What actually decides a Gem Grab

Gem Grab is not a collection race. Ten gems is the entry fee. The win condition is fifteen seconds of survival while the other team knows precisely what it needs to do and exactly where the gems are standing. Teams that treat the tenth gem as a finish line lose it around the eleventh second, having spent two minutes preparing for a test they were never going to be given.

Everything else follows from that. Gems are a liability as much as an asset. A death is a transfer rather than a loss. The middle of the map is worth holding long before anybody needs it, and the counter on the scoreboard is a much worse guide to who is winning than the question of which team is set up to survive a countdown.

Nobody wins Gem Grab by collecting. They win it by holding a count that nobody can break for fifteen seconds.

The carrier decision comes first

Settle who carries inside the first ten seconds, then have everyone else stop picking gems up. The carrier is not the best fighter on the team; it is the body that can sit behind cover and never be forced into a fight. Enough health to survive one mistake, enough range to contribute without stepping out, and a Super that gets it out of trouble rather than into it. Once that is agreed, every gem collected by anybody else is a gem sitting on the wrong body, in the wrong place, waiting to be dropped somewhere contested.

The corollary is the rule people hate. As the carrier you do not take fights. Not good ones, not free-looking ones, not the one where you are certain you win the trade. A clean trade still scatters your gems across contested ground, and it hands the enemy a respawn with nothing to lose while you respawn with nothing at all.

Count their gems, not yours

The number that decides your next thirty seconds is the enemy count rather than your own. Once they are within a couple of gems of ten you are playing defence whether you have noticed or not, and the correct response is not to gather faster. It is to find their carrier and make them uncomfortable enough that the count stops climbing. Killing a carrier before a countdown starts is worth more than three loose gems, because it resets a clock that has not begun yet, and clocks that have not begun are cheap to reset.

The mine is the only source of gems on the map, which makes the ground around it both the most valuable and the most dangerous real estate in the mode. You do not need to stand on it. You need standing on it to be expensive. That is why a thrower or an artillery brawler is worth so much here: they make the mine a place the enemy carrier cannot linger without paying, and nobody on your team has to walk into the open to arrange it.

Gem GrabRules, team archetypes and the rest of the mode primer.→

When you do reach ten, the correct behaviour looks like cowardice from the outside. Stop pushing. Fall back to cover with sightlines onto the routes the enemy has to use, keep the carrier behind the other two, and let the clock do the work. The most common way a team loses from a full count is one player who keeps fighting because the fight was going well, which is a description of every fight right up until it stops going well.

Drop to nine and the countdown restarts from fifteen. Two seconds of greed does not cost you a gem, it costs the whole timer.

If nobody has held ten through a countdown by the time regulation ends, the arena starts closing in and the map you learned stops existing. Hold the tighter side of the mine rather than the open one, group earlier than feels necessary, and remember that in a shrinking arena the team forced to move is the team that loses. Sudden death rewards the side that decided where it wanted to be standing before it had to be standing there.

Hard Rock MineA worked example: the mine sits in a clearing behind two bush belts, so the side lanes decide who reaches it.→