Unrefined Openings: The O No!

    

Most of my openings writing is after much thought and experimentation. But here's one in raw, unvarnished form, yet-to-be distilled.

I was playing TvP and got STOIJ as my opening deck. While I now see I could've just played RJ's Joy, no opening occurred to me at the time, so I went back to the old mainstay of doing a T-spin then improvising Tetrises and T-spins. I played my first deck as follows:

  

I call this the O, No! because I've in the past gotten into this position when hoping to do a WumbOJ but ending up with the L before the J, at which point I say "No!". Play the O, then say No, and here we are.

The simple next play is to just take a Tetris on the right. (The fancier play is to set up a T-spin single into rightside Tetris, but I'd already screwed up being fancy once...) And so the next 7 pieces were spent taking this Tetris:

  

It was pretty easy to play a T-spin single immediately:



Then... WOAH! An all-clear at 20!



This is a No-Z all-clear. So we have a T-spin single, a Tetris, a T-spin single, and a 20 piece all-clear. In TvP this is very close in damage to the Izzy20's best possible three T-spin doubles and an all-clear, and better than a whole lot of 20 piece all-clears. I suspect this opening is too constrained by deck ordering to be useful in practice, which is likely why I've never seen it, but it's potentially a nice fallback if we want to guess on the WumbOJ, and don't hit. And it might be good secret-strat counterplay, doing 20 damage in 20 pieces in a way no one expects.   

Let's do a quick look at the constraints to check our hypothesis:


Constraints: I < J|L, O < Z


Constraints: L < Z|T, S|J < T


Constraints: I < O (or I last), T < J (or T last)


Pretty thoroughly constrained second deck. This might be good enough to be worth practicing if we decide to go for the WumbOJ excessive amounts in modes where we don't get to see 5 pieces ahead, like Swap. Good enough to play as an intended opening? Possibly in TvP, but the jury's still out. Were I investigating this, I would look at alternate all-clears, look at the path of switching to a repeat T-spin single pattern with Tetrises in column 10, and generally investigate feasibility and fallbacks.