Counter

When garbage is queued on a player's board, but hasn't yet been placed on the playfield, it can be mitigated before it has a chance to drop. Queued garbage won't drop until the player makes a move that does not result in clearing any petals - this allows a player with many clear opportunities available on their board to delay the impact of garbage by several moves.

If any of these moves results in a clear that would send garbage to the opponent - such as a Chain - instead of sending garbage, it will reduce the player's own garbage queue by the amount that would otherwise be sent in addition to delaying its deployment. It's possible for small, successive chains to whittle down the impact of a large incoming garbage attack this way. If the queue is reduced to 0 , any excess garbage is sent to the opponent as normal.

Strategy

If two players make chains of similar sizes and execute them around the same time, they will typically cancel out, so a large garbage attack is most effective when the opponent doesn't have a chain set up to counter it.

While an incoming garbage attack can be mitigated by a large chain, a player in a position to do this may instead choose to Tank and Send - deliberately making a move that allows the incoming garbage to drop before setting off their own chain, ensuring that all of the garbage sent goes toward attacking the opponent rather than countering the incoming attack. This may be an advantageous strategy if a player is in a better position to deal with incoming garbage than their opponent, or if the amount of incoming garbage is comparatively small compared to the amount the player can send back. It is a much more dangerous strategy to employ in game modes such as Trash Attack where dropped garbage appears fully-formed, with a high likelihood of immediately interrupting chain setups.