The most ridiculously greedy opening is to set up a 20-line Long Combo, then start breaking. This is actually seen in top level play when both players open Long Combo and try to out-greed each other. On the other hand, some greedy T-spin combos I've seen are a lot less relevant. Let's start with the one that inspired this post, played against me by Glitch432 from California.
1. Glitch432's Greed: triptripdub
The idea here is to set up two T-spin triples into T-spin double on the left with LIZS, ZL, then fill in the right. While not useful against many openings, the greedy triptrip counters the rarely-used side long combo opening, bopping it with 13 damage the moment it builds to 8 lines. That might have some use. Another fun but useless tidbit: after the first two trips, you can put an inverted J on top of the Z for another two trips. Triples galore!
Of course, this opening loses quite trivially to any 15 or 20 piece all-clear, a central Long Combo, and generally anything that puts 14 lines of damage on the board before it can play its first triple. Our next opening, played against me by Jonathon from New York, is less vulnerable.
2. Jonathon's Quick Trips: single + triptrip
Needless to say, Jonathon did not win the round with this one. But the opening isn't completely impractical; the quick single can prevent a loss to an all-clear, and one can instead do a T-spin double pattern in column 8 and just opportunistically do the Trips instead against an opponent intent on setting up an early side Long Combo. The biggest point against this opening is that the first-deck constraints on it means that you can rarely use it even if you want to, and when you can you usually want to Izzy instead.
To the mix, let me add a few of my own creations from my files:
3. Robert's greedy TetrisTea openings
I've ordered these from most to least practical. Let's start with the most reasonable one.
I used this opening to pass the Tetris versus Puyo levels in Adventure mode as quickly and easily as possible, since the computer opponent doesn't really fight back. We just build two Tetrises and a T-spin, hold an I, then do T-spin + Tetris + Tetris together in a combo when we see the T and I occur close to each other. Computer takes nearly a full screen of damage, level over.
It's actually sane to use this in real competitive TvP matches sometimes, though, if we open Tetris Tea and have good reason not to attack them earlier, for example if they waste their early pieces in a small break, or if their board appears to be very robust to an early attack. Here, it's not our plan to open greedy, but rather something we do responsively, as an option to counter our opponent's play.
This one is slightly more theoretically efficient, but unlikely to see much use as an opening in real play. We build a Left-O multispin on top of our column 7 Tetris, hold a T, and do T-spin + T-spin + Tetris together in a combo when we see T and I occur close to each other, again. We need to be pretty clever with the I, though. We can either get it in at the end by clearing the hook with a J or L, or I-spin it in via the AAB sequence.
The reason this wouldn't see much real play versus the above is the lack of flexibility. We're in a fairly awkward spot until the Left-O finishes building, so we'd almost always take the Tetris before setting up the multispin, at least when used as an opening attack.
Here's something I did while practicing transitions, which gives almost the most huge pure back-to-back combo you can get. You hold T, and magically happen to get two decks with their Ts near to each other and an I in the mix. Bam, you can do THREE T-spin triples with a Tetris. I wouldn't plan on doing this outside of Marathon or Free Play, though.
Conclusion
Really greedy T-spin combo openings aren't very practical. But though not so hot as main go-to tactics, they might still come up as counterplay. Really, though, their big selling point is being fun and awesome.
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