The Fifth Tuesday #4: How Do You Team?
Jan 29th, 2013 by Terence Jason Dorman
by Terence Jason Dorman, Awesome Manager of Inspired Writings
Clans and Teams have existed in The Spoils since the rise of the forums. Whether it was Team Strike, Team Hopper, Team Covenant, or Team 6:32, the forums were alive with teams planning their next events or talking trash to one another.
Since Arcane Tinmen took over The Spoils, though, teams seem to have fallen out of the limelight. Teams certainly still exist, but they aren’t as vocal or as prominent as they were in years past.
I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad or good thing as I really don’t know if it is either. What I am curious about, though, is how the teams that do exist operate. In short, how do you team (and yes, team is a verb now)?
As you are all well aware, I am a longstanding member of Team Hopper. Team Hopper plays out of Grasshopper’s Comics in Williston Park, New York, and the core group of guys that make up Team Hopper have been gaming together for fifteen plus years.
Team Hopper exists outside of gaming, though. We have parties, go to birthday dinners, watch wrestling together, play video games, etc. We are essentially a group of friends that met through gaming, and it’s pretty awesome.
But what about your team? I’ve met a number of teams over the years (across various games) that are a team in gaming only. They travel together, playtest together, design decks together, but outside of gaming, there is no real friendship. These types of teams almost seem more like a business partnership to me.
If you are a member of one of those teams, how does it work? Do you all play out of the same store? Are you from different parts of the country and only practice online? I’ve always been curious as to how these types of teams are formed and maintained simply because it is so different from my experiences on a gaming team.
Speaking of different experiences on a gaming team, how do you other teams playtest? As I’ve mentioned in the past, each member of Team Hopper builds their own deck to fit their playstyle and we play against each other over and over. We provide each other with analysis and try to help perfect each other’s decks, but none of us are ever playing the same deck as another member.
Other teams I’ve seen, though, will work together as a group to build one deck that they all play They playtest it over and over and over against various other decks and refine the deck to a list that they are all happy and comfortable with. They will then show up to an event each with the same exact deck (or maybe with slight variations) and just hope not to get paired against each other and have to face a mirror-match.
I can see the benefits of both methods of playtesting/deckbuilding, and each certainly has its drawbacks as well. If you’re team practices one method or the other (or somehow a combination of the two), let me know how it works out for your and what your specific methods are. I am curious to hear how gamers operate all around the world!
Before I bring this month’s edition of The Fifth Tuesday to a close, I want to remind all Spoils players out there that there is a specific forum for Clans and Teams. While that forum has been rather quiet for a considerable amount of time, I think we can revive it!
Urge your teammates to register/log on to the forums and introduce themselves in a thread dedicated to your team. You could even announce what upcoming events your team will be attending that way other players know who to look out for.
Either way, I think the Clans/Teams forum is a great place for us all to congregate and get to know each other better. I know I had a blast hanging out in the Team Hopper (and other team’s threads) years ago, and I would certainly like to bring that feeling back!
One Response to “The Fifth Tuesday #4: How Do You Team?”
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At Anime & Games Central in Lafayette La, we have a few players who are serious about the game and have talked about teaming-up for big events like this year’s GenCon (which we hope to attend), but we really haven’t made too much effort towards really organizing. Like team hopper, we all make decks we want to play, and I, personally, make decks I want to learn how to play against, and we play all of them as much as we can. We are actually more focused on honing our Limited skills, and really try to help each other make the best decisions for that format. For Constructed, I learned that pooling is always best, and apparently others in the group agree, but we do have separate pools. My pool is the largest (6 people) and also happens to get the most packs via winning, but there are some people chugging along on their own who have amassed a lot of cards as well. We all tend to give things away to each other, trusting that we’ll get something in return later.
When it comes to our personal lives, we have groups within the group that do hang out together outside of table-top gaming, but often these ventures revolve around gaming in some way, whether it’s sports, video games, or poker. I am close friends with some of the “members” and acquaintances with others. Our group is dynamic, containing very experienced gamers and newbies alike. It’s interesting though, because if the game were bigger I’m not sure if all of us would be allied together the way we are. It’s great that we’ve started this alliance early, because the more this game grows, the more valuable our connections will become.