T4R3M3 Quality Delibs

Method Man -

In Soviet Russia, Objective Match hunts you! This was a really fun twist on the common “collectathon” format where the stage hazard is what you’re trying to collect, so we were looking for smart ways to approach and avoid the lil bastard lizard. With that having been said, onto Quality Delibs!

SWV:

Let me just say that your formatting style is definitely a smart one for this match. Going for a more modular makes your strat more flexible for this match. Your overall strat is to use your Stands’ superior speed and numbers to run Rupert ragged and corral him into your waiting arms. While I’m generally more skeptical of low END = low stamina arguments in the tourney at large when they’re used to stat-check opponents with high AGI, baiting Rupert with literal bait was a neat blend of strats and stats.

Unfortunately, while your strat isn’t bad, it’s a bit thin. The advantage of a modular strat is having responses for every situation, and I would have liked to see a bit more robust responses to the various situations you could have found yourself in: extensive responses for what to do when Rupert was in each patch, countering Fighter’s positioning, etc.

I don't think SC can undo the smoke bombs the way described, which leads the the point that many have raised that Nico doesn't have much responding to Fighter's extension tech, which sees a lot of great work in his strat. However, the efficiency of Nico's opening leads me to think he has a competitive shot nonetheless.

Objective matches are always a bit on the trickier side, and while I wanted to see more, I liked what I saw. Strating for this match was a bit tough, but focusing on fundamentals—positioning, timing, worst case conditioning, etc.—once you have a solid framework is a strong way to make good on that base.

CD:

There’s definitely good here: some clever traps and strong zone control with extended items. However, the big mark against the strat is that it’s all over the place and very hard to read, especially in the midgame. After the opening, sections are laundry lists of tech without really a sense of prioritization. While they are all individually minor, I do have issues that are enough to knock this strat from the 8 it could have gotten. Rather than enumerate them all, I’ll hit the big ones.

First, there’s the underestimation of SC as a Stand body despite giving Rupert and WTC more respect: “the gaps in the rake will allow Rupert to slip through, while SC has to find a way to climb over, further keeping them apart,” despite the latter being spider-sized. In general, there’s a confidence that pushes on hubris that you’ll be able to easily catch and deal with an A SPD A PRE Stand. We’ve long held that you can intelligently work around high stats, but the aforementioned disorganization of the tech makes me a bit skeptical of how you do so.

Second, your means of dealing with Nico are more damaging than they need to be. I don’t necessarily mean that in “you tripped the loss condition” (although the initial grapple is a bit sus), but there’s a lot of effort put into interference and making Nico “lose” that is wasteful at best and tactically unsound at worst (inflicting collateral damage against a character who scales with damage).

After a scattered midgame, there's the mention that Fighter has been firing missiles at the fountain over the course of the match (even though he was using them to terraform the ground to impede SC?) to blow it up and flood the arena. This is a quick match against an incredibly nimble character: wasting shots on the fountain for a late game ploy that might not happen is foolish. (As an aside, it's a home garden fountain; even when constricting the cross-section of the flow, the pressure is not going to be that high.) Similarly, consider the contingency of uprooting a tree and hurling it out of the yard if SC is touching it. Even if B POW were sufficient to uproot “5 meter tall trees” that are over 2 meters thick, this is a huge investment of Stand, user, and time when there are two other bodies on the field to worry about.

Finally, there’s an overestimation of your own abilities. Having tossed Nico’s backpack, Fighter goes into the shed and gears himself up with his Jojolity play. After this girding up, Fighter takes  to the skies with a repeating 5 second boost to play the zoner game. First, there is a compelling argument that SC’s weave and pincer play can have gone off in the time it took Fighter to prepare for his midgame.

Fighter significantly encumbers himself down with the sheer amount of equipment he’s holding. The issue here isn’t weight, but bulk: carrying a massive sack is going to be awkward and when your opponent has two incredibly nimble Stand bodies, that could be a cause for concern. Instead, just throwing the sack into the middle of the stage and grabbing stuff from there would be a lot easier, since it’s constantly in reach.

While I am somewhat suspicious of permanent flight and Stand floating to avoid everything - see our reaction to "free air camping" - I take umbrage with some of the tech used, namely "the 5 second boost has no cooldown written on the sheet, therefore its an infinite boost". I find this squirrely and contradictory to the spirit of what is written on the sheet (you get a 5 second boost for burst mobility). Even if it were raised that it's "5 seconds in one straight direction without the ability to turn", the garden is 28m a side. 5 seconds is enough for a C SPD Olympian to clear 50 meters. Given Fighter isn't rocketing out of bounds, I don't quite think this defense is made as acknowledgement of the weaknesses of boost spamming, given how those weaknesses don't apply to the strat.

All in all, if I had to describe CD's strat, I'd call it inefficient more than anything. There's much good here, and I'll repeat that there is an 8 in this strat, but Fighter simply does too much in too disorganized of a timeframe, ceding the early game and wasting resources on interference. One could say that this strat is a rough draft in need of trimming, but I think starting from a more parsimonious mindset would have been and will be more helpful. Rather than just throwing whatever works and seeing what sticks, survey the match, recognize your win conditions, and work towards them.

Final Score, 7-6, advantage SWV. While I see cases for why both sides win, I have to give more "grace of interpretation" than I'd like for Fighter's. Fighter stretches himself thin and overexerts himself when focusing on his strengths would have sufficed.

Ghostface Killah -

This match has a few interesting layers to it to consider. While Fighter can go airborne and has decent maneuverability and coverage, Sweet Cavalier can duck and weave past traps given their small size. Rupert also has a few lines of defense from their own speed, their 20 guard units, garden traps, as well as foliage for even more obstacles.
I'm going to start on Fighter Jet here since there is more to talk about here. Harassing Nico at the start doesn't leave too good of a taste in my mouth for multiple reasons. It really wasn't necessary given at best you make it so they can't break their inventory, but you then gave Nico the broken backpack straps to work with and there is a whole slew of other objects they could have used. There were likely more efficient ways to go about trying to counter Nico, while the marginal gain from doing this didn't really seem like much considering this is your starting play. This also toes the line a bit on the match description saying not to hurt the opponent, its not enough to call an instant loss, but it is a bit reckless. You could make the argument that this was in character of Fighter Jet, but really he makes himself out to be the heel in a lot of instances of the match nothing points worthy either way I just thought it was funny to point out.

Onto the inventory prep, while you do get a lot of tools, 45 whole seconds of prep time is a lot. First off is the potential to lose track of Rupert entirely, resulting in even more time loss, second is that time is a really important resource in this match given the nature of the match, when one team catches Rupert the match just ends. The amount of tools taken is probably also excessive, I see the reasoning as a jojolity play, but this seems like a potential case of sacking quality points for jojolity. Carrying around and having to manage that inventory on the move is going to be more difficult said then done, given the makeshift bag of miscellaneous tools, wheelbarrow, and sprayer tanks. Not to mention you are probably going to want your tupperware with you to win the match with.

On to Part 2 of the strat, this feels fairly incohesive as far as a strat goes. Its an unordered series of if statements without the priorities too clearly defined, from badgering Sweet Cavalier, trying to cut off Rupert, tossing out smoke bombs, creating shovel traps, and a few different reactions to what Rupert or Sweet Cavalier does. It could have been ordered better given that some of the actions seemed to have lower priority than others such as the spare moment actions as well as how it puts a split between actions to mess with Sweet Cavalier and Rupert. The way the strat is formatted, the easier assumption to make is that fighter is focusing on SC since its the one talked about first, but then going over how it plans to try and catch Rupert throughout the match makes combining the two fairly separate priorities in a jumbled knot. This is not even mentioning part three, which take its set up time in part two as well.

Onto the full quality of the strat as a whole, I'm not impressed to put it simply. A lot of actions were taken to try and disrupt Sweet Cavalier, which in theory sounds good is more difficult that laid out. Most of the strats in place, while disruptive, I don't think they help you win the match more just making the other team take longer to win. The difference being that doing these actions may have well have cost you the match rather than helping yourself to win the match. Stuff like trying to block off SC using rakes and such, even through they could just as easily run/jump past them, using water to sweep away a stand that can dodge at A speed, or trying to toss a wheelbarrow over them. All have a lower chance of success than I think the strat tries to state. The wheelbarrow has the biggest potential payoff, but I can see them getting out by damage transfering over a large enough hole to escape, not to mention how telegraphed the attack really is, carrying around and having to slam down a wheel barrow over their body.

Fighter Jet also kinda seems to ignore the whole vegetation and extra units guarding Rupert, sure he can extend out and block Rupert's path, but the extra obstacles can prevent good blocks in this case. The fact that the extension speed is at B also might leave a bit room for error.
The biggest play Fighter Jet tries to make is the water hose, but there again fighter jet doesn't really account for the extra units around Rupert.

All in all I think Fighter was trying to play not to lose and being prepared for a long haul rather than trying to win directly most of
the match. I haven't mentioned the smoke bombs yet, but they do play to this point too. A lot of what Fighter Jet does is causing chaos for Rupert to have to deal with. And I would argue his means of taking advantage of that chaos isn't good enough, there has to be a method to the madness otherwise SC could potentially take advantage of fighter jet's actions himself. There didn't even seem to be a clear direction of where Fighter Jet was trying to guide or pin Rupert other than the traps they laid out, not much in terms of detailed long term planning once preparations were done.

The more I think about this the more I think this score is justified, a 3 for this strat. I can see the merits of the strat, but the quality presented here was more a mess of ideas rather than a cohesive plan. That coupled with the plans like carrying around an overstuffed inventory, overstating/overestimating the benefits on some attacks on SC, underestimating the importance of time, and some downplaying or forgetting of some aspects of the match really drags the score down here given the over encumbrance of inventory will make some plays harder and there wasn't really a response against Rupert's guards. I think there is more that can be said here that I might be forgetting, but this is pretty much all the major aspects of it all said here.

Onto Nico, the strat here is fairly short, but it is definitly sufficient. I see some missed potential, but there isn't too much in the strat that I can point to as flawed.
The basket is a nice alley-oop into the tupperware and the bait is a nice extra bonus strategy that can help. Fighter Jet's harrassement plans, might delay a catch but SC's ability to steal a catch is likely better than fighter jet's opportunities gained by blocking off a SC unit. The missing backpack doesn't really play too big of a factor since nearby plants can be ripped to similar effect as mentioned in contingencies. Personally I would have liked a larger attempt to coral Rupert to certain locations, but SC's opportunistic methods do work fine enough for what they are.

I'm going to give the strat a 7, the state is definitly above the bare minimum threshold given the effort still put into the strat and
detailing, but I can't help but feel there was some missed potential in this strat to do more complex or long term plans. I will say it is efficient, but more could have been done here to raise the score.

Ol' Dirty Bastard -

SWV -

I'm going to keep this rather brief because I honestly don't have a ton to say here.

I thought this was a good strat. It was pretty short and straightforward, but in a way that I believe benefitted it. It was concise, said what it needed to, and didn't have too much bloat.

I think your methodology for catching the lizard was pretty good. The advantage of your speedy swarm is pretty clear, it allows you to have more spread over the map and cover more ground, and I think you use that to good effect. Weaving your own basket and attempting to corral him with the SC's, having Nico in a more central location to maximize your influence over the map, was pretty expected; however, that's not bad! Things are expected for a reason, and you did what was best for you in this scenario.

Combine your solid method of coralling, baiting, and yoinking Rupert with a decent list of contingencies and plans for Fighter and the various traps, and you have an all around good strat! I think overall you could've maybe been a bit more flashy or creative in your execution, more specific plans for nabbing Rupert, and more to account for harassment plays from Fighter Jet. Overall though, a good strat, and well deserving of a 7/10.

CD:
I'm a bit conflicted here. This strat has some pretty clever plays in it overall and had a lot of potential, but in the end I think it didn't quite reach it for a variety of reasons.

To start off,  I think as a whole you underestimate Nico and SC a bit too much. Your harassment plays are at times egregiously direct when not necessary, such as taking the backpack, and trying to trip them up quite a bit. On paper this isn't that bad, I don't think it's so egregious that it's assault or that you lose because of it, but the keyword is 'when not necessary'. Tripping up Nico here doesn't do as much for you as I think you believed it would, and getting all the materials ready to do so just seems like a waste of time. Nico has the advantage of a couple very fast and precise stand bodies that can help catch rupert and avoid traps, you don't. That was time that could've been better spent going after Rupert.

Speaking of, I think there's a lot of wasted time here. As a fellow judge mentioned, 45 seconds might not seem like a lot, but when you're going up against someone that has a lot of ground coverage potential, a very fast and precise stand, and you're not actively looking at the speedy lizard that you're trying to catch, there are a variety of ways you can lose track of them and be at a disadvantage. You go for a bit of an 'everything and the kitchen sink' thing with the tools. Decent for jojolity, not great for your quality. You don't explain much how you're going to go about keeping all of those on your person, that's a LOT of equipment even for Fighter.

Overall, I think the main issue with your strat as I mentioned before is underestimation of your enemy and overestimation of yourself. You're fast, yes, but so is your enemy. You have great harassment potential but should you really be focusing on it that much?

You overestimated how much time you have to alot to certain activities, overestimated how much your traps would actually hinder your opponent as well as underestimating their ability to escape/get out of them (Statchecking alone isn't enough, but you really should have kept their size and speed into account when coming up with these.)

Your strat isn't without quality or merit. You have some clever usages of the tools for traps, good field coverage with your lengthening abilities, but overall I feel that you spend too much time doing things that aren't really directly beneficial to you, just a hinderance to your enemy but something they can recover from, while they have more of an opportunity to catch Rupert while you're doing that.

I'm going to give this strat a 5/10. It's not the worst I've ever read, as I said it has its potential, but I'm not going to say that it's good. You've gotta be more concise and considerate of your enemy's potential next time.