Speeches Thread

To the esteemed members of the Jury, hello and welcome to our Pyramid of Secrets! We are super happy to have you here and excited to get started with the tour. We’ll traverse a few twists and turns and traps, so mind your heads!

First, we want to start off by saying thank you to everyone for making this game amazing. Every single person here has contributed to this game in their own special way and it has been everything to spend the last two-ish months with you guys <3333

So who are your wonderful tour guides? Well none other than Maat and Hathor of course! But, pull behind the masks and reveal that it was actually Hathor and Maat the whole time! A huge revelation, we know! Together, we created personas to try and mask our IDs inspired by the other. You know Hathor as the elegant goddess of the sky, but she’s truly a Maat at heart Coffee, Boyfriend, or a Cat? I have none! Maat, pretending to be the loud, excitable of the two, speaking in large letters and comic sans actually hates K-Pop and nicknames

This was both a strategy and a very fun gimmick! We are a hydra made up of two individual players, one who is typically known as a social threat, and the other, a challenge threat. We needed to cover that up! Having Maat start off the game seeming to be the social threat, really helped cover up the fact that Hathor was the one that LOVED pm’ing. We laid the ground work to establish strong social connections with both heads and even typed/responded as the other so people never felt like one person was more receptive than the other. Doing this forced us to play a completely different game than we usually do and allowed us to break out of our comfort levels more.

Nearer to the end, this became less important to our gameplay as our personalities were already established and we shifted to dividing up our game into the strategic and social spheres. Hathor managed the social relationships, building up our alliances and communications with everyone in the game while Maat laid plans and organized tribal councils. We knew our challenge ability would be varied with us having to swap off and relying on challenges would not get us far so we put all of our attention into these two spheres. We can confidently say we never felt in danger due to the strong alliances we created and often held control in tribal councils with our carefully laid plans. Now, let’s focus on specific moments throughout this game:

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Jotunn -


Coming into Jotunn, Maat was the only one available to PM and hit the ground running. We tried setting up initial alliances with Loki and Hermes in order to prepare for the tribal that never happened. We felt comfortable that we could have a majority here if necessary with Jael or Radiance joining us, so no big worries here. In the middle of this tribe, we had to deal with the shipwreck twist that brought us everyone in the game, and we used this to establish connections right off the bat. We sussed out who we thought were heavy hitters and started staking a claim for future alliances. In this phase, we made connections with Hades, Poppy, Perse, and the other hydras, all connections that would soon prove profitable. At the end of this tribe, Radiance proposed a five person alliance with Jael, Hermes, Loki and us, and we immediately were soured to that idea. We didn’t want to go into the rest of the game with a large Jotunn majority and knew that would quickly become a death sentence. We told Viy about this plan of Radiance’s to keep him in the loop and to watch his back. Luckily this alliance was never needed and the tribe ended without a hitch.


Taotie -

The Jinn threw us into Taotie and this was when we really got into the game. Some of our most important connections formed here. This was a very important tribe for us because we took part in two alliances that would influence our entire game. The first alliance was called Life & Death. This alliance consisted of Cerberus, Poppy, Hades, and us. We directed every single tribal on Taotie as a group and had full control. The second alliance our Hydra alliance. It consisted of Fili and Kili, Phobos and Deimos, and us. This group was more under the radar but we were still focused on building up this group.

The first tribal was a consensus inactive boot (Odysseus), no questions asked.

The second was a tribal that we directed. We had wanted Radiance out to avoid a Jotunn majority getting us targeted down the line. This tribal was our first “big move” as Bilious and Poppy did not want Radiance out. We had to convince Life & Death that this was the best path forward and do so while also trying to snag ourselves a Double Vote in the process. We managed to get radiance out (3-1) and a Double Vote in our pockets.

The third and last tribal on Taotie, we successfully blindsided both F&K and Bilious. Poppy had told us early on in the tribe that Bilious had an idol and he was intent on using it on himself. This plan came into motion when Hades brought forth the idea of a Blindside, booting Fili & Kili and flushing Bilious’ idol. We were initially saddened by the idea of having to backstab F&K but when they didn’t tell us about P&D being in danger, we knew the hydra alliance was over and focused our efforts on Life & Death.

Directing Taotie tribals was not all that would come out of these connections. The Life and Death Alliance that we built up on Taotie would follow us to the very end of the game. Our strongest group alliance was always with Poppy, Cerberus and Hades and we shared every bit of information that we could with them. We will refer to all connections as skyscrapers and it was on Taotie that we started building these skyscrapers. By the end of this tribe, our skyscrapers were already hundreds of feet tall and these would only get taller and taller until the very end.


Valkyrie -

Being on Valkyrie was one of our last options in the draft; we wanted to avoid Bilious at all costs after the Taotie blindsides, but we didn’t get an option. On this tribe, we had the Hadith twist and we set up a pact with Loki. However, we never got a steal vote because Hades had picked us from across tribal lines and blocked us. We made do, however, organizing notes on who everyone else on our tribe picked and pulling that info throughout the game. We knew where every steal a vote was and started planning on how to ensure we always had control of the vote despite them. The tribal here wasn’t too eventful as Bilious was an easy boot since he had been rubbing Hermes/Loki the wrong way and Poppy was ready to move on. She still walked out of this tribe with Bilious’ Lent double vote, increasing her threat level and showing us that she could be very persuasive even to a player that was on their way out the door. 


Rakshasa -

This was a tribe where things could have gone south really fast. We lucked out never having to go to tribal but we were always worried about that prospect. Most of our allies were on Vanara and we had to create new connections fast. We never went to a formal tribal but due to the Moirai DI, we did “go to tribal” the second round. We quickly found out that Cerberus was pretty interested in sticking to original tribal lines. Jael and Jesus were people that we didn’t fully trust here and things were looking pretty dicey, having only Hermes. We managed to get all of the Moirai votes on Jael except of course, Jael’s and Hermes’. We knew they would be a big target after not going to tribal for the entire game and we felt comfortable knowing they would still be around at F9. We convinced Jesus to vote for Jael over his preferred vote in P&D. We told Persephone how we felt about Jael and she realized she felt the same and voted with us. And we convinced Cerberus that Jael was a better vote than Eloritu. We shared our plan with Athena and she revealed she had also been working to get the votes on Jael, but was afraid of our connection to them and didn't tell us originally. Being open here allowed us to form that first contact with Athena and form a trusting bond that we would end up needing later in the game.

But the most important thing that happened on this tribe was our connection with Jesus. We did not have a strong connection with him back on Jotunn. We did not connect during the second shipwreck. We connected here. Jesus and us played a game of “information ping pong” during this Moirai vote and bonded heavily over it. We realized that we both felt close to Hades and Viy. We both realized that the titan block would be an issue eventually and that Jael was cagey. Starting here, Jesus was our number ONE ally for the rest of the game and no one else in the game realized this/when they realized it, it was far too late. Nearly half of the jurors, if not more, had mentioned booting Jesus to us throughout the merge and we ensured that never happened. We both knew the other would not stab us and that is something really powerful. Our connection was like the Burj Khalifa, taller than anything else before it. This is hands down, the most important connection that we ever had throughout this entire game.We could not be here without him just as he couldn’t be here without us.

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Merge

For the next portion of the game, we want to go into the details about how we maneuvered through each tribal and the impacts we made on the game. We'll go through our own thoughts on the tribal as well as how we set up for the future.


Hermes -

Typically you aren’t supposed to talk about mistakes in your game in FTC but we think it’s worth it to mention it because it led to really great things. Maat was not here for this tribal because her phone had died and this was Hathor's first game making merge and first merge round ever. This tribal was incredibly rough but it helped her in a lot of ways as well. She gunned for Persephone’s head really hard here, trying to salvage our alliance with Hermes. Ultimately, that failed, but a couple good things came out of this:

First, we realized how much Jesus was on our side. He was the only person who was telling us what others were saying about us. Second, we bonded really well with Jael, the only other person who REALLY wanted Hermes to live. In hindsight, they couldn’t do anything since they had that idol but this was the first round that we managed to bond hard with them. Lastly, this was the beginning of our journey to repair our relationship with Persephone. The journey led to a one round no-target pact and an informal alliance.

Hathor tried hard to save Hermes but backed out when she started realizing that it was too risky and we simply didn’t have the numbers. We voted Hermes and that concluded this sad round, our lowest point in the game. From there, things got much better


Eloritu -

Going into this tribal, we were still reeling from the failed plan to take out Perse. We had to recollect ourselves and stabilize our game and fast. Our name was brought up this tribal, but was quickly squashed and we’d like to think that was due to our own relationships and bonds we had formed. The target changed from us to Cerberus but we didn’t get the full info on why that changed. However, it didn’t matter! We had already known from Poppy that Cerberus had a double idol, the Ring of Mudarra, which he used to protect both of us. Cerberus played this idol on both of us while we directed the votes onto Eloritu/Persephone. Athena, Jesus and Hades pushed for Eloritu while Poppy, Cerberus and us stuck on Perse. We knew with the idol, there was no need to organize a vote and our relationships with Eloritu and Perse were already strained and we did not have a strong desire to control the vote. Splitting the votes allowed us to quickly scan who had the Video Idol and we narrowed down our options to Jael and P&D after the votes were revealed. We accused P&D of having it as we felt close enough that he would tell us if confronted and he revealed he had tried to backstab Cerberus and knew that Jael had the idol instead. We were grateful to know this information, but knew that at this point, P&D had been keeping too many secrets to be a safe bet.


Cerberus -

We had already been setting up Cerberus as a potential boot before this round. We loved the Life & Death alliance but began to get worried that Cerberus was too Titan strong for that alliance to be successful. We had proposed votes on Athena, P&D, and Perse in the past and we always seemed to hit a wall. With that said, we didn’t have much influence over Cerberus going here. We knew Jael had the idol and we tried to put in a good word for ourselves so that we weren’t the target of that idol, but we also didn’t try and change the boot here. With three double votes in the Life and Death alliance and Cerberus’ steal a vote, it would have been possible to counteract the Moirai votes, but this wasn’t the path we chose to take and are still confident in that decision: Jael solidified the target on their back and had no more idols or Moirai votes to protect them. Cerberus, our perceived F2 had been taken out, lowering our threat level and giving us the ability to strengthen other relationships.


P&D -

This vote was probably the most difficult to arrange and caused the biggest disagreement in the Life and Death alliance. Originally, Jael was the intended target for this round, as the idol had delayed that vote a round. This round, Life and Death could control who went home due to the Double Votes expiring here, and we wanted to make sure we did not waste this on getting someone who just received a majority of votes out of the game just yet. We fought to push this vote onto P&D but Hades and Poppy both were against it for their own reasons. For us, this worried us because it seemed like Hades was trying to keep Titans in the game and Poppy was off planning her own thing with Jael and Perse. We took the conversation to each of them privately where Poppy revealed she wouldn’t be voting Jael or P&D at all and was actually trying to vote for Jesus. Hades revealed that he was worried Jael would be able to squirm their way out of a vote again and be impossible to beat in the end given their gameplay. Additionally, he shared that saving Jael would dissuade Athena from wanting to work with us in the future. We came to an agreement: if we could convince Athena to vote for P&D here without making her worried about our loyalties, Hades was in.

The plan was in motion and the deadline was close. With just about an hour left to go in tribal, Maat had to convince Athena, Jesus and then Hades that P&D had to go. This was the birth of the Revenge of the Nile alliance (Athena, Hades, Jesus, us). They quickly agreed and the plans changed quickly. But this wasn’t without it’s own chaos. People shared that plans were changing and the Jael vote façade was dropped and Jesus was revealed as the target. We doubled down and pulled in Perse to ensure Jesus stayed safe. We eventually got all but Poppy on this vote, her two votes leading to some confusion. Moving the vote onto P&D was a big move as it left the rest of the people in the game showing all their cards. We knew who each person liked best, who each person was willing to compromise on. P&D had always been a question mark in that respect and leaving an unknown in the game at that point could have been dangerous.


Jael -

After the chaos of the previous rounds it seemed like now was the time to get things back on track. The DI could have thrown a wrench into things but it honestly made sticking with the easy vote ideal. Plans would have been hard to snake down the line of PMs and saving Jael would have left us without a safety net if it turned Athena and Hades against us. Jael had been a great player and managing to dodge so many tribals with knives at their throat at every turn would have been tough to beat.


Persephone -

After nearly four rounds of a nonaggression pact, it was time for this pact to end. We had managed to dodge a lot of the heat after repairing our relationship with Perse. However, with Athena winning immunity here, our hand was forced. The only other alternative brought up by Poppy and Hades had been Jesus, but we weren’t about to let that happen. Without repairing our relationship with Perse, we believe it would have been Perse vs. Us during this tribal so the impact of our informal alliance was seen here. This could have been the point where we received our first vote, but Perse was still not willing to turn on us after we fixed our relationship. We had always been thinking about how each player we voted out would end up being a member of the jury, but it seemed very real here. We had made promises and alliances with everyone left in the game and we didn't want to sour those relationships on their way out. At this point, we started explaining our decisions to vote out our target, ensuring they knew why we had to make the decision we did.


Athena -

Athena was always the Challenge Beast of the game, and Maat finally winning an immunity here against her felt amazing. She had proven that given a creative challenge, she could wipe the floor with us, so winning this challenge will always be a personal victory. With Athena now on the table and our Life & Death alliance in control, we took our shot, ensuring the rest of us had the opportunity to win immunities down the line. This was made easier by Jesus being willing to sack her here and an alliance forming between Hades/Jesus and us to discuss the vote. We prepared the next round to be Poppy and gave ourselves a path to the end of the game.


Poppy -

With Hades offering us a F2 and us trusting Jesus with our entire game, Poppy would have gone here unless she got immunity. Hades did not agree with that idea but we believed that Jesus would win firemaking in the event of a tiebreaker so we could have made it happen without Hades’ vote. Our endgame plan was a F3 with Hades and Jesus and a F2 with Jesus but we were still incredibly sad during this round because Poppy had constantly been doing things for the better of OUR game. She did a lot of things for our game and we absolutely would not be here without her. When we explained our reasoning to her, she took it with grace, confident in her own gameplay and understanding of our reasons. 

Overall, we strongly believe all three players that were alive at F4 would’ve taken us to the end. They can confirm or deny that claim in jury questioning, but we were confident in the people that made it to this point and the fact we were involved in bringing all these players to that point.


Hades -

Going into the Final Immunity Challenge, we felt confident that both players intended to bring us. We had an explicit Final 2 deal with both and both had been willing to cut the other at points in the merge. When we both competed and lost our individual challenges, we realized our fate would lie in the social relationships we made in this game, something we had set out so early to strengthen. This round was a testament to our strategy of putting all our points into social gameplay and away from challenge ability.

During this round, Jesus questioned us and heavily debated his decision. Despite our F2 plan, we still had to do a bit of convincing. We understood why he had these last minute jitters. We admire his game and Hades’ game. We all played incredible games and deserved to be here at f3. Shoutout to Hades for making an alliance chat called Les trois finale with Jesus and us. We know that you got cold feet about Jesus pretty fast but that was a nice prophecy and it came true!

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Overall, I think we played a strong game, having to not only endure the twists and turns this game threw at us, but each other. Balancing two wildly different playstyles was a fun challenge and we’re both genuinely surprised we managed to pull it off so well. To reiterate our last few points and a TL;DR of why you should vote us:

• We went through the entire game, never receiving a vote.
• We knew when to create alliances and knew when to let them fall apart.
• We had items but never needed them to accomplish our goals.
• We orchestrated many eliminations leading us to a point where we would confidently make it to here, The Final Tribal Council.

Alright that’s it! Thank you for taking the time to read this monster. Love you all and see you in the question threads o/

Sincerely,
Maat and Hathor