JJOCT7 R3M14 Quality

Judge Gregor Yuvecksky (Logic Sandwich)

This match idea has been kicking around since at least T4, under multiple forms. By minimizing the setup time available to both teams and vastly changing the power curve of each, this Bizarre match focuses on the late game available to both parties, but forces them to intelligently set up their resources to enable those resources.

To get into the strats, Moony is one the best designed 3 ACT stands in recent memory, each ACT capable on its own, but the interactions across ACTs makes ｢Anthrax｣ into the realmbreaking nightmare it can be. CFC thus does a good job of apportioning their strat Scaling, Interference, and Lategame. (Planning)

I don’t have much to particularly say in that regard; I think the Scaling overstates “[the ACT3 drones’] A Speed, four different bodies, and line-cook directed efficiency [such that the terraforming] should not take close to the Drones’ full 30 second lifespan to complete,” given the amount of terraforming being done, but it is certainly doable within the 3 minutes as a whole. (Logistics)

The Lategame section boasts a variety of *nasty* techs and attacks from its secured position, using a range of AoE attacks peppered with thrummingbirds to debilitating effect. (Competency/Technical) ACT2 is paradoxically the strongest and weakest part of the section, making strong use of its amorphous body and its versatility (Competency) but responding to Midnight Rider as a Stand body and its own versatile ability in somewhat generalist terms, making a read for Cutting attacks but less so for other damage types (e.g. thermal) (Counterplay).

I waffled a bit on scores, especially for reasons I’ll discuss in Jojolity, but considering my thoughts on the whole, I’ll bump up my quality score from a high 7 to a low [8]. Solid showing as always.
Before I get into Vasant’s strat, while they did not affect my score, some thoughts on Formatting, as the Judge who most often posts strats.

I’ve groused about sections that are longer than 10k characters because it makes posting those sections difficult, but generally it just ends up a few hundred characters over so that’s more an issue with the platform than the strats. By contrast, I’ve been explicitly critical of “Put Everything In The Midgame-Itis” where a strat will divide itself chronologically, overloading the middle section by putting everything into the part of the strat that is neither the beginning nor the end.

Vasant’s Section 1 is 17k characters. To be fair, this is divided into 3 subsections, but each subsection is ~6k, so I can’t cleanly post two in a Reddit comment.
The second point is that the strat is entirely bulletpointed, which harkened back to IMPACT’s Maya and Dawn strat, where the glut of match information (a complex stage, four players, etc.) was presented insufficient flow so that the bulletpoints kept the strat from cohering.

That all said, this strat coheres.

Part of it is the simplicity of the match and the Plan (build a deck of utility lotuses, combat trick his way to Moony), but the nested hierarchy of the bulletpoints does work. That said, I think that the strat could be edited for concision, there were a lot of verbose or redundant phrases that I think could be reduced. (Several of the Action sources from Lotuses discussed in Growing Lotuses could be put in Section 0, but I digress.)

All in all, I strongly believe that organization and editing are just as if not more important than substance, so I implore everyone to take these comments to heart.

After all that, I have little to say about the first section, beyond my skepticism of the protection clause. While bodyblocking is valid, doing so can’t quite “[take] advantage of the fact that Moony cannot throw attacks at its direction without them being stopped by Villu’s intervention” because an attack is defined by specific intent to harm. If Moony aims for the Lotus Bomb and ｢Midnight Rider｣ bodyblocks, the latter risks taking damage for “coming to the tort.” Additionally, I think “Dig” is not quite “strongly and readily associated” with hands, but that’s relatively minor in the context of the strat.

The second section makes good on the time spent stockpiling, detailing not only the process to break Moony’s defenses, isolate her, and exorcize her (Planning/Competency), but also how the Actions are approportioned for each step of this plan (Logistics). However, I have two more salient concerns with this section.

First, while going airborne was a wise decision for the comparative increase in mobility and avoiding terraforming, it makes mobility a concern in addition to the Lotus allocation and use: ｢Midnight Rider｣’s D PRE may be taxed beyond its limit. Second, while the section is well planned, it is a little happy path. Some of this is addressed with redundancies and looping earlier steps, but I think the strat’s dealing with Moony’s counter-offense is a bit first order, especially when considering the robustness of her kit and ｢Midnight Rider｣’s aforementioned precision limit. (Counterplay)

While these concerns may slow down the strat’s offense, it does not deck out. For being “undeniably solidly good in how it approaches its central thesis,” this strat gets a strong [7]. I’ll reiterate that while I gave a delta in this category, I think both strats were very solid and made good use of the bizarre match gimmick.

Judge Noriko Yabuuchi (CPU_Dragon)

Starting with Moony, Quality wise I think that your goal of terraforming the map within the 30s lifespan of the drones is a bit much, but overall you have a very strong setup phase. I’d believe that you have the ability to turn the bottom left of the map into a hellscape to get near, and it acts as a nice barrier to Vasant himself getting near. Your actual offenses are nicely varied as well, with shrapnel to shred an unprotected Vasant and plenty of nasty tricks with Act 2 learned from the materials in the Funky Kitchen.

The Ghostrider is a bit less impressive to me, as it’s a one-off attack that I feel if avoided would lead Vasant to having the road uncontested, but the fact is that he needs to go into her somewhat to defeat Moony, and her shrapnel storm acts as a stopgap for it. I feel your interference during phase 1 is sound as well; putting pressure on Vasant’s resources once you’ve got some terraforming done, eventually bringing to bear your whole flock to harass him.

Moony is one of the more tightly designed ACT Stands in tourney, and this really shows it! She puts together a defensive cordon worthy of the setup time she is given and has sundry methods to kill Vasant when the time comes. All in all, I feel a 7/10 is warranted here. I was impressed, but I feel that after a bit the

Moving onto Vasant, and he has a lot to love here. The choice to beeline for the camping supplies was the right call, as with Moony’s slightly slower start it gives you the chance to pull what you needed from them before Moony can quite steal them.

Moving onto the rest of the preparation phase and you have a solid accounting of exactly what you need to get to by the time you actually fight. I don’t really have any complaints about the setup phase; you are able to appropriately protect your combo while putting pressure on Moony’s setup.

In the next phase, Vasant proves that he’s been playing Yu-Gi-Oh while the rest of us are playing checkers, putting together a big stupid combo to break down Moony’s defenses, then go after Moony herself, then finish the job. While the combo is a very good one, I did feel that it stretched the Precision of Midnight Rider a bit; especially to handle Vasant staying airborne while maintaining pressure directly on Moony. It’d either need to keep Vasant relatively close, putting him under threat, or keep him away and rely on Vasant more to hit the Lotuses correctly so it could focus more on dealing with Moony. Vasant’s massive Skill in wielding the Silver Dollar does make this a bit more believable, and it isn’t a major concern. But it does mean he could potentially be caught out significantly before Moony is available to be RETIRED, giving her the chance for a counterattack on Vasant himself.

That said, the combo really is good. Given the excellent planning for it in preparation and the strong prose throughout, I feel confident giving this a 7/10. There’s a lot of solid planning here, and while there may be a few things to scratch at in the final execution, I was convinced by the strategy.


Judge Keith Moon (Alphamon)

Oh, on the trials of Motorbikes and Food Trucks, how their wheels doth spin on axles, and how buildings used to be able to stand after letting one in… I mean, that wouldn’t work out that well with either of these monster motors, especially the one that’s just a bomb on wheels, but, y’know.

Going into this delib room was just about the same as any other, I sat myself down at my chair, looked at the teams playing, made a list of other names I could call them that made sense since I did it with Heat of the Roment and nobody really cared so I kept the bit going, before finally sitting down and giving myself a headache from looking at my tired, ancient monit- too long? OK.

We’ll start with Cherry For Cathy!

This is a very, incredibly solid use of multiple kits at first blush. All three acts are in use, in some respect, in every section if I recall correctly, and they’re used to solidly bind the character writing together: Moony is not OK. Moony probably isn’t even Moony by the end of her soiree there, either…

To call back to the first movement of my catty opener, the roving firebomb of a truck is a nasty weapon and a great use of allotted equipment in the match; I don’t know if you’d planned on using the food truck as a firebomb from first blush, but the precision with which it was deployed almost feels like it.

Outside of that, you made good use of the tools at your disposal within the confines of your kit, especially so with the kerosene and other implements, like glass, or the knives when you terraformed the grass itself into cutting implements.

The fact that practically all of this is within the confines of the mechanics is great writing and throughput, so I can’t see giving this anything less than an **8**.

Alright, onto Electric Grapevine! No, not the character- Esoteric Grove then, jeez!

The first thing I’d like to poke is the bullet points, and the nested bullet points. Genuinely, the formatting would’ve been easier on the eyes (at the very least, my eyes) if the first row of bullet points didn’t exist, and the nested bullet points were bulleted.

Now that that’s over, let’s talk about their contents!

As a quick aside, I love that both of these strats have a Chekhov’s BOMB in them.

The Lotus Bomb, the ever-growing temple of flowers that serves as the giantest “nuh-uh” that you’ve put together in the time you’ve been allotted, is an absolutely fantastic way to close the match. You also spend the match building up to its use, which is, ultimately, the point, so I’ll concede it.

There’s not a lot coming to my mind here, outside of “You used [X EQUIPMENT] to great effect”, so I’ll say that, logistically speaking, your movement capabilities are sufficiently covered and used by both your stand and bike.

I’ve given myself more to say in JoJolity by keeping this short, but I feel like the depth of writing and consistency of it across the board, straight through to The Three Step Plan is deserving of another **8**.