As a Pokédad, when you first start learning about the Pokémon community, at some point you discover “teams.” Teams sound like the secret sauce: a group of committed players identifying the meta, testing decks together, and having Pokéfun. You go to large tournaments and see people wearing funny and cool t-shirts and you wonder, “How do I get one of those sweet shirts?” Successful players such as Jacob Van Wagner and Zander Bennett prominently credit their teams for helping to facilitate their recent successes. I want my kids to be successful! Maybe they need to join a team!
But how does that happen? Does it really help? As I thought about this recently, I imagined that many new players and even some older players might have the same questions that I had, so I tried to find out the answers. Furthermore, as a technology professional who has a lot of experience with distributed teams, I wondered about the kinds of tools that teams use to work in a distributed fashion.
To find out the answers to some of these questions, I interviewed a slew of prominent Masters and Seniors players (some semi-anonymously) to find out information about how they work with teams. For this article, I will share with you their answers to my questions and then some analysis of the results.
Editor’s Note: There will be only minimal editing of the given replies.
Jacob Van Wagner
1. Does your team have a name? What is the name and how did you come up with it?
I’m on two teams actually. One is the more well known Team Hovercats, the origin of which is a trade secret. My main testing team however is named Honor Roll. I’m not sure exactly where the came from on that one, but it’s the brainchild of teammate Kenny Wisdom.
2. How many members does your team have? How many have you added or subtracted this year? How do you recruit new members?
Honor Roll has 14 members, 12 of which actively play and compete. It started out as five close friends then we have added more over the last two years, approaching people based on ability, overall success, willingness to keep ideas within the group, etc.
3. What technology tools does your team use? How do you communicate and share information?
We use Facebook Messenger primarily to communicate but occasionally through Skype.
4. What kind of collaboration happens on the team? How do you prepare for a major tournament?
Whenever anyone has an idea they just post it and we explore any possible way to make it effective and competitive against decks we already know to be top tier. Most of the time they don’t work out but when we do discover gems that are successful, it’s very satisfying.
5. How do decks get identified and tested? How often do you test/brainstorm? How do you account for sample size in testing?
Same idea. We gauntlet idea through the main decks in the meta. Sometimes this is done through smaller groups of local friends rather than explicitly teammates.
6. Is there a main person in the group that will generate the best strategies or best lists?
I would say we all come up with things pretty similarly but Travis Nunlist has been known to come up with a lot of “spooky” decks that have performed very well.
7. At what point do you give up on a rogue idea? Do you aim to beat the top three decks or accept one auto-loss and two heavily-favored matchups?
We generally give up on things when they are losing to more than half of what we’re testing it against. There are a lot of different decks that are good and you’ll see them all at events right now. If we put a deck together that’s only losing to one or two of the huge amount of decks that we find good right now, it’s probably worth bringing to a tournament.
8. What’s your standard consistency-card count in your test lists? Do you count VS Seeker?
Trade secret but yes, we count VS Seeker. ?
9. Do you bother testing matchups that you consider auto-wins or heavily favored after adding in a new tech that might lower consistency?
Yes.
Zander Bennett
1. Does your team have a name? What is the name and how did you come up with it?
We’re Team Nanerpus, which isn’t the most intimidating team name of all time but it started with this video right here a few years ago, and I’m actually one of the more recent members so I don’t know the exact history. For all I know they could just like the video.
2. How many members does your team have? How many have you added or subtracted this year? How do you recruit new members?
Team Nanerpus has 14 people on it, of which exactly half continue to play competitively. We do add and recruit new members, pretty much our friends, who get voted in by a council of 7 (no joke, it’s a big deal) after they have had a high-level Regionals/States run or they just tore up Cities.
3. What technology tools does your team use? How do you communicate and share information?
Nanerpus has a Facebook group but that isn’t as active as our group chat on Facebook which is about 15-20 members of Nanerpus or potential recruits. That chat is always active about something, not even always Pokémon because it’s our actual friend circle as well, but sometimes it’s Melee, sports, or just dank memes. We also use Skype a lot which I’ll go over next because it seems to fit better there…
4. What kind of collaboration happens on the team? How do you prepare for a major tournament?
We love Skype. It’s a lot of fun to just hang out with all of our friends and not even always just discuss Pokémon, same as before. Before a tournament happens, there is always a call. We talk about what did well last week, evaluate hype trains or decks that are just going to fail, and then come to a conclusion on what decks will be the best play. Mathematically we have isolated the correct play for each Week 1 Regionals week [sic] respectively (Yveltal, Mega Manectric/Tool Drop, and Seismitoad/Giratina). If you look at the top tables, the deck we selected had the most top cuts of the Regional that we attended.
5. How do decks get identified and tested? How often do you test/brainstorm? How do you account for sample size in testing?
Testing in our group is somewhat individual but our results are shared. Sometimes we test on PTCGO but a lot of our discussion is theorymon over Skype and then we test from there. Each one of us knows the decks that we are good with, for example I know that I will never be good with a slow deck, so I pretty much rule out any of those for my tournament selection (except for Primal Groudon Week 2 which I’ll be writing more about in my A Roll of the Dice article). Depending on the event, metagaming is somewhat ridiculous but we take a look at what did well the week before, what beats those decks, and how much the popularity of everything will rise and fall because the results. A lot of the reason that we figured out that Seismitoad/Giratina was the play for Fort Wayne was that Week 1 was all hard counters to Seismitoad/Giratina (Yveltal and Archiestoise). As the counters became the decks to beat, the format moved over to a format more succeptible to Seismitoad/Giratina, and by Week 3 Top 8 should have been 4 Seismitoad/Giratina (but it was only 3 because of the disqualification).
6. Is there a main person in the group that will generate the best strategies or best lists?
I am notoriously the bad deck idea maker. I always throw them out because I feel like any deck is worth discussing. After they put me in my place, we start to realize what decks from a new set seem to be solid and then make lists individually and compare. If I had to pick a name for the best decklist maker in our team, I think it would be James Hart. He’s really good at making consistent lists for concept and putting my wild lists into place. Personally, I’m normally a step ahead as I’m that guy who always looks ahead at what the next set is going to be (for example, one day after Regionals is over and I already have XY-BREAKthrough lists on my phone) so sometimes I just share my bad list and we fix it. However, I do think that having multiple heads generates the best decklists, and that normally happens in the Skype call.
7. At what point do you give up on a rogue idea? Do you aim to beat the top three decks or accept one auto-loss and two heavily-favored matchups?
When we realize that it just gets demolished by a new top deck or we can’t get a list to fit every card that we need to fit in the deck for it to work. Sometimes we just give up on stuff not because it’s bad but because we like other decks better. I feel like no matter what deck you’re playing you’re accepting an auto-loss to another deck, there are just to many powerful decks that especially in such a crazy format like upcoming Cities or the Georgia Marathon (where Nanerpus is going to be the new Dream Car Best Car), so it’s just a matter of metagaming.
8. What’s your standard consistency-card count in your test lists? Do you count VS Seeker?
I don’t think that I am the best person to talk to about consistency cards when the deck that I’m known best for runs 2 draw supporters. Consistency for me last weekend was 4 Shaymin, 3 Hoopa, 1 Unown, 1 N, 1 Colress, 4 VS Seeker (Yes, I do count VS Seeker), 3 Trainers’ Mail, and 3 Acro Bike. You could argue that Ghetsis counts also but that’s mainly for the disruption than the draw. For other decks, it’s entirely depending on how important resources are and how fast you fill your Bench. 3 Juniper, 1 N, 4 VS Seeker is the lowest I would go but obviously you would have things such as Shaymin and one would most likely add more of those and then some Colress too. That’s my guess at least, I’m much more of a fan of Rayquaza consistency ;)
9. Do you bother testing matchups that you consider auto-wins or heavily favored after adding in a new tech that might lower consistency?
I test them once just to make sure that it really is an auto-win, which sounds stupid but it’s important to know that you’re not just making assumptions. For example for Virginia Regionals last February I almost played Tool Drop, I don’t exactly remember why but I know that I considered V/G an auto-win. After getting wrecked by Alex Croxton twice I dropped the deck instantaneously. A lot of the time, an auto-win is an auto-win even with a few techs in there that may mess up consistency, there’s a reason that it’s an auto-win. As a whole, if we test the matchup once and we see it’s highly favorable, we don’t have time in our lives to double-check our results if its originally classified as an auto-win.
Russell LaParre
1. Does your team have a name? What is the name and how did you come up with it?
Some1sPC. We came up with the name on a 9-hour car ride back from Georgia Regionals last year. I forget which one of us in the group came up with the name.
2. How many members does your team have? How many have you added or subtracted this year? How do you recruit new members?
I believe 4 but we all have so many friends that contribute to our deck building that it’s basically 9 or 10 friends that are honorary members.
3. What technology tools does your team use? How do you communicate and share information?
We just use Facebook group messages and TCGone to test and share ideas. TCGone recently started freezing and glitching a lot so we all got really lazy and just test in person maybe once a month.
4. What kind of collaboration happens on the team? How do you prepare for a major tournament?
Dylan Bryan and I would pitch an idea or strategy that we want to build then we’d question each other if it wins against certain meta decks or situations and if one of us can provide a solid rebuttal to each other’s questions we test the idea. Once we test what we believe is the deck’s worst matchups we decide if we want to play it or not.
5. How do decks get identified and tested? How often do you test/brainstorm? How do you account for sample size in testing?
Dylan or I would find an amazing combo/strategy and slowly build the deck from there. We brainstorm weekly ideas but only test maybe 1 hour a month. Our sample sizes are usually too small and most of us just trust the list or idea and hope it goes well.
6. Is there a main person in the group that will generate the best strategies or best lists?
Dylan Bryan and I just spit ideas back and forth. Dylan usually finds better questions to fight the idea but sometimes we’re able to go back and forth then believe in a deck.
7. At what point do you give up on a rogue idea? Do you aim to beat the top three decks or accept one auto-loss and two heavily-favored matchups?
We love rogue ideas that can beat a majority of the meta but take a small loss to the big three. If the rogue idea really hard-counters most of the meta we decide if we should add in tech to beat the bad matchup. Sometimes a matchup is hard to tech against where we just accept the auto-loss if we need be.
8. What’s your standard consistency-card count in your test lists? Do you count VS Seeker?
Usually 12-16 consistency cards while counting VS seeker.
9. Do you bother testing matchups that you consider auto-wins or heavily favored after adding in a new tech that might lower consistency?
We test new tech against the worst matchups and see whether or not the cards make the matchup winnable. If it doesn’t then we just accept the auto-loss or don’t play the deck.
Jimmy McClure
1. Does your team have a name? What is the name and how did you come up with it?
(Jimmy told me that he is not really a part of a formal team, but as a successful player I thought getting his take on how he works with people to build decks would help provide a more complete picture of best practices.)
2. How many members does your team have? How many have you added or subtracted this year? How do you recruit new members?
As few as 2 and as many as 8 or 9, depending on who’s around (some players don’t play very often). We usually just have our friends involved in our testing, so if we make new friends we have more members. It’s a pretty casual thing.
3. What technology tools does your team use? How do you communicate and share information?
Standard means of gathering metagame knowledge (looking at results, watching videos). We text, or just talk in person.
4. What kind of collaboration happens on the team? How do you prepare for a major tournament?
Bouncing around deck ideas (usually bad ones) and building on old ideas/already prominent decks; some playtesting, but mostly theory and metagame prediction.
5. How do decks get identified and tested? How often do you test/brainstorm? How do you account for sample size in testing?
Whatever someone can think of at the time; no more than once a week, if that; the goal is to learn a matchup, and think about how often that matchup will be seen. If the answer is not much, then additional techs are not usually needed.
6. Is there a main person in the group that will generate the best strategies or best lists?
I’m not sure about the best strategies or lists, but I know the people who do not generate many lists. :-P
7. At what point do you give up on a rogue idea? Do you aim to beat the top three decks or accept one auto-loss and two heavily-favored matchups?
I would say that a rogue idea is dismissed as soon as the metagame does not support it, or as soon as we realize there are other decks that can accomplish our goal. Taking one auto-loss is always desired, if it means doing well against everything else.
8. What’s your standard consistency-card count in your test lists? Do you count VS Seeker?
I’m not sure about my peers, but I generally aim for 14+ (not including VS Seeker, but I do give VS Seeker and Battle Compressor in the same deck consideration).
9. Do you bother testing matchups that you consider auto-wins or heavily favored after adding in a new tech that might lower consistency?
Yes; sometimes you can play the matchup differently to make it better, or sometimes you can realize you are being ridiculous in the endeavor of trying to add another tech for an already good matchup. It never hurts to test against things you already know or think you know, because you can always learn more (and perhaps apply it to other matchups).
Anonymous Top 16 Masters Worlds Finisher 2015
1. Does your team have a name? What is the name and how did you come up with it?
we dont actually have a team name haha
2. How many members does your team have? How many have you added or subtracted this year? How do you recruit new members?
we have 4 members(myself included)
3. What technology tools does your team use? How do you communicate and share information?
we talk about ideas mainly over text, but we also occasionally use ptcgo to playtest.
4. What kind of collaboration happens on the team? How do you prepare for a major tournament?
before any major tournament, we will start to gather info about what has done well recently and share it with each other. we then build all the decks that we expect to play against. finally, we test the decks that we think we might play against those decks and assess how the matchups go.
5. How do decks get identified and tested? How often do you test/brainstorm? How do you account for sample size in testing?
#4 helped answer this. we brainstorm and bounce ideas off of each other all the time, but as far as testing goes we could certainly use a little improvement haha. a normal sample size for a matchup in our testing is usually from about 5-10 games per matchup.
6. Is there a main person in the group that will generate the best strategies or best lists?
yes, although we’ve all had our own great and successful ideas at times.
7. At what point do you give up on a rogue idea? Do you aim to beat the top three decks or accept one auto-loss and two heavily-favored matchups?
tough to say, but i think we’d all agree that it’s generally alright to accept one bad matchup if you have overwhelmingly good matchups against the other two dominant decks.
8. What’s your standard consistency-card count in your test lists? Do you count VS Seeker?
we don’t all agree as a team on this, but i generally include 4 sycamore, 2-4 n(depending on deck) and 2 lysandre in every list along with 4 vs seeker. my teammates tend to slim down on occasion and play 1 n and 1 lysandre at times.
9. Do you bother testing matchups that you consider auto-wins or heavily favored after adding in a new tech that might lower consistency?
we test every matchup no matter how good or bad it may be just to get the feel for it. as a rule though it’s always important to us to retest a deck after changing the list a decent amount.
Jon Eng (Top 16 Senior 2015/2016)
1. Does your team have a name? What is the name and how did you come up with it?
Our team name is Team C, and we are spread out all throughout the U.S. and some European countries.
2. How many members does your team have? How many have you added or subtracted this year? How do you recruit new members?
Our team as of now has 19 members in it. Recently we have added quite a few players this past season.
3. What technology tools does your team use? How do you communicate and share information?
We mainly use Facebook Messenger to talk in one huge group chat. We talk daily in the group about Pokémon and other subjects too. We also occasionally use Skype to get in group calls where we talk about Pokémon and usually play test.
4. What kind of collaboration happens on the team? How do you prepare for a major tournament?
In preparing for major tournaments, the team as said before talks through Skype and playtests over webcam. We sometimes also use PTCGO. The team is spaced out all over the U.S. so testing in person rarely happens but when we do see each other at Regionals and other large events we do like to test the Friday of in the venue.
5. How do decks get identified and tested? How often do you test/brainstorm? How do you account for sample size in testing?
Decks get identified and tested usually by one member of the team just shooting an idea in the group chat. We decide whether or not at first glance if the deck is good or not. Then if we like it we start testing it. We test pretty often when we have free time which can be pretty hard to find. Brainstorming goes along with testing, as we all get together in a Skype call, test and brainstorm ideas.
6. Is there a main person in the group that will generate the best strategies or best lists?
There isn’t really a main person in the group who will make the best lists and strategies.
7. At what point do you give up on a rogue idea? Do you aim to beat the top three decks or accept one auto-loss and two heavily-favored matchups?
When making a rouge, we usually try to beat what we think will be popular in our meta. Most of the time when give up on rouge decks, it is because the deck starts losing to the decks they should beat! The main reason for this is because of inconsistency. It is extremely hard to beat most to all of the decks in such a wide-spread format so sometimes in order to do that the rouge deck becomes inconsistent, which is something we don’t want.
8. What’s your standard consistency-card count in your test lists? Do you count VS Seeker?
The standard consistency line for cards in our decks is extremely deck dependent. Like in donphan which I piloted to top 4-of Lancaster regionals, We agreed that 3 vs seeker was enough, not 4. So yeah it depends on the deck.
9. Do you bother testing matchups that you consider auto-wins or heavily favored after adding in a new tech that might lower consistency?
We do bother testing match ups that are considered auto-wins or favorable after adding a tech card. Now this is where the some of us part ways on our decision. I’m more of a consistency > tech kinda guy but some people think otherwise. so I don’t really try to fix severely bad match ups using tech cards to make my deck inconsistent.
Sydney Morisoli (Top 16 Senior 2016)
1. Does your team have a name? What is the name and how did you come up with it?
My league team, which i’ve been a part of since i was 6 (7 yrs). we’re called team wreckface. not 100% sure how the name came about haha
2. How many members does your team have? How many have you added or subtracted this year? How do you recruit new members?
I’m not sure on the exact number of members, but i do know we’re all in this together. i know most of my older friends haven’t been able to play competively for a while due to school/work/etc. i think have have around 13 members total though. we don’t really subtract members. you need to be an honest player here for good reasons, though. our team mostly consists of my friends who’ve been a part of our league for a long time, and i trust them more than most people i know. there’s not really a recruiting process for us.
3. What technology tools does your team use? How do you communicate and share information?
We use facebook messanger for the most part; however, we used to have a website, but we found messenger being easier & more convienient.
4. What kind of collaboration happens on the team? How do you prepare for a major tournament?
For testing for cities, regionals, states, we’ll usually figure out times and skype or use ptcgo/playtcg for testing purposes. usually, we’ll talk about what we expect (if we’re preparing for a metagame that’s well-defined) after seeing results and what has, in theory, the most positive matchups across the board. for nationals and worlds, we typically have had a testing party at my house about a week before we depart for the event. it’s good for all of us to meet up seriously and test our thoughts-i also love getting input from my friends who can’t always get to league because of schedule problems. i usually figure out my deck at these parties.
5. How do decks get identified and tested? How often do you test/brainstorm? How do you account for sample size in testing?
It really depends on how busy i am. i didn’t get to test that much for regionals due to practicing for honor bands, studying for my scholarship test, getting in the swing of school, etc, despite my back-to-back top 8s with vespiquen. my team is also mostly in college/busy at work, but i tried to talk with them about deck ideas or test as much as we could coordinate. usually, we’ll prepare a lot when we’re not overcrowded with our other commitments, like school/work. some of my friends on our team and i tried to make lots of weird, rouge decks work for regionals, to no success. we typically brainstorm a lot, though.
6. Is there a main person in the group that will generate the best strategies or best lists?
We all try and pitch in. a good team’s qualities include friendship, loyalty, honesty, and the obvious one, teamwork. i don’t think a team will succeed if one person is carrying the weight and expectations of ten other people. if we have any revalations, we’ll share them and discuss.
7. At what point do you give up on a rogue idea? Do you aim to beat the top three decks or accept one auto-loss and two heavily-favored matchups?
This honestly depends on the metagame. sometimes i’ll just click with a deck, but sometimes “rouge” gets overly inconsistent, it’s time to give it up. sometimes decks try to achieve too much at once; for instance, i was trying a vileplume/eggexcutor/ariados/disruption deck, but i couldn’t get all the pieces together. it was trying to lock items, supporters, and slowly drain their hp with poison, which sounds promising, but in reality, was too hard to make it all happen. sometimes you need to use common sense and see when a rouge deck is too rouge.
8. What’s your standard consistency-card count in your test lists? Do you count VS Seeker?
There’s not really a “standard” consistency count for us, because we’ve done many varieties of deck types in the past. but vs always counts. we focus on what does well, and go from there, but we sometimes drop a consistency card for a tech card. sometimes having a tech card that they don’t have can swing the series into our favor.
9. Do you bother testing matchups that you consider auto-wins or heavily favored after adding in a new tech that might lower consistency?
If a matchup is considered “favorable” or “auto-win”, i usually will test the harder matchups or 50/50 matchups before i want to fine tune my “better matchups”. however, when i was testing primal groudon for worlds, i was short on time for preperation, so i chose not to test against toad/garb or other straight toad varients just because of primal groudon’s omega barrage being the key factor.
Conclusions
pokemonscreenshots.tumblr.comThere are a couple of conclusions that really jump out when you look at the responses:
- Teams usually have one or two primary leaders that are driving the deck building and decision-making process. Teams with Seniors are less likely to have this.
- Teams are much more about theorymon than about playtesting. There tends to be a lot of discussion, but very little actual playtesting of matchups. Once again, teams with Seniors have more emphasis on playtesting.
- Teams are lower tech than you might expect — most of the collaboration is via text messages and occasional face-to-face or Skype meetings. Teams with Seniors tend to rely more heavily on Facebook. I had wondered if teams would do things like maintain Google Docs with “best lists” for decks or use tools like Slack to track conversations — this appears to be a little too far out on the bleeding edge.
- Conventional wisdom regarding consistency and testing is widely varied.
The lack of focus on playtesting is probably the most surprising result to me as the challenge of testing on PTCGO or TCGone by playing random people can result in a lot of time wasted.
Hopefully this set of interviews gave you some information to help you improve your Pokéteam or help you figure out what you need to do to start your own! Good luck.
Question: Are you on a team? I would love to see your answers to these questions in the comments! I am sure there are a lot more team dynamics that people would enjoy hearing about.
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