Why?
Obviously, I favor a dynamic, improvisational midgame, adapting to one's opponent and the randomness of the garbage we're given. But, speed is the name of the game, and our dynamic improvisation can have building blocks in it we've practiced to be played fast, fast, fast. By knowing formulaic patterns we can use, we can plug them in and run with them when the situation is right.
Additionally, we should note that the attrition-based gameplay we often get into in late midgame is more characteristic of Tetris vs Tetris than Tetris vs Puyo. In Tetris versus Puyo, Tetris is often a player of rapid repeated attacks, while Puyo is a player of large bops. When we're not doing a massive garbage clear as Tetris, it behooves us to be able to continue our attack repeatedly--and a formula may help us do this.
Why not?
In long term attrition, we often don't have the space to play formulaically. Formulae must stand aside for on-the-fly solutions for our board and garbage, lest we die. So, as with many techniques, these have a time and a season.
How?
1. The Repeat Seat
Suppose our board looks like this, and also suppose our decks were just S, T, and the occasional I:
We could then just use S and T over and over like so:
Every time we do the pattern, we clear 2 lines for 2*10 = 20 squares. We leave a row behind with 8 squares of material, for 28 squares total. We know a deck is 7 pieces, meaning 7*4 = 28 squares of material. So, this pattern matches up exactly with one clear per deck in real Tetris; we could theoretically keep it going forever.
Once we've built up too big a hole in column 5, we can just use our Is and add on the occasional Tetris:
Of course, this loses us two tetrominos / 8 squares from our repeated pattern, but if we have a lot of spare material, or just want to kill our opponent, that's just fine. We could've also played a J at an opportune time to fill up column 5, and gotten back into the repeated ST using an L:
Cool, we have a formula that gets us T-spins over and over and mixes in Tetrises. That sounds pretty darn good. But, how would our board end up looking like that? Well, if you've read the previous posts, you might've come across this 3x3 square with a notch lopped off all over the place, in openings, all clears, combos, and the like. Because it fills 8 out of 9 squares of a 3x3, I call it an 8/9:
Top Corner:
Bottom Corner:
We can create 8/9s, 3x3s with any corner lopped off we want, though in the setup above, it'll either be repeatedly the top-left or the bottom-left. The available piece combinations for your basic top-left are: JO, OL, JZ, and LS. Though, if we're repeating the pattern already, we'll likely not use LS and save our S for the ST part.
We then just have to fill up columns 1-4, and perhaps the occasional column 5 if we want to Tetris. Let's start at the end of a strong opening we know: the Izzy-dubdub after a couple T-spins:
We know we have a full deck to work with other than the T. Let's try to transition into a Repeat Seat and get it going. First, we take our T-spin. We can set up the next block in our right-hand tree while we do it:
Our first notch is only one off the ground, so we can't take it with an S. Let's use the L instead:
Now, with each deck, we add another block to our tree, with JO, OL, or JZ, take a T-spin with ST, and build up our left-side 4-wide block with the remaining three pieces:
In the above example, I found it the Z piece most convenient for my left-side build, so I ended up taking either JO or OL on the right. We adapt our tree-build block based upon whatever pieces are most convenient for the left-side, allowing us to improvise to the situation. And if we have an I we don't know what to do with, we just drop it in column 5 or 7 to set up and take Tetrises.
Awesome. With a bit of improvisation, we can probably just keep doing that in Marathon. In a real match, of course, we'd eventually be called to do garbage clear combos lest we be attrited to death.
Now, you might say, all this improvisation is hard! Can you give me an even more boring formula to do my 4xN column? Well, you are in luck!
Suppose we always use ST for the middle. We'll always use JZ or OL on the right for an 8/9, and always use I + the remaining JZ or OL on the left for another 8/9. If we start in a position where this works, can we just keep it going forever? Let's try. Here, I'm using grey blocks for my 8/9s and alternating their highlights.
We'll always have either 4*n, 4*n+1, 4*n+2, or 4*n+3 squares of material, and we have a repeated pattern for each, though 4*n+2 requires breaking down the OL specifically. So all we need to do is improvise until we have a board flat enough for one of the above patterns to apply at deck start, then just repeat it over. And over. And over. Here's an example transition, using bottom-corner 8/9s:
We see in the sample we have a measure of flexibility--we can use a deck to mostly tree-build, or mostly column-build, if either one is more convenient to our deck ordering and board. And we nevertheless are able to keep to the repeated pattern on both sides.
It's the Repeat Seat because we get our T-spins with the repeated S, T. On the right, we have a tree-shape--we'll call it the three-wide tree. But what about a narrower tree?
2. The two-wide tree
Let's say we start here. You may recognize this as the beginning of the third deck of the WumbOJ: after we play our L and T for a third T-spin on piece 16:
We can set up the first couple T-spins of a Repeat-Seat pretty easily with the J and Z:
If we wanted to keep the exact same pattern going forever, we could add an O, S, and L. Incidentally, this theoretically could be used to do four back-to-back T-spin triples--fun to do in Marathon or Free Play, though it's unlikely anyone would try this in a real game:
But adding an S is lame, since we prefer to use it for the repeated S,T combo. We could just use Z,T in place of S,T. This gives us a T-spin single and leaves two lines on the screen, giving us a Tetris every 2 T-spins instead of every 4. And hey, against Puyo, 4 singles and 2 tetrises theoretically does slightly more damage than 4 doubles and 1 Tetris:
If our 5xN isn't fully built, we can substitute for the S with an O plus a piece straddled across the 5xN and S columns:
We could, of course, use JL instead of an S for a cycle:
As long as we're willing to use J and L here, though, why not use them slightly differently? We can just use S,L on the left, and J,Z again after J,Z on the right, and we set up a 2 T-spin combo. Heck, add a Tetris on this, and we can do a quick 15 damage bop:
Excellent. We have the theory of the right side of the screen. Now let's try to fill in the left and right at the same time with actual decks:
Looks like we can keep this one going too, though it's hard to give a truly boring repeated pattern since we must use different pieces to build the right. Given an already-built tree, there is a repeated pattern for the 5xN with the 5 pieces other than ST. This works for all five of the 5*n + k cases by adjusting the I-column, but is less useful in practice than the repeated 4xN which allows building the tree at the same time:
We see in the two-wide tree we get a moment of choice after playing the Z on our tree: we can continue the pattern of a notch every 3 rows with an O, or get a notch 2 rows up with a J, and allow a 2 T-spin combo. But there's another possibility here: what if we instead form the notch on the left, either with the Z or the J on the right?
If we just keep doing that, and keep T-spinning on the right with a Z and a T, we switch into:
3. The Central Tree
Above is an example of the Central Tree build coming out of the same situation we used for our two-wide tree: a T-spin double on the third deck of the WumbOJ followed by T-spinning one away from the edge. In general, when we do a T-spin one away from the edge, whether on the J or Z on the right or the L or S on the left, we can start this pattern.
I've intentionally used a wide variety of ways of building the tree in the example. If you look at the size of the tree, it's 7-wide. We could divide this into a 5xN plus a 2-wide tree, or a 4xN plus a 3-wide tree, or be more fanciful. Now is a good time to go through more fancy arrangements that be used to build the tree beyond the 2-wide's JZOSL and the 3-wide's repeated 8/9s. Some of these are also applicable to the 3-wide tree, however, and can substitute for two 8/9s:
Of course, once we get going, we likely just want to treat the Central Tree as a 4xN plus a 3-wide tree as we have fast, braindead patterns for repeating this over and over. But all the different possible shapes can help one transition in.
4. Theory of Getting Started
Notice that in all these setups, I branched off an existing opening after a number of T-spins. We don't just open with these formulae, because they require material on the board. Ideally, we should have from one to three notches in our tree ready at any given time, and our 4/5 wide section built up to the proper height by the time we get to the S/T in a given deck, which might be at the beginning. Thinking about that, for our first ST in the three-wide tree, we'd need 4*3 squares for our column and 8*2 squares for our tree (given two layers), making for 28 squares or 7 tetrominos worth of material. Every deck we do a T-spin double with, we play 28 squares of material and spend 20, so we expect to be able to do thee three-wide tree once we've done four T-spins. And indeed, in the the first above transition example, our first ST is after 4 initial T-spins. In the second example we do T-spin single instead of double for our third T-spin, getting us 10 extra squares of material, and start after the third T-spin.
In the two-wide tree example, we got started after only 3 initial T-spins, giving us 24 squares or 6 tetrominos worth of material to work with. This was a little dicey, but we made it work. Once you take a few Tetrises, though, your material is reduced even further. You may need to transition out, or skip an ST cycle to get more material. Theoretically, we need two pieces in our tree to get our notch, for 8 squares, and 5*3=15 squares for our 5x3 initial column. So, 23 squares! We can transition in after our first three T-spins, but should be ready to transition out if we run into issues. How can we transition out?
5. Transitioning out: clearing, comboing, and bopping
We'll likely reach a point where we want to stop doing our repeated T-spin and start clearing our board: perhaps because we're having trouble maintaining the pattern, perhaps to clear garbage underneath, perhaps to send our opponent big, potentially lethal damage, perhaps to defend ourselves, and maybe all of the above. How shall we go about it? The most obvious way, given built up sides, is to haphazardly shove pieces into the hole with reckless abandon and hope for a big combo:
Sequence: TJILLIJ for 6-combo.
Sequence: TILSZJTSOLJ for 10-combo.This works best if you've already put an I into one of your empty columns. But with shorter combos, the damage can be lackluster, especially against Puyo with its lesser combo count bonus. We could just take a T-spin plus Tetris for a high damage short combo:
Of course, we've seen above that we can build a double-double on top of our column. This works well in both the central tree and the two-wide tree. It's not as good in the three-wide tree since it requires using either two Ls (for top-corner only), two Zs or Ss (for bottom-corner only), or an extra I, which is already in short supply:
2-wide tree:
Central tree:
3-wide tree:
Bottom-left:
Against Puyo, we might want to get both our T-spins and the Tetris in a together in a combo due to the way damage scaling works. If we do this, we get at least 14 notches on our green bar for 8+ lines of garbage. We can generally do this by holding the T and getting a deck with T and I next to each other or one piece apart; this happens more than half the time. And when it doesn't happen, well, doing them separate isn't too bad either, and we can sometime interpose a one-line clear to combo anyway.
What about other ways to do multispin + Tetris here? Well, we've already seen the back-to-back triple with the two-wide-tree, which generally works whenever the inverted L is at the top. How about with the three wide tree, or with the central tree?
3-wide tree:
Top-left:
Central tree:
We see that we can do it with the three-wide tree by using an I, in both the bottom-corner and top-corner variants. With the central tree, we still kind of need the I to smoothly fill in the S-columns with stuff. The trip-trip is more often seen as a standalone multispin, but it's nice to keep in mind for the Repeat Seat in case we end up filling in the S-columns.
Against Puyo, we may wish to combo our two T-spins with the Tetris. This is actually easier in probability than the above dubdub: we can do it by holding the T with any deck in which the I is either immediately before or within a few pieces after the T, via clearing the hook with an interposing piece: (Sequence: TTOI)
The above example uses an O for simplicity, but you can generally improvise something. I randomly generated a deck pair just now (losjzti,lzjosit) and lo and behold, we can clear it as follows: (Sequence: TTZLI)
This clear does 20 lines of damage against Tetris and 16+ damage bar against Puyo for 10+ lines of garbage blocks so is generally lethal in either case unless defended, though the setup is usually not the most practical.
We can also do a multispin via the Left-O:
This is often much faster to set up than the above trip-trip multispin, and does barely less damage. We get a T-spin double and a T-spin triple in addition to our Tetris. The same clearing logic applies, allowing us to combo the T-spins with the Tetris via an interposing clear most of the time: (Sequence: TTOI)
Randomized deck (tijlozs): (Sequence via piece swapping: TTJLI)
Conclusion:
We've seen how to transition into a formulaic attacking game from basic openings, ways to execute our repeated attacks, and ways to transition out to combos, improvisational clearing/counterpunching, and high-damage bops. We have the tools needed both to repeatedly hit Puyo players and to play our Tetris versus Tetris game beyond the opening. In later posts, we can look at the general theory of midgame and dynamic use of these tools in a game of play and counterplay.
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