Currently, one of the predominant approaches for optimal classical planning is A* search with heuristics that partition action costs among several abstractions of the input planning task. One example of this approach is the Scorpion planner, which computes saturated cost partitionings over projections and Cartesian abstractions. Scorpion participated in the International Planning Competition 2023 and achieved the second place in the optimal track. It was only outperformed by the Ragnarok portfolio planner, which includes Scorpion as a component. In this invited paper for the ECAI Frontiers in AI series, we present the components of Scorpion and analyze their contributions to the overall performance in an ablation study. As a result, the paper serves as a short introduction to many of the techniques that are vital for state-of-the-art performance in optimal classical planning.