R3E1 Quality Delibs

Judge Miku (Rocket)

Starting with the boss, I am always interested to see how individuals playing boss characters decide to go about matches. For the most part, it is about showing off, about making a statement, about putting up a fair challenge that gives the players a serious challenge. From that standpoint I think you do a pretty solid job here. However moving past that into how you go about the match I think the approach to chip away your opponents until you can finish them off is a classic that we often see. However there are a series of issues with execution that I feel need to be addressed.

First of all, I think that the way that you describe a lot of your tech working is overstated based on the stats of the stand itself. Attacks that take time to ramp up are treated as guaranteed to go off, shields that grow at E speed are going to stop attackers immediately, and UFO’s that can lock down opponents without much issue. While all of these elements of your kit can certainly have this effect, I think that a little more focus on setup would have been needed in order to have the level of effect that you seem to describe, if not different tactics entirely. I also think that the area control you think you have is going to take a lot more effort to keep up and manage than you think.

While the UFOs are certainly a nuisance in masses, they are fragile, and without a little more attention and organization and coordination I just don’t see them maximizing what you want them to do here as far as locking down the area. Especially when dealing with opponents as mobile as the to actually fully locking down an area requires coverage and pressure that I just did not see described in what you have here. Especially with the clear area and zone control that is built into this kit I think that you absolutely could have locked down sections of the map with some more specificity and effort.

All in all the best that I feel I can give this strategy is a middling 5/10. While there are elements here that I feel are very clever, such as using your contortionist ability to confuse and limit Lumberjacks ability to pick out your weak points and making self regenerating rubble ammo to help you batter your opponents,  there are just to many points where I see somewhat large overestimations of your ability and underestimation of your opponents to give a higher score here. Largely doing what it is already trying to do, some small changes in execution could have seriously elevated things here, and while some really hype stuff is done here, some distillation and focusing of ideas to be more rock solid could have done wonders to improve your overall score.

Moving onto players I have far less to say here. The name of the game in matches like these is synergy, and you guys do an amazing job of working together to come up with really wonderful movement, offensive, and defensive tech. Having Lumberjack focusing on constantly transforming into various forms that complement, support, and enhance Nadine while having her taking the brunt of the actual fighting is pretty clever, taking full advantage of the strong defensive option opened up by Lumberjacks element of the match and then supplementing that with consistent pressure and offense that picks away at your opponent's defenses well while sticking strongly to a particularly slipper opponent. If I had to give my biggest criticism here I would say that you could have better planned for counter UFO and descaling efforts, but with everything as is a strong 8/10 is more than earned here.

Judge Teto (Flame)

Apologies for the shorter delibs this time around. That said, it’s Exhibition Boss match time!
Starting with Marione, who instantly moves to make her barely E Speed box delivery time redundant by opening them in midair. While the capability of the D PRE UFOs does seem stretched, at least measures have been put in place to make less precision needed (ordering in an order so the UFOs only have to worry about the X box in a sequence). Strat cohesion is also spotty at times, as while sections do work there isn’t great connection between them except arguably the scaling that the UFOs help with. You’ve written a strong Narrative at least, and the core gameplan of scaling and interference before attacking to let the finisher be made. Overall, this strategy reads as a **6** (“a plan that covers the central core of what it wants [...] but doesn’t cover things that could back it up sufficiently or makes some notable missteps.”).

Moving onto the players, the Death card doesn’t actually mean death but an incoming change (which can be a death, yes). And I suppose Lumberjack becoming a battering ram counts. The two aim to begin the match by taking away Marione’s phone, storing it inside Stonejack after either of the two snag it, with the removal being a large focus of the first section of the strat. I will also praise that despite this, they still act for the rest of the strat as if Mari still has the phone (one of the examples of good Planning/Counterplay).
The “stone storage” “tech” isn’t just used for the phone as well, encasing Nadine in an armor of Stone(jack). Overall the great displays of Technical Understanding and Creativity to combine the Embody Earth powers with Nadine’s ability set, along with the extensive Counterplay shown, lend me to give this a **9** over an 8 (this as stated in the rubric being “some elements [...] uniquely worthy of praise.”)

Judge Neru (Logic)

First Exhibition Boss Match! Glad we could pull this one in before the holiday break, expect the return of Niema and Exhibitions in January, where we’ll try to get two more matches in before R4. For now, we have Marione and the miracle of Amazon Prime attached to an Abomination of a user (albeit one lacking in physical stats) versus Lumberjack with an Embody element (a loadout whose strength we saw in R1) and Nadine, who brings grappling, zone control, and mobility. This makes for effectively two deathball comps bashing against each other, so let’s sit back and watch the fireworks.

Marione:

AE gives us a Christmas miracle of a sub-20k strat, and rather than beat around the bush, I’ll say I give Marione an 8. This isn’t to say that I disagree with the criticisms of my fellow judges—they follow naturally from the comprehensive jurisprudence of both delibber’s—and it is reasonable to be more bearish about issues we’ve noticed over four rounds. However, I disagree with their weighing of constitutional axes.

Upon my first read, contra other judges, the SPD didn’t concern me as much as the use of the UFOs. (Technical/Competency/Logistics) Despite each unit having D PRE and being vocally ordered, the strat uses them for very complex maneuvers and implies that they can teach each other commands (their only stated function is the tractor beam so having speakers for vocal commands doesn’t immediately follow from the sheet). I’m willing to accept some amount of handwaving for minor plays, but the complexity and lack of specificity in some spots, especially their harassment (though the queuing for box retrieval was a smart play) does materially impact the strat’s efficacy and tempo.

As summarized in CMD, the goal is “to shut down offense at range and go for chip and arena setup to exhaust the players, while focusing on a few big instakills if they mess up,” much of the meat of the strat in “HERE’S WHAT TO DO.” Here, the rate of box acquisition is somewhat material as to Planning. A lot of plays are made with individual boxes, and even with the smart allocation of UFOs to early interception, given the time to order and retrieve, it’ll take minutes to get the number that some parts of the strat imply. Given the emphasis on disengaging, this isn’t too much of a concern, but minding this rate would be helpful (Logistics/Planning).

There isn’t as clear a transition from chip damage to executes in movement or positioning which would help the strat structurally cohere. (Planning) There’s some play around setup and stealth among the debris for melee and ambushes, but I think this section is a bit underdeveloped, for example with how the Spinal Fluid boxes from earlier are used as traps and traps. The subsection isn’t quite happy path, but assumes a bit of ease and combat doesn’t quite generalize from defensive tech against Lumberjack. (Counterplay) In sum, the overestimation/underwriting of ⌈Alien Alien⌋ and the strat’s more nebulous midgame causes a bit of unraveling.

While that was a lot of negatives, part of that was to more robustly state the judges’ criticism, but also to highlight the strat’s strengths by negation. Although that middle section could have been split and tightened a bit, the strat reads really cleanly (Elegance/Formatting) and the clear emphasis was put on Narrative; the mechanics and the narrative text itself weren’t bogged down by each other, which often tends to be the case.

Even though I’ll talk more about the narrative in the Jojolity section, it’s this particular emphasis that leads to my score. This 8 is admittedly on the higher side, but I think on balance and on the whole, it “executes its central thesis well while not leaving behind what it needs to be functional.”

Players:

Players’ first section calls back to Tsuchi’s shining moment from T4: “rushdown to run their pockets.” It’s a brief section that almost feels happy path, but that seems to be more from how succinctly the subroutine reads—a plan to be used if the opportunity arises.

Similar to Marione’s strat, much of the meat here is in the mid game. Nadine wears Lumberjack as a suit of armor and uses LF’s crystals and wires to repel towards Marione, with tech for swarming her with an outfighting boxing style or ranged attacks. There’s a robust section for dealing with each subability (Counterplay, particular Creativity on counter ⌈Shoujo A⌋ tech), but I think the UFOs are a bit too dismissed by a matter of strength and weight. Given Marione’s scaling, some accounting for swarms of units would be useful—particularly multiple tractor beams, given how much rappelling you’re doing.

The finisher is similarly cinematic to Marione’s, Nadine declaring even if the world comes crumbling down, Marione should know she’ll be there and that she’s not alone (yeah) while beating her face in. Beyond this finisher, much of the Narrative is relegated to separate sections, but I think the mechanical sections can use a bit more development in the interim. Solid job overall, earning a high 7/10 and the similarly high scores from my fellow judges.