In our last look at midgame formulae, we discussed patterns which emphasized repeated T-spins. However, there's another big single attack to think about--the Tetris. Patterns which emphasize these can be strong for many reasons. While against Tetris, a T-spin double does the same damage as a Tetris and a triple does even more, against Puyo a Tetris does the same damage as a T-spin triple, suggesting we should consider more Tetris-heavy play in TvP. Tetrises also can be set up and played with pure hard-drops. For a T-spin, we need to at least soft-drop the T... which can be quite a few milliseconds when the T-spin hole is close to the bottom of the screen. Tetris-heavy patterns can give us more flexibility, as it's much easier to set up T-spins on top of a Tetris hole than it is to set up Tetrises given a T-spin board. We get a certain flexible explosiveness, where we can set up multiple Tetrises and one or more T-spins, and can keep building and attack in one fell swoop when our opponent isn't ready to defend--by contrast, T-spin patterns usually have to take T-spins one or two at a time as they come along. Finally, the building of Tetrises is far more intuitive to most players than the building of T-spins, allowing for less thinking and thus faster play.
1. Why column 7?
Beginning players are more familiar with Tetrising in a side column, which can indeed be a powerful pattern. But as one cannot T-spin in columns 1 and 10, focusing on this can make Tetris + T-spin attacks difficult, awkward, and inflexible. We also lose the powerful maneuver of placing pieces by hard-pulling then hard-dropping in whichever side column we're using, as only the I gets placed there. Placing things one away from the side can call for much more precision and slowness than exactly placing things on the side.
If we place our Tetris column in 4 or 7, we can build a 3xN on the side. This 3xN won't kill us if we're damaged, since only columns 4-7 are fatal to incoming pieces. It's easy to set up a T-spin hole on the 3xN with the S, Z, or even O, and we can go right back into building upward after taking the T-spin. And of course we can place almost all the pieces by hard-drag + hard-drop, a very fast way to place a piece.
Why column 7 over 4? Arguably, 7 is slightly worse for survivability, since more pieces kill you in column 4. But, on the other hand, placing pieces in 4-6 is often much faster, since the majority of pieces enter the board in these columns and can be very quickly hard-dropped. Speed is the name of the game, and the survivability difference is quite slight.
2. Building up
The Right Side
Part of what we seek to achieve with a Tetris-heavy pattern is speed of piece placement--we make up for being less efficient in terms of damage per piece by placing more pieces in a given time. So, let's look at ways to build the right-side that can be done as fast as possible--by dragging each piece to the right side of the screen and dropping it.
We should all know this basic 3x4:
It turns out that the left one can be placed by dragging each piece all to the right and hard dropping--just by holding right then tapping up. Of course we have to rotate the L twice during the drag. The one on the right, we have to move the O left once, so we hold right, then tap left and up real quick. Slightly slower, but still pretty good.
And we should all know these ones by now:
It's not immediately obvious, but the two on the left can both be placed in pure drag+drops. For JSL, we drag J all the way to the right and drop it, drag S all the way to the right, release, hit B (counterclockwise rotate) and drop it, and for L, we drag, hit B while during the drag, and drop it. Of course if we were perfect and trying to save frames, we could place this S by hitting A during the drag and dropping just before we reached the edge. But if you're not practicing to be the absolute l33t3st speed demon, it's more reliable to practice the S as follows: hold Right, lift thumb, then in one fluid motion hit B and Up at almost the same time, Up very slightly later. The reason this works is that the hard drag places S against the right corner in its flat orientation. Hitting B rotates it leftward, which puts it one away from the wall. See the post on spins for more on the rotation mechanics.
The same logic applies to the Z in JZL--it's just that we have to rotate J once and L twice during their drags.
For LZJ and LSJ, there's no help for it, we have to place J or L respectively one away from the wall. We can either have perfect timing, or drag right, hit left, then hit up. So we're slightly slower on these 3x4s with L at the bottom.
Finally, there are these two:
These can both be placed in pure drag+drop. If you end up playing an L on bottom, you might prefer the LSL for just this reason. You wouldn't typically see much of these in a Long Combo setup, where we intentionally place a 3x4 every deck, but in column 7 Tetris Tea, we usually want to build the left and right at approximately the same speed, which means that the right side shouldn't be getting 3 pieces per deck. So it's quite feasible to build with LSL and JZJ, and sometimes your best and fastest option.
The I/O
The I starts horizontal across columns 4 through 7. In our build, we'll mostly want to place it upright in columns 5 and 6, these being the fastest places to put it. Indeed, we may sometimes put Is side-by-side in 5 and 6 to build these columns up by 4 squares.
To place I in column 5, hit B just as it comes out, and hit Up for a hard-drop. Practice doing this in one fluid motion, hitting them almost at the same time with B coming slightly first. To place in column 6, do the same with A. One can do this placement exceedingly fast.
The O comes out in columns 5 and 6, and this is the fastest place to drop it. In general, we'll tend to drop it in 5+6, 4+5, or at the far right for JOL 3x4s. To place it in 4+5, we tap left and tap up. To place it at the far right, as discussed above, we hard-drag and hard-drop. All these placements can be accomplished very quickly.
The left side
So far, we haven't played a T, and we've been largely silent about columns 1 through 4. While the T can operate as a fixer later in the build, at the beginning, the easiest place to play it is flat in columns 1-3:
We can do this with just a hard-drag left and a hard-drop, without rotating it. Once we've done that, we get easy placements for Z and S:
The Z placement is your basic drag-and-drop. For S, you tap Left and B at the same time, then tap Up to hard drop. The Left moves it from 4-6 to 3-5, the B orients it on the left side of its 3-wide box to be in 3-4, and the hard drop gets it in its place on the T.
From here, putting this together with the I/O, we can just place the next O in 5-6, or if we have an L we want to use at the beginning of next deck, we can place the I in 6 and invert the L and put it in 4-5. This again is a fast motion: tap Left and B at the same time, and hard drop.
Putting it together
Improvising from these basic building blocks, we can place both the left and right side of this build extremely rapidly, almost entirely using the fastest and most reliable piece movements. This lets us build up Tetrises in column 7, which we can again take fairly rapidly, by hitting A and Right at the same time then Up to hard-drop our I.
We see in the above example builds the use of T-spins in addition to our Tetrises, sometimes comboed together. How do we add these?
3. Taking the Tetris with Tea
Unlike with a repeated T-spin pattern, our goal with a Tetris-heavy pattern is not to T-spin with every T in the deck. Rather, we place pieces as rapidly as possible and take T-spins whenever they become convenient to our rapid placement. The most convenient place to T-spin is right in column 7:
This possible when columns 6 and 8 are the same height. One can get into this awkward situation where they're just one square different in height:
If one places an S on the left and a Z on the right, the difference remains. But since we're NOT trying to T-spin with every T, we can just place a T in the lower side, and now our sides are the same height and we can T-spin with our next T:
If we're willing to lose a back-to-back bonus, we can even up the sides with a 3 line clear via J or L:
One can also T-spin off the central column. This has the downside of temporarily blocking our Tetrises, so ideally we build these with the idea of taking the T-spin almost immediately. We can be just one square off the central column pretty easily; this has the advantage of not requiring our columns 6 and 8 to be even, as long as our T-spin notch is in the right place:
We can also T-spin completely off the column,which can be useful if our right side is much higher than our left. Here we want to make sure that our T-spin exactly clears the column, i.e. by only having the corresponding two lines atop our column, or by having just one and taking a T-spin single:
Above we see few ways of doing this, but most commonly, we conveniently cover our column with the O, the Z, or the S which then gets a T-spin close by. I also included a couple examples using a faceup L, but this is seen less often.
While we covered many ways to T-spin in this section, the substantial majority of your T-spins in this pattern will be the basic column 7 double--this is usually the easiest, and offers us the flexibility to take Tetrises at any point.
4. Transitioning Out
It should be noted that it's very easy to transition between column 7 Tetris Tea and a Repeat Seat with a 3-wide tree. In fact, these often end up in almost exactly the same places, and the same transitions out apply. For more details on most of these transitions, read the transitions section on the Repeat Seat post. Let's just review.
As above, we can just take a T-spin with one or more Tetrises:
The above combo, done by holding I and getting a deck with T and I near each other, is among the easier ways of doing screen-filling damage versus Puyo.
We can do various multispins with or without a Tetris:
(Note: the I-spin under the hook for the trip-trip can ONLY be accomplished if the hook is at least 2 squares tall. Use this sequence: A->Hold D+R (Move to column 10+soft-drop to bottom)->B->A->hard-drop. See: I-spins)
You can combo out. Given built-up sides of 3xN or wider, we can transition into combos quite easily:
Sequence: ITSLJOJOS for 8-combo.Here we do see things a little different from the Repeat-Seat: in Tetris Tea, we're much more likely to get a left-side column as narrow as 3xN, while we'd normally see at least 4xN in the repeat seat. 3xNs on both sides means we can transition into the classic central Long Combo:
We don't even have to be particularly careful with having 3 squares of material in the hole here, as we can just clear the center until we have three squares at the top, and treat the rest as garbage in the hole. For example, from this awkward board:
We kind of have 6 squares of material in the top 3 lines of our center, but if we just downward clear three lines, we're effectively at 3 squares of material (Sequence: SLJ):
Now we're back at the left handle setup we know and love, and just need to avoid clearing more center lines till our sides are almost done.
It should also be mentioned that in addition to clearing down 3 rows, we can use the rows beneath the top to just add a square to the top row, which allows us to take a Tetris in column 7 later:
Essentially, we have the flexibility to use downward clears to remove material, or upward fills to add it, either way getting to 3 squares of material for our Long Combo.
Conclusion:
Column 7 Tetris Tea can be a powerful pattern, especially against Puyo. And by practicing its details, with its specific techniques for dropping pieces quickly, we can improve the general speed of our play. While the longer start-up time means this should not be our sole option from opening onward lest our opponent take advantage of sure knowledge of not being quickly disrupted, this pattern adds a powerful bullet to our ammunition.
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