The other day I was talking to a friend of mine about strategy guides and how to make them. Technically there are no "rules" to these, just sort of informal ideas on how to make them. The idea behind them was inspired by two things. TierZoo which looks at evolution as a point-buy stat system video game and will talk about different animal "builds" or how they invest "points" into different stats and abilities that make them more or less competitively viable. Shadiversity's "Fantasy Re-Armed" series talking originally about good weapons for various fantasy races to use or to use against them. The principle idea here was to take vs debating and do something similar with that.
Because it evolved naturally there isn't really "rules", but there are general guidelines:
1: You take the verse you are trying to counter and organize it's characters roughly into tiers. Initially I did on what kinds of threats you were likely to face at a certain sphere of influence, but it's morphed to the more difficult "everything in the verse."
2: You pick 2-4 characters that you think could counter all the characters in the tiers, generally via abilities you think would be strong in the verse because they neutralize the verse's biggest strengths and/or take advantage of relative blind spots and weaknesses in the verse. These initially weren't ordered but it quickly became the norm to order them from the worst to best counter for the verse.
3: You can't use characters more powerful or faster than the verse by a wide margin. A small margin is acceptable, particularly if having just a small speed or power gap is a strategy that the verse would be weak too, but you're not supposed to rely on just out-stating the verse in question. This was done primarily just so the best counters aren't just "the strongest characters I know about." This makes verses with odd stats combinations much harder.
4: If a verse is high in attack potency or durability but not both, for instance a series of glass cannon wizards that can destroy cities but have human level durability, you can pick counters who similarly can match their high stat in one stat, but not both. So in the above case, you could pick a counter with city level attack potency, or city level durability, but not both
5: Some characters have things that sort of get around this rule, such as summoning characters much stronger than them or using temporary power-ups that make them way stronger. Generally speaking that's fine so long as you're not relying on that to "cheese" countering a verse's abilities. The point of this is to counter what the verse can and can't do, and just picking a character way stronger, or can get way stronger, or can summon way stronger isn't really interacting with the verse. You know it's a good counter when it feels like the counter's abilities feel tailor made to counter the verse you're comparing it too, rather than just being strong in general. If you want what I consider the ideal example of this, I would look to my friend Thor's countering of the Ring-verse's high tiers, specifically Sadako, with Talim. A mind-bendingly good counter.
6: Likewise to the above, generally you don't wanna pick characters that just outhax. A lot of counters honestly DO come down to being a little bit more hax and that's just sort of the way VS debating can go, but your character should be hypothetically defeat-able. If you put a ghost or a platonic concept in a verse where they have no physical attacks, obviously they're going to win; the verse can't even hit them. That's not engaging with the verse's abilities at all, that's basically the same as picking a character way more powerful.
And that's really it. It's a really fun little VS game that test your knowledge of different verses and tactical thinking with bizarre abilities, which is what I love about vs debating. A side effect of it but now one of the primary reasons I do it is not just do I think it sharpens my ability to vs debate, it very much sharpens my knowledge of my own favorite verses; what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are, and who they realistically would/wouldn't defeat. I think vs debating would be humble in general if people were willing to say "this is my favorite character and these are the characters I think would beat them in a close fight." In other words I think strategy guides not only show your favorite verses best qualities tactically, it helps show where the limits are.
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