which it is). Normally, when a player oversteps or overestimates what their kit is capable of, I’m inclined to try to find as charitable a reading of it as possible to not sink their strat entirely on one mistake, and as much as I’d like to try to do that here, I just don’t think I can justify it. The foundational piece of tech that Kaserinma displays throughout this match is something that doesn’t just not work as described, but is explicitly disallowed by the wording of her sheet.

From there, a lot of this strategy is unviable. Almost all of Kaiserinma’s movement is done in the water, and while she can swim, fighting against the current of a whirlpool for the entirety of this match when she only has 3 Endurance isn’t going to do her any favors. This is especially bad when her solution to potentially getting sucked into the whirlpool is stated as such: “Kaiserinma can keep Herself out of the center by simply jetting Herself away.” With her main movement option off the table, she plays this match very riskily and puts herself in danger of an early RETIRE at the hands of the stage hazard. Her endgame also makes little sense, as now she is roughly even with Mikey while in the water since she lacks her ability to move swiftly through the current, and it's even arguable that she’s at a disadvantage, having been tired out fighting against the whirlpool for so long by the point she and Mikey would actually be meeting in combat.

There are other mistakes, too, the most serious of which is what strikes me as continual misestimations of how long it will take Kaiserinma to do things throughout the match. There are several instances where she intends to heat her blood up to maximum temperature to achieve her greater flexibility at the cost of durability for one specific scenario before quickly switching back, but Kaiserinma only operates at E Speed. In any scenario where she’d need maximum flexibility or durability, she would have needed to already have been in the process of shifting her temperature long before the strategy states she does. Now, I am willing to believe that the ocean could help cool Kaiserinma and make the cooling process quicker than heating up, though I’ll also point out that the very same water that helps her cool down faster would also impede her ability to heat up for the same reasons. I’m also a bit suspect of how quickly Kaiserinma is able to actually destroy the different floating platforms. With A Power, it’s no doubt that Kaiserinma could easily rip them to pieces, but aside from some of the smaller pieces of debris, I think the time it would take for her to completely smash these to pieces in a way that renders them useless to Mikey as intended in the strategy would take much longer than the strat seems to think.

I’ll also quickly comment on a more minor issue, but one that I think is still worth mentioning. Several times throughout the strategy, you make mention of Mikey being “forced” to protect civilians when Kaiserinma threatens them, but this isn’t really the case. Mikey’s JoJolity is to embody a hero, not defend the civilians. Now, while that JoJolity definitely incentivizes Mikey not just abandoning them entirely, he is under no obligation to really do anything to ensure their safety, so the assertion that he must do something when they are threatened isn’t exactly accurate. Remember that the Priority Targets are Kaiserinma’s 1 skill, not Mikey’s. Again, this isn’t a major factor in my scores, but I still felt there was merit in bringing it up so similar mistakes aren’t made later down the line.

So when it comes to scoring, I’ve thought on it and I think I’m going to have to give this strategy a **3**. I’ll point to the definition of what a 3 Quality strategy looks like from the delib rubric, which explains that in the case of such strategies, “large parts of the strategy don’t hold up under scrutiny,” “what attempts are made are infeasible as written,” and “the core of the strategy falls apart.” All of these, unfortunately, I think are apt descriptors of Kaiserinma’s strat here. Her water processing movement and endgame built around the advantages that brings don’t hold up under scrutiny and are infeasible. I’m left in a position where I either try to imagine this playing out as close to how it was written as possible, in which I see a likely scenario where Kaiserinma is RETIRED by the whirlpool long before she can finish off Mikey, or one in which I toss out anything that simply isn’t possible, at which point there isn’t much strategy left to judge.

Now one last thing I want to mention is that I know it’s easy to look at a score like this and think “Wow, I suck,” and I want to say that despite the harsh score I’m giving you here, I really don’t think that’s true. Narratively, I think this strategy was really cool, and this strategy is very effective if it weren’t built upon an unfortunate misunderstanding that tripped you guys up right from the beginning. My recommendation for you guys going forward is, before stratting, make sure you have carefully read and reread your sheets so something like this doesn’t happen again, and if you’re not sure about something, to ask the Judges if it’s allowed. If you were simply more mindful of how your power is defined and Kaiserinma’s stats, I really think you guys are capable of putting out something awesome with this character. So please don’t take this score too hard. I would really hate to see you all get discouraged over this.

Now, I have comparatively much less to say about you guys on CARCINIZATION. I think Mikey’s strategy is pretty good all around, and I don’t really have much in the way of criticism. Mikey properly understands that Kaiserinma is scary as hell and probably has a winning match up at close range, and I think you guys put a lot of good work towards trying to play a range game against her while dealing constant chip damage to wear her down.

A lot of the applications of Mikey’s Stand here are pretty cool. I like the range extension with the nozzles, I like the trap setting by creating clouds of blood in the water that can be triggered from afar with Blood Beams, and I like the Blood Armor to protect yourselves from Kaiserinma’s heavy blows. However, I think my favorite piece of tech here is the Blood Boats. One of the biggest threats in this match is the limited ground on which to stand, which is constantly getting drawn closer to the center of the whirlpool. Being able to create your own terrain to stand on is a very smart move. At points I wondered whether Mikey might be overextending his resources with all of the different things he could be doing at any given point, but with pretty much constant B Speed generation of material, I don’t think he’ll ever be in danger of not doing what he needs to at any particular moment. In general, pretty much all of the tech you guys displayed in this strat impressed me, with one or two exceptions.

One example of those exceptions I could give would be the idea that Mikey’s blood propulsion would boost his movement. Mikey is only able to eject blood with D Power, which has a bit of force behind it, but not so much that Mikey would become meaningfully more agile here. I get that he’s a kid and is thus smaller and lighter, but without a relevant skill that states this allows Mikey to more easily launch himself around with his Stand, I’m not really buying that explanation based purely on character design. I’ll also state that I think while a lot of the things you create by hardening Mikey’s blood are viable applications of his kit, I don’t think wires are viable. Wires or any similar material require being able to create a degree of flexibility that I don’t think falls within the scope of the ability to simply harden blood.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with what you guys put out here. I think this is an example of a strat that understands the advantages and disadvantages of its character and plays around them very well. Mikey’s keepaway game using the range extension brought about by his nozzles to constantly pepper Kaiserinma with chip damage over the course of the match, with a particular focus on taking chunks out of her body to wear her down when possible and targeting her heart, the one part of her body that she cannot easily replace. I think I’m going to give you guys a **8**. I’ve struggled to choose between a 7 and an 8 for a while now, wondering whether the movement boosts not working is enough to deduct a full point or whether there are other areas that could have been better fleshed out. Ultimately, I think I’m going to err on the positive side and give you guys the higher of the two here. Nice work!