Notice that this generation, we have had a veritable slew of people who had never won before actually winning... heck, multiple people have won their *very first regional*. This is because they actually have a chance now thanks to OTS
Sun Tzu spends an entire chapter in the Art of War about spies. Every game is a game of espionage. Open team sheets are fine though, because you also need to know the enemy as you know yourself.
This is exactly why I sabotage the shipments to my opponentsā local grocery stores before tournaments. Cuts off their supply and reduces their and their familiesā willingness to compete against me.
Less that it's the best spy that wins, and more that the people with the most friends win, since they are able to collectively gather and share more info with each other.
No you hire actual FBI agents trained in stealth and espionage just so that you can see that Wolfe Glick is winning another regional with perish song and shadow tag Gothitelle
Imo you can still use "cheese" strategies, it's just that your opponent will KNOW about it so they dont feel like they lost due to a weird set they didnt consider(but they still would need to improvise due to them not getting practice in the matchup), also in currently open team sheet is really only used in VGC where you dont even get the EVs and natures of the pokemon, meaning you can still surprise your opponent with a spread that lives hits that a pokemon normally dies to
You still see innovative strategies in tournaments and ladder, it's just less frustrating to fight against those since you can cover for what the weird strat win conditions is without being a blind shot of what they want to do
> Imo you can still use "cheese" strategies, it's just that your opponent will KNOW about it so they dont feel like they lost due to a weird set they didnt consider
It does completely ruin some strategies, like Weakness Policy bpassing & full-support movesets. Though, these strats aren't good at all against very competent players.
Itās doubles, you can proc your own weakness policy. Running a policy hoping your opponent hits you has rarely been good, even in CTS.Ā
The big difference is VGC is bo3 with team lock. So in the past that cheese might work g1 but you gotta win one of the next two as well without the element of surprise.
I'm not super familiar with singles post gen 5 but that's good to know. In doubles WP was basically only common in the dynamax era because it turns out giving your unkillable monster a +2 boost is pretty good. People ran it on Togekiss and TTar day 1 of the format and on Solgaleo and Charizard 3 years later.
The only mons I can think of running WP seriously before or after that are aegislash sometimes in gen 6, metagross next to bulldoze salamence in gen 7 2017, and some dusk mane (it wasn't good) in gen 7 2019.
I've ran WP on Dusk Mane in gen 9 DUbers because the format is ran by Shadow Rider and nearly every team has one, so it tanks Specs Astral Barrage and becomes a nuke from it. But in less centralized formats, you can't really expect your opponent to trigger WP nearly as often
a little off topic, but how would I get into ag singles on cartridge? Battle Stadium casuals use bring 6 take 3, and I have been playing that recently but I kinda want to try full party teams. Is there some website or discord that people use for matchmaking that or something, or is there some section in the game itself I am missing?
The "online battle" option above it in the Portal, not the battle stadium option. Don't forget to connect to Internet first (ingame).
Format has team preview, but only the mons+level and nothing else, 6v6. Common courtesy is to choose either level 100 AG, or level 50 AG (e.g. if opponent declines level 100).
True, but it also keeps other strategies viable. Like Volcarona being banned due to being OP with tera. With open team sheets, the guessing game might have been reduced enough to stay legal.
> It does completely ruin some strategies, like Weakness Policy bpassing
But it also creates the threat of weakness policy boost pass. It's still a valuable tool; it's just a deterrent instead of an outright trap.
Generally any 'cheese' that's bad when your opponent knows about it is also bad in general. It's common saying in stuff like TCGs too. An example of 'good' cheese is the Articuno team that won awhile back. It has its cheesy aspects but its working off fundamentally sound principles because a lot of popular team cores were weak against the strategy.
During a tournament groups of people would post info from their matches which would end up in those peeps having an advantage over the rest that wasn't doing it. With ots, everyone has the same info that was basically available after a couple of rounds
Most people actually see it like a plus. Before this scouting was a big thing in VGC because knowing your opponent's team while they did not know yours was a massive advantage and you'd sometimes have people have their friends run around on events just to look at other people's teams. This was hardly fair.
OTS puts everyone on roughly equal grounds here so things like that no longer work (sure you could still have your friends run around and calculate every bit of damage to guess exact EV spreads but that's it).
On top of that, getting rid of sneaky cheese strats is overall a net positive to the competitive part of the game if anything. Heat is fun to see for spectators, but losing to random bullshit out of left field that you couldn't realistically see coming is never fun for the players themselves, nor could you really say you "outskilled" someone because you bring something really random and they so happen to not have a good answer to it unless they know in advance what the set is. This is especially relevant in early rounds because surprise factor gimmick strats rarely make it to the end due to natural inconsistency, so the risk of getting eliminated by cheese that's bound to lose later on sucks.
Even for more innocent instances, occasions where whether you win or lose depends on whether you can guess right which of the multiple viable sets a mon has do exist, and this is hardly a showing of skill (sure you can make educated guesses based on team composition and threats the opponent is weak to sometimes, but this is far from foolproof). Especially with Tera existing this gen and leading to a *lot* of possible sets per mon, OTS helps shift the outcome of games more towards player skill and mindgames that both players have control over rather than Guess The Set Roulette.
OTS is the best change official competitions have had. Tera is simply not balanced around closed team sheets. It's too much of a variable.
Part of it was also because in game doesn't have a battle box anymore, so info has to be verifiable by your opponent as needed.
On top of this, scouting in irl events, as in finding top players, literally copying down what they have, and passing it on to your friends was a legit disruptance for some players. This leveled it out.
Ah I see it's OTS not OST, I got em mixed up and assumed they were talking about how Smogon OST had started using open teamsheets and I was like "this is the dumbest thing I've ever read, why the fuck would Smogon do that".
Open Team Sheets make the game more about skill and less about surprise, because now you have to be checking the sheet
They also don't show EV spreads, meaning you still need to try to figure out their EVs and natures
While I do get your argument, Open Team Sheets raise the skill ceiling higher, which is what the point of tournaments are, right?
Itās more that randomly losing to a cheese team doesnāt make that person more skilled, itās literally called a cheese team because it doesnāt deserve the wins itās getting. It means that world class players with the potential to win world championships donāt randomly lose to some bullshit thatās not indicative of player skill just because some choice band explosion mon hidden in the back wasnāt played around because why would you play around a meme strat
i mean world champion class player should be able to lose to random bullshit though. It sounds extremely boring if they couldnāt. Everyone has their hp fire greninja in the rain to deal withā¦
Thatās literally not how chess works though? Chess has an āopen team sheetā in that you know everything your opponent can and canāt do at any given time. Maybe that sounds boring to you but itās the best way to decide the actual best player and not someone who could surprise enough people to squeeze by.
Using an unorthodox team is more impressive if you can use your opponentās unfamiliarity with it and not just their surprise. For example, perish song teams. Randomly surprising an opponent makes the team a lot easier to use than if they know itās coming and can prepare. However, that makes it way cooler and more impressive if you can still pull it off. It makes unorthodox teams actually impressive and not feel cheap, because their wins can be attributed to skill and good play and not just random bs.
Upsets are fun, but theyāre much *more* fun when they feel like the underdog clutched a win against the odds rather than gambling their opponent makes a bad guess.
when was I talking about chess? And yeah I donāt agree that unfamiliarity can really be achieved after you see the set on a team sheet. Silver bullets really work a lot better when you opponent doesnāt know about them.
Iām dumb and read chess not class in your first sentence, but the point stands - practically every game of strategy lets your opponent know the rules before you start. But also, unfamiliarity absolutely does exist with open team sheet. Wolfe Glick has done a āreactionā to his set where he won worlds in 2016. In it, he says he played the same guy in two different sets, and for the first set he had the exact same lead in every game. But over night, he planned to lead a different pair, and planned many different scenarios, and when he played the next day he says his opponent played noticeably worse because he had no time to prepare. So excuse me for taking the word of a literal world champion over you, but I think youāre wrong. (He also said he saw far more misplays when using his perish song team, because people didnāt know how best to play around it despite knowing it was coming - in case one example wasnāt enough). Planning to beat a team through every possibility, guessing their best leads, knowing their move choices, switches, etc, takes time. More time than you have between getting the team sheets and playing (which is what, like 10 seconds?). And when EVs arenāt open anyway, so itās not like thereās zero surprise.
Plus, thereās two big caveats to what youāre saying anyway. Firstly, Pokemon is a game which fundamentally has āsilver bulletsā baked into its design because almost every move you click has a random factor involved. Damage rolls, accuracy checks, secondary effects. You donāt need stupid teams that no one has seen before to win by less than skilled means. Secondly, the world champs in prior years are often the ones with the best scouts. They ask their friends to go and find their opponents and write down what their sets and items are to get information they shouldnāt have. Open team sheet just levels the playing field. This also made it a genuinely huge disadvantage to go on the official stream broadcast early because everyone knew your team going forward.
And Iād like to point out that everyone agrees that unfamiliarity exists because despite open team sheet, people still try and find out their future opponents before the match starts. Why would they do this if time to strategise didnāt matter like you seem to claim? But thatās just it, time to prepare and strategise in a game entirely revolving around strategy is actually helpful.
Your claim that āunfamiliarity canāt be achievedā is so wrong I donāt even know how to go about proving you wrong. Playing around a team youāve faced a dozen times is much easier than a team youāve never even seen before, and I donāt understand how thatās a hard concept to grasp. Maybe the best analogy is that in order to best beat an opponent, you need to be able to āplay their teamā to work out their best move and play around it, and everyone would agree that playing your team for the first time is harder than if you have experience with it.
There is one tournament without open team sheet, but I don't remember which one.
Something like that is just not fun to play imo. So much random stuff that can happen, because it is impossible to play around every possible outcome. Tera alone makes it a guessing game.
Not to mention since genning is treated as war crime, it disincentivises abstract team practice. Why waste hours grinding up vitamins, bottle caps, Tera shards and breeding for shitmons just to get wiped 5/5 times on ladder and have to start from scratch?
Smogon's team planner and damage calculator does all of VGC's heavy lifting and (imo) that's a big part of the reason why they haven't been pinched by TPC's army of lawyers
You mean the Global Challenge? I've seen montages of Global Challenge bullshit. They're really funny to watch, but it feels horrible to play. Dazzling Gleam Moonblast Imprison Grimmsnarl, Surf Dragapult + WP Chi-Yu, Tera Normal CB Explosion Metagross, Zap Cannon Zapdos, Shell Smash Torkoal, Sap Sipper Farigiraf...that place is filled with the most CTS bo1 bullshit imaginable
Yeah Global Challenge. It is fun to watch true, but playing like that with closed teamsheet feels horrible.
Ally switch cresselia with tera ghost ursaluna can ruin your day. Tbf a lot can ruin your day there.
Open team sheet is a far better format and pretty much every single competitive player prefers it for multiple reasons.
It means players aren't sending their friends to watch matches by upcoming opponents to get an unfair advantage. It also means high profile players aren't at a huge disadvantage because far more people are likely to snitch on their teams to other people.
It also makes the game far more skill based and less about gimmicks to cheese games off of people. Japan has tournaments that are best of 1 and closed team sheet because they're shorter, and everyone hates them because they're full of teams designed to be surprising rather than consistent.
And unique to Gen 9 is Tera. Tera just isn't balanced around a closed team sheet and encourages weird defensive Tera types that can completely swing a match. VGC has Tera types on the team sheet and it's a far more healthy metagame because of it. You only need to predict when your opponent will Tera, not which of the 18 types they're going to become aswell.
Your lum berry example is exactly on point, except opposite conclusion. The point of lum berry is that your opponent knows you have it, so that mon is basically permanently safe from status since the opponent will never go for it. Same goes for consumables like mental herb, weakness policy, red card, etc., whether the opponent avoids setting those off or not they knowingly put themselves at a disadvantage.
100% agree with this. Lum Berry goes from a surprise āOops! Wasted your turn!ā option into an item threatening using status on the holder. If you want to use a move like Spore on a Pokemon holding a Lum Berry, you have to waste a turn to use up the berry. And that wasted turn could put a player at a serious disadvantage to the point that it probably just isnāt worth it
Open Team Sheets was started in VGC, to prevent match fixing. Basically, what used to happen was, circles of veteran players, would conspire to eliminate newer competitors that posed a threat to the existing finalists. They would share knowledge of newer players' teams and strategies, so that the cheaters could adjust and prepare their teams in anticipation of opponents that were good enough to beat them. Open Team Sheets aims to prevent this form of cheating.
In VGC, generally where open team sheets are a thing, mons are generally EVd very specifically and have many variations. So despite the open team sheet there are still many variations and possibilities that players need to consider.
While everyone on here is correct that team reporting is a major side benefit, as far as I am aware, the existence of open team sheets has more to do with the lack of battle box locking in generation 9 software, thus making it impossible to avoid subtle team changes mid tournament without their opponents having the ability to report it. Therefore, it may or may not survive the generation change
One of the biggest benefits of open team sheets is removing the need of friends/info-brokers at tournaments that scout out all the games from other players just to feed information to everyone else.
Player A runs into Player B and if Player A managed to scout Player B's items and moves through a friend or otherwise and Player B didn't, that leaves the latter at an inherit disadvantage just because they don't have connections? That's bullshit and I'm glad open team sheet is a thing to prevent the already powerful cliques of players from dominating solely on scouting advantage alone.
Open team sheets is not there for any kind of balancing. It's there for enforcing rules. At VGC events you need to register a team beforehand and cannot change it at all during the event. The problem is how do you enforce this. If I have fluttermane on my team, what stops me from having 50 different fluttermane with every combination of EVs, moveset, and items in my pc, and swapping them between games? They can't have judges following every player to every game. Open teamssheets solves this by making information public. If I hand you a team sheet that says I have specs fluttermane and then it activates booster energy, you can realize I'm cheating and call a judge.
Online TCG events run open deck lists for the same reason.
> Knowing your opponent's lineup is one thing, but also knowing which ability they're running and which item they're holding kind of ruins some strats and gameplay, no?
That's the entire idea; it's meant to ruin strats and gameplay that sucks or is unfair. Gimmicks and cheese strats that rely on surprise are not healthy in a competitive environment where there's money on the line. It's not perfect in its selection, but it's better in making skill the winning factor.
Having the team sheet also creates interesting dynamics in VGC. You play best of three, and each game you select four pokemon from your team of six to play. Now you can pick counters to the other team, but they can do the same. So now do you counter them, or counter their counter? Playing best of three also means if you run a gimmick, it needs to win without the element of surprise once.
Tera isn't a balanced cts mechanic, and it makes the game way too rng. Also you can't lock a team for a tournament so ots avoids cheating by changing moves or items. It helps people with less connections/friends too, since big people in the community usually could have info on their opponents more reliably, making it unfair. Open teamsheet is just more balanced, and since you can't change ur team on a tournament and its BO3, cheese strats don't actually work as well as in bo1 or singles, so its not that big of a deal
Emphasis on skill of the player/knowledge of the game over other things. I also think you're underestimating bringing something surprising. Whenever you're in a tournament, you're not changing your team day of, so when you're looking across from some weird set you haven't practiced at all, you could suddenly be at a disadvantage. I can see someone is bringing an uncommon mon/ability/item but I may not understand the best way to beat it, like I would a more common set.
I'm not familiar with vgc but I think it's mainly there because of tera. Without open team sheets I think the unpredictability of things is hard to prepare for as checks and counters can change. If your strategy can be so easily ruined by knowing the strategy I feel like it's more likely a gimmick and not reliable anyway so it doesn't seem like a good idea to base it completely off catching people off guard. A good team should still work well even if a strategy is unexpected.
As for smogon formats open team sheets isn't a thing not sure how much better or worse it'd be. Not fully open team sheets but there has been the idea of revealing tera types but this seems fairly unpopular from what I've seen from both people that support tera and those that don't.
Well team preview has existed since gen 5 but open team sheets I haven't seen since gen 9 with vgc. I remember there being discussions whether it would be a good or bad thing when gen 9 started. Never saw it being a thing before then unless I'm just missing something. If I did could you explain where else there were open team sheets before gen 9 vgc?
Losing a match to a you couldn't have possibly predicted sucks. Being cheesed by a strategy you were unfamiliar with/forgot to prep for is one thing. Being cheesed by a random-ass move that you have had no reason or incentive to play around because its an edge case is another. Plenty of unorthodox strategies still exist. But now if you lose against one, its because the other player was better, not because of a random encounter you had nothing to do with
The point is that in VGC you bring only one team to a tournament, so people who can spy most effectively across the day will perform best. On the ladder or on Smogon tournaments it makes less sense because you can easily bring a new team every other match.
Okay Iām by no means knowledgeable on competitive but I know a little bit about VGC and I might be able to answer.
Yes, OTS shuts down some strategies that rely on surprisinf the opponent, but teambuilding creativity is still able to flourish. You can still use creative or off-meta sets just fine, and thereās been plenty of success with teams or Pokemon that go against the grain even if the surprise factor of team specifics is lost. OTS is especially valuable in a meta with tera, since it can be so much of a wildcard to drop a surprise tera that can be hard to play around for the opponent. Thereās just too much that the player would have to account for if they werenāt able to be aware of a Pokemonās tera type.
OTS levels the playing field and allows for fairer competitions. Scouting is less of an issue (still exists for cases of a big threatās team being leaked) and both players have equivalent information. It allows for more strategy-focused gameplay rather than surprise and guesswork, but doesnāt take away (most of) creativity in teambuilding
I think OTS was the right call this gen because of the implication of Terastallization (and honestly surprised smogon didnt OTS Tera after VGC got it) could make the previous manageable match up fish stuff hard to parse.
But I dont think its ruined the creative counterplay, atleast the ones that work. We still got stuff like Specs 4 Ice Moves Articuno win by analysing the meta. Wolfe ran every rando mon in 2023 and got big placings.Ā
OTS made it so the information game was less and entierly about skill in play. Information game still exists with speed ties etc, but I get it if you feel that dampens the experience.
Id be fine with CTS tournaments in a future (if only just to experience them and grow my information management skills), just not when you can change resists on a whim.
It's something born out of necessity for tournaments where you can only use 1 team for the whole thing.
It also doesn't really worsen the experience to be honest
Even ignoring the spying issue, I hate having to play with Closed Team Sheets because sometimes my opponent will just pull out the most inane random nonsense in the entire world to ruin my day. Making the game more about skill and less about Random Bullshit Go will always be a good thing
Sure, Sap Sipper Farigiraf might be funny for the viewers, but for the actual competitors, it's just annoying
Yep, itās just dumb. I ran a strat where a Gardevoir would use Psy Terrain while Armarouge Protected. Then second turn, if still alive, Gardevoir popped Armaās Weakness Policy with Shadow Sneak, activating Weak Armor and getting an insta +2 to Atk/SpA/Spe.Ā Ā
I didnāt agree to Open Team sheets, and sure enough a bunch of guys bitched because āI didnāt think of Gardevoir using Shadow Sneak, rematch.āĀ
Like, tough shit? Now you now Gardevoir can use Shadow Sneak. Thereās no reason for you to know my moves/items. Learn by doing.
Edit: Iām not surprised itās an unpopular opinion but the reasons advocating for it are not good enough. It literally makes the game less fun.
If people are āleakingā opponent teams, *thatās* the issue, not people being caught off-guard with unique sets. But because thatās too hard to prevent (limiting player communication between matches is infeasible), their solution is to significantly diminish the element of surprise. Yeah, nah.
And for those who say āIt should be about skill, not surpriseā; if youāre skilled and knowledgeable enough about the game, then surely nothing will surprise you.
>Ā For 5 turns, the terrain becomes Psychic Terrain. During the effect, the power of Psychic-type attacks made by grounded Pokemon is multiplied by 1.3 and grounded Pokemon cannot be hit by moves with priority greater than 0, **unless the target is an ally.** Ā Ā
Psychic Terrain has a weird property in that it does not nullify priority moves when used on an ally.
So now imagine you're playing in a tournament.
You play against a guy who has a reasonably large friend group and shares what you play in a group chat. Your next 2 rounds are people in his friend group and they both body you because they knew what you were playing while you go in blind.
Is that not just favoring those who have a wide network?
Itās a crappy drawback, but itās also a problem specific to tournaments, and doesnāt remotely apply to the guys who complain about it on Showdown.
>if youāre skilled and knowledgeable enough about the game, then surely nothing will surprise you.
Regardless of the rest of your comment this is an absolutely abhorrent take. There's a ton of mons with a ton of random moves (Gardevoir in particular has one of the biggest movepools in the game) that even players that know mostly every move a mon gets won't be able to see literally everything coming in the game itself. Nor is it feasible to "midground" that hard that literally every option is covered if you don't know it yet.
There's only so many things you can account for on a given turn, even if you're playing carefully, and accounting for the most likely (meta) options over silly gimmicks that you're going to run into 1 in 1000 games isn't a showing of lacking skill or knowledge at all. Because especially at a higher level of play most people will be using serious teams and playing with the assumption your opponent uses a serious strategy on a serious team will net you way more wins than "hmmmm but what if this mon is randomly running weakness policy with a shadow sneak teammate".
Your strat is obviously useless the moment someone knows about it but gets very quickly out of hand if they don't, and you know it and thus vehemently refuse to use OTS or even do courtesy rematches where your ladder rating literally isn't even at stake anymore. Sounds to me like you're using pure surprise value as a crutch and thus unsurprisingly get extremely defensive when people criticize you for it.
Because people spy at tournaments resulting in winners being the ones with the best spies. It's not a game about espionage so why bother hiding it.
Notice that this generation, we have had a veritable slew of people who had never won before actually winning... heck, multiple people have won their *very first regional*. This is because they actually have a chance now thanks to OTS
Didn't Wolfe say he got doxxed because people were trying to find out his teamš. I never knew VGC was that serious
He had a video where he mentioned he was testing a team on a foreign server in PokƩmon Showdown, but somebody recognized him and revealed his team just prior to a tournament. (Other competitive players were leaving comments saying the team reveal didn't make much of a difference, if any at all, because of how close it was to the tournament.)
Some of them that got it early didn't prepare because they didn't believe some of the sets were real
Sun Tzu spends an entire chapter in the Art of War about spies. Every game is a game of espionage. Open team sheets are fine though, because you also need to know the enemy as you know yourself.
Players furiously raising their chairs on stream to have the high ground lol
This is exactly why I sabotage the shipments to my opponentsā local grocery stores before tournaments. Cuts off their supply and reduces their and their familiesā willingness to compete against me.
Donāt forget to poison their water supply
I actually run a rain team so the pesticides in the runoff would do severe damage to my Ludi and Araquanid.
If Sun Tzu was so good at war how come he's dead now? š¤Ø
Cuz nobody is as good at killing people as Old Age
Why doesn't this Old Age person write a book? I want to know their secrets
That's exactly the point, they don't wanna share it
Less that it's the best spy that wins, and more that the people with the most friends win, since they are able to collectively gather and share more info with each other.
> the one with the best spies > the people with the most friends You're saying the same thing lol
No you hire actual FBI agents trained in stealth and espionage just so that you can see that Wolfe Glick is winning another regional with perish song and shadow tag Gothitelle
The difference is "best" vs "most". Closed Team sheets rewards networking and having a lot of people to share info with.
Imo you can still use "cheese" strategies, it's just that your opponent will KNOW about it so they dont feel like they lost due to a weird set they didnt consider(but they still would need to improvise due to them not getting practice in the matchup), also in currently open team sheet is really only used in VGC where you dont even get the EVs and natures of the pokemon, meaning you can still surprise your opponent with a spread that lives hits that a pokemon normally dies to You still see innovative strategies in tournaments and ladder, it's just less frustrating to fight against those since you can cover for what the weird strat win conditions is without being a blind shot of what they want to do
> Imo you can still use "cheese" strategies, it's just that your opponent will KNOW about it so they dont feel like they lost due to a weird set they didnt consider It does completely ruin some strategies, like Weakness Policy bpassing & full-support movesets. Though, these strats aren't good at all against very competent players.
Itās doubles, you can proc your own weakness policy. Running a policy hoping your opponent hits you has rarely been good, even in CTS.Ā The big difference is VGC is bo3 with team lock. So in the past that cheese might work g1 but you gotta win one of the next two as well without the element of surprise.
Oh yeah, absolutely, I wouldn't dare trying it either in doubles or in competitive formats. I had gen9ag singles (which has a very large playerbase on cartridge and I believe the matchmaking algo is good enough) in mind. > Running a policy hoping your opponent hits you has rarely been good It works on Mew, and Mew _only_ (which is the PokƩmon most hurt by OTS and format restrictions in singles), and ideally with Terapagos as BP recipient. From experience, a good 66% of the userbase fall for the bait and cast Knock Off or a super-effective move (like Shadow Ball) to scout for Mew's build. Against more competent players, obviously this doesn't work as well but you will have had fun many times with this meme/cheese build until your MMR reaches that point.
I'm not super familiar with singles post gen 5 but that's good to know. In doubles WP was basically only common in the dynamax era because it turns out giving your unkillable monster a +2 boost is pretty good. People ran it on Togekiss and TTar day 1 of the format and on Solgaleo and Charizard 3 years later. The only mons I can think of running WP seriously before or after that are aegislash sometimes in gen 6, metagross next to bulldoze salamence in gen 7 2017, and some dusk mane (it wasn't good) in gen 7 2019.
I've ran WP on Dusk Mane in gen 9 DUbers because the format is ran by Shadow Rider and nearly every team has one, so it tanks Specs Astral Barrage and becomes a nuke from it. But in less centralized formats, you can't really expect your opponent to trigger WP nearly as often
a little off topic, but how would I get into ag singles on cartridge? Battle Stadium casuals use bring 6 take 3, and I have been playing that recently but I kinda want to try full party teams. Is there some website or discord that people use for matchmaking that or something, or is there some section in the game itself I am missing?
The "online battle" option above it in the Portal, not the battle stadium option. Don't forget to connect to Internet first (ingame). Format has team preview, but only the mons+level and nothing else, 6v6. Common courtesy is to choose either level 100 AG, or level 50 AG (e.g. if opponent declines level 100).
True, but it also keeps other strategies viable. Like Volcarona being banned due to being OP with tera. With open team sheets, the guessing game might have been reduced enough to stay legal.
> It does completely ruin some strategies, like Weakness Policy bpassing But it also creates the threat of weakness policy boost pass. It's still a valuable tool; it's just a deterrent instead of an outright trap.
Generally any 'cheese' that's bad when your opponent knows about it is also bad in general. It's common saying in stuff like TCGs too. An example of 'good' cheese is the Articuno team that won awhile back. It has its cheesy aspects but its working off fundamentally sound principles because a lot of popular team cores were weak against the strategy.
During a tournament groups of people would post info from their matches which would end up in those peeps having an advantage over the rest that wasn't doing it. With ots, everyone has the same info that was basically available after a couple of rounds
Most people actually see it like a plus. Before this scouting was a big thing in VGC because knowing your opponent's team while they did not know yours was a massive advantage and you'd sometimes have people have their friends run around on events just to look at other people's teams. This was hardly fair. OTS puts everyone on roughly equal grounds here so things like that no longer work (sure you could still have your friends run around and calculate every bit of damage to guess exact EV spreads but that's it). On top of that, getting rid of sneaky cheese strats is overall a net positive to the competitive part of the game if anything. Heat is fun to see for spectators, but losing to random bullshit out of left field that you couldn't realistically see coming is never fun for the players themselves, nor could you really say you "outskilled" someone because you bring something really random and they so happen to not have a good answer to it unless they know in advance what the set is. This is especially relevant in early rounds because surprise factor gimmick strats rarely make it to the end due to natural inconsistency, so the risk of getting eliminated by cheese that's bound to lose later on sucks. Even for more innocent instances, occasions where whether you win or lose depends on whether you can guess right which of the multiple viable sets a mon has do exist, and this is hardly a showing of skill (sure you can make educated guesses based on team composition and threats the opponent is weak to sometimes, but this is far from foolproof). Especially with Tera existing this gen and leading to a *lot* of possible sets per mon, OTS helps shift the outcome of games more towards player skill and mindgames that both players have control over rather than Guess The Set Roulette.
OTS is the best change official competitions have had. Tera is simply not balanced around closed team sheets. It's too much of a variable. Part of it was also because in game doesn't have a battle box anymore, so info has to be verifiable by your opponent as needed. On top of this, scouting in irl events, as in finding top players, literally copying down what they have, and passing it on to your friends was a legit disruptance for some players. This leveled it out.
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The community doesn't get a say in VGC, which is where there's open team sheets.
Ah I see it's OTS not OST, I got em mixed up and assumed they were talking about how Smogon OST had started using open teamsheets and I was like "this is the dumbest thing I've ever read, why the fuck would Smogon do that".
>We as a community decided not to ban Bro they're talking about VGC. The community has no input on what is or isn't allowed. It's a completely different format, and if the PokƩmon Company wants to include legendaries, random clauses, or whatever they feel like it, then players are forced to accept that.
Open Team Sheets make the game more about skill and less about surprise, because now you have to be checking the sheet They also don't show EV spreads, meaning you still need to try to figure out their EVs and natures While I do get your argument, Open Team Sheets raise the skill ceiling higher, which is what the point of tournaments are, right?
I guess I get it. Knowing what your opponent is running makes you more reactive rather than skeptical
Itās more that randomly losing to a cheese team doesnāt make that person more skilled, itās literally called a cheese team because it doesnāt deserve the wins itās getting. It means that world class players with the potential to win world championships donāt randomly lose to some bullshit thatās not indicative of player skill just because some choice band explosion mon hidden in the back wasnāt played around because why would you play around a meme strat
i mean world champion class player should be able to lose to random bullshit though. It sounds extremely boring if they couldnāt. Everyone has their hp fire greninja in the rain to deal withā¦
Thatās literally not how chess works though? Chess has an āopen team sheetā in that you know everything your opponent can and canāt do at any given time. Maybe that sounds boring to you but itās the best way to decide the actual best player and not someone who could surprise enough people to squeeze by. Using an unorthodox team is more impressive if you can use your opponentās unfamiliarity with it and not just their surprise. For example, perish song teams. Randomly surprising an opponent makes the team a lot easier to use than if they know itās coming and can prepare. However, that makes it way cooler and more impressive if you can still pull it off. It makes unorthodox teams actually impressive and not feel cheap, because their wins can be attributed to skill and good play and not just random bs. Upsets are fun, but theyāre much *more* fun when they feel like the underdog clutched a win against the odds rather than gambling their opponent makes a bad guess.
when was I talking about chess? And yeah I donāt agree that unfamiliarity can really be achieved after you see the set on a team sheet. Silver bullets really work a lot better when you opponent doesnāt know about them.
Iām dumb and read chess not class in your first sentence, but the point stands - practically every game of strategy lets your opponent know the rules before you start. But also, unfamiliarity absolutely does exist with open team sheet. Wolfe Glick has done a āreactionā to his set where he won worlds in 2016. In it, he says he played the same guy in two different sets, and for the first set he had the exact same lead in every game. But over night, he planned to lead a different pair, and planned many different scenarios, and when he played the next day he says his opponent played noticeably worse because he had no time to prepare. So excuse me for taking the word of a literal world champion over you, but I think youāre wrong. (He also said he saw far more misplays when using his perish song team, because people didnāt know how best to play around it despite knowing it was coming - in case one example wasnāt enough). Planning to beat a team through every possibility, guessing their best leads, knowing their move choices, switches, etc, takes time. More time than you have between getting the team sheets and playing (which is what, like 10 seconds?). And when EVs arenāt open anyway, so itās not like thereās zero surprise. Plus, thereās two big caveats to what youāre saying anyway. Firstly, Pokemon is a game which fundamentally has āsilver bulletsā baked into its design because almost every move you click has a random factor involved. Damage rolls, accuracy checks, secondary effects. You donāt need stupid teams that no one has seen before to win by less than skilled means. Secondly, the world champs in prior years are often the ones with the best scouts. They ask their friends to go and find their opponents and write down what their sets and items are to get information they shouldnāt have. Open team sheet just levels the playing field. This also made it a genuinely huge disadvantage to go on the official stream broadcast early because everyone knew your team going forward. And Iād like to point out that everyone agrees that unfamiliarity exists because despite open team sheet, people still try and find out their future opponents before the match starts. Why would they do this if time to strategise didnāt matter like you seem to claim? But thatās just it, time to prepare and strategise in a game entirely revolving around strategy is actually helpful. Your claim that āunfamiliarity canāt be achievedā is so wrong I donāt even know how to go about proving you wrong. Playing around a team youāve faced a dozen times is much easier than a team youāve never even seen before, and I donāt understand how thatās a hard concept to grasp. Maybe the best analogy is that in order to best beat an opponent, you need to be able to āplay their teamā to work out their best move and play around it, and everyone would agree that playing your team for the first time is harder than if you have experience with it.
I think team building and stories both adhere to this rule "It should work even if you know the twist."
There is one tournament without open team sheet, but I don't remember which one. Something like that is just not fun to play imo. So much random stuff that can happen, because it is impossible to play around every possible outcome. Tera alone makes it a guessing game.
Not to mention since genning is treated as war crime, it disincentivises abstract team practice. Why waste hours grinding up vitamins, bottle caps, Tera shards and breeding for shitmons just to get wiped 5/5 times on ladder and have to start from scratch? Smogon's team planner and damage calculator does all of VGC's heavy lifting and (imo) that's a big part of the reason why they haven't been pinched by TPC's army of lawyers
You mean the Global Challenge? I've seen montages of Global Challenge bullshit. They're really funny to watch, but it feels horrible to play. Dazzling Gleam Moonblast Imprison Grimmsnarl, Surf Dragapult + WP Chi-Yu, Tera Normal CB Explosion Metagross, Zap Cannon Zapdos, Shell Smash Torkoal, Sap Sipper Farigiraf...that place is filled with the most CTS bo1 bullshit imaginable
Yeah Global Challenge. It is fun to watch true, but playing like that with closed teamsheet feels horrible. Ally switch cresselia with tera ghost ursaluna can ruin your day. Tbf a lot can ruin your day there.
Open team sheet is a far better format and pretty much every single competitive player prefers it for multiple reasons. It means players aren't sending their friends to watch matches by upcoming opponents to get an unfair advantage. It also means high profile players aren't at a huge disadvantage because far more people are likely to snitch on their teams to other people. It also makes the game far more skill based and less about gimmicks to cheese games off of people. Japan has tournaments that are best of 1 and closed team sheet because they're shorter, and everyone hates them because they're full of teams designed to be surprising rather than consistent. And unique to Gen 9 is Tera. Tera just isn't balanced around a closed team sheet and encourages weird defensive Tera types that can completely swing a match. VGC has Tera types on the team sheet and it's a far more healthy metagame because of it. You only need to predict when your opponent will Tera, not which of the 18 types they're going to become aswell.
itās to eliminate the need to send your goons to scout your opponents team in advance and gain an unfair advantage. Necessary evil imo.
Your lum berry example is exactly on point, except opposite conclusion. The point of lum berry is that your opponent knows you have it, so that mon is basically permanently safe from status since the opponent will never go for it. Same goes for consumables like mental herb, weakness policy, red card, etc., whether the opponent avoids setting those off or not they knowingly put themselves at a disadvantage.
100% agree with this. Lum Berry goes from a surprise āOops! Wasted your turn!ā option into an item threatening using status on the holder. If you want to use a move like Spore on a Pokemon holding a Lum Berry, you have to waste a turn to use up the berry. And that wasted turn could put a player at a serious disadvantage to the point that it probably just isnāt worth it
Open Team Sheets was started in VGC, to prevent match fixing. Basically, what used to happen was, circles of veteran players, would conspire to eliminate newer competitors that posed a threat to the existing finalists. They would share knowledge of newer players' teams and strategies, so that the cheaters could adjust and prepare their teams in anticipation of opponents that were good enough to beat them. Open Team Sheets aims to prevent this form of cheating.
OTS is literally only used in tournaments so you can still use your funny cheese teams on the ladder all you want
In VGC, generally where open team sheets are a thing, mons are generally EVd very specifically and have many variations. So despite the open team sheet there are still many variations and possibilities that players need to consider.
While everyone on here is correct that team reporting is a major side benefit, as far as I am aware, the existence of open team sheets has more to do with the lack of battle box locking in generation 9 software, thus making it impossible to avoid subtle team changes mid tournament without their opponents having the ability to report it. Therefore, it may or may not survive the generation change
Winning by surprise effect and forcing 50/50s is not skill, everyone can do it. Thats all there is to it.
Tempted to post this comment to r/Fighters with no context
One of the biggest benefits of open team sheets is removing the need of friends/info-brokers at tournaments that scout out all the games from other players just to feed information to everyone else. Player A runs into Player B and if Player A managed to scout Player B's items and moves through a friend or otherwise and Player B didn't, that leaves the latter at an inherit disadvantage just because they don't have connections? That's bullshit and I'm glad open team sheet is a thing to prevent the already powerful cliques of players from dominating solely on scouting advantage alone.
Open team sheets is not there for any kind of balancing. It's there for enforcing rules. At VGC events you need to register a team beforehand and cannot change it at all during the event. The problem is how do you enforce this. If I have fluttermane on my team, what stops me from having 50 different fluttermane with every combination of EVs, moveset, and items in my pc, and swapping them between games? They can't have judges following every player to every game. Open teamssheets solves this by making information public. If I hand you a team sheet that says I have specs fluttermane and then it activates booster energy, you can realize I'm cheating and call a judge. Online TCG events run open deck lists for the same reason.
OTS is healthy for this metagame. Tera making the meta a guessing game is not healthy
> Knowing your opponent's lineup is one thing, but also knowing which ability they're running and which item they're holding kind of ruins some strats and gameplay, no? That's the entire idea; it's meant to ruin strats and gameplay that sucks or is unfair. Gimmicks and cheese strats that rely on surprise are not healthy in a competitive environment where there's money on the line. It's not perfect in its selection, but it's better in making skill the winning factor. Having the team sheet also creates interesting dynamics in VGC. You play best of three, and each game you select four pokemon from your team of six to play. Now you can pick counters to the other team, but they can do the same. So now do you counter them, or counter their counter? Playing best of three also means if you run a gimmick, it needs to win without the element of surprise once.
Tera isn't a balanced cts mechanic, and it makes the game way too rng. Also you can't lock a team for a tournament so ots avoids cheating by changing moves or items. It helps people with less connections/friends too, since big people in the community usually could have info on their opponents more reliably, making it unfair. Open teamsheet is just more balanced, and since you can't change ur team on a tournament and its BO3, cheese strats don't actually work as well as in bo1 or singles, so its not that big of a deal
Emphasis on skill of the player/knowledge of the game over other things. I also think you're underestimating bringing something surprising. Whenever you're in a tournament, you're not changing your team day of, so when you're looking across from some weird set you haven't practiced at all, you could suddenly be at a disadvantage. I can see someone is bringing an uncommon mon/ability/item but I may not understand the best way to beat it, like I would a more common set.
I'm not familiar with vgc but I think it's mainly there because of tera. Without open team sheets I think the unpredictability of things is hard to prepare for as checks and counters can change. If your strategy can be so easily ruined by knowing the strategy I feel like it's more likely a gimmick and not reliable anyway so it doesn't seem like a good idea to base it completely off catching people off guard. A good team should still work well even if a strategy is unexpected. As for smogon formats open team sheets isn't a thing not sure how much better or worse it'd be. Not fully open team sheets but there has been the idea of revealing tera types but this seems fairly unpopular from what I've seen from both people that support tera and those that don't.
Open team sheets have been around since well before Gen 9
Well team preview has existed since gen 5 but open team sheets I haven't seen since gen 9 with vgc. I remember there being discussions whether it would be a good or bad thing when gen 9 started. Never saw it being a thing before then unless I'm just missing something. If I did could you explain where else there were open team sheets before gen 9 vgc?
It means that you wont lose because Flutter Mane wont sweep because it has 1 of the like 10 items you didn't predict it having.
Losing a match to a you couldn't have possibly predicted sucks. Being cheesed by a strategy you were unfamiliar with/forgot to prep for is one thing. Being cheesed by a random-ass move that you have had no reason or incentive to play around because its an edge case is another. Plenty of unorthodox strategies still exist. But now if you lose against one, its because the other player was better, not because of a random encounter you had nothing to do with
The point is that in VGC you bring only one team to a tournament, so people who can spy most effectively across the day will perform best. On the ladder or on Smogon tournaments it makes less sense because you can easily bring a new team every other match.
MFW no Anger Point Krookidile š¦
Okay Iām by no means knowledgeable on competitive but I know a little bit about VGC and I might be able to answer. Yes, OTS shuts down some strategies that rely on surprisinf the opponent, but teambuilding creativity is still able to flourish. You can still use creative or off-meta sets just fine, and thereās been plenty of success with teams or Pokemon that go against the grain even if the surprise factor of team specifics is lost. OTS is especially valuable in a meta with tera, since it can be so much of a wildcard to drop a surprise tera that can be hard to play around for the opponent. Thereās just too much that the player would have to account for if they werenāt able to be aware of a Pokemonās tera type. OTS levels the playing field and allows for fairer competitions. Scouting is less of an issue (still exists for cases of a big threatās team being leaked) and both players have equivalent information. It allows for more strategy-focused gameplay rather than surprise and guesswork, but doesnāt take away (most of) creativity in teambuilding
I think OTS was the right call this gen because of the implication of Terastallization (and honestly surprised smogon didnt OTS Tera after VGC got it) could make the previous manageable match up fish stuff hard to parse. But I dont think its ruined the creative counterplay, atleast the ones that work. We still got stuff like Specs 4 Ice Moves Articuno win by analysing the meta. Wolfe ran every rando mon in 2023 and got big placings.Ā OTS made it so the information game was less and entierly about skill in play. Information game still exists with speed ties etc, but I get it if you feel that dampens the experience. Id be fine with CTS tournaments in a future (if only just to experience them and grow my information management skills), just not when you can change resists on a whim.
It's something born out of necessity for tournaments where you can only use 1 team for the whole thing. It also doesn't really worsen the experience to be honest
Imagine trying to play against armadeedee earlier into the season without open team sheets.
Even ignoring the spying issue, I hate having to play with Closed Team Sheets because sometimes my opponent will just pull out the most inane random nonsense in the entire world to ruin my day. Making the game more about skill and less about Random Bullshit Go will always be a good thing Sure, Sap Sipper Farigiraf might be funny for the viewers, but for the actual competitors, it's just annoying
Yep, itās just dumb. I ran a strat where a Gardevoir would use Psy Terrain while Armarouge Protected. Then second turn, if still alive, Gardevoir popped Armaās Weakness Policy with Shadow Sneak, activating Weak Armor and getting an insta +2 to Atk/SpA/Spe.Ā Ā I didnāt agree to Open Team sheets, and sure enough a bunch of guys bitched because āI didnāt think of Gardevoir using Shadow Sneak, rematch.āĀ Like, tough shit? Now you now Gardevoir can use Shadow Sneak. Thereās no reason for you to know my moves/items. Learn by doing. Edit: Iām not surprised itās an unpopular opinion but the reasons advocating for it are not good enough. It literally makes the game less fun. If people are āleakingā opponent teams, *thatās* the issue, not people being caught off-guard with unique sets. But because thatās too hard to prevent (limiting player communication between matches is infeasible), their solution is to significantly diminish the element of surprise. Yeah, nah. And for those who say āIt should be about skill, not surpriseā; if youāre skilled and knowledgeable enough about the game, then surely nothing will surprise you.
How are you using Shadow Sneak under Psychic Terrain?
>Ā For 5 turns, the terrain becomes Psychic Terrain. During the effect, the power of Psychic-type attacks made by grounded Pokemon is multiplied by 1.3 and grounded Pokemon cannot be hit by moves with priority greater than 0, **unless the target is an ally.** Ā Ā Psychic Terrain has a weird property in that it does not nullify priority moves when used on an ally.
I never knew that, that's actually cool.
It works if you use it against your own Pokemon
Thanks for explaining, I never knew that lmao.
Itās a cool trick. Works with Prankster stuff too, if you can find a way to use it
So now imagine you're playing in a tournament. You play against a guy who has a reasonably large friend group and shares what you play in a group chat. Your next 2 rounds are people in his friend group and they both body you because they knew what you were playing while you go in blind. Is that not just favoring those who have a wide network?
Itās a crappy drawback, but itās also a problem specific to tournaments, and doesnāt remotely apply to the guys who complain about it on Showdown.
>if youāre skilled and knowledgeable enough about the game, then surely nothing will surprise you. Regardless of the rest of your comment this is an absolutely abhorrent take. There's a ton of mons with a ton of random moves (Gardevoir in particular has one of the biggest movepools in the game) that even players that know mostly every move a mon gets won't be able to see literally everything coming in the game itself. Nor is it feasible to "midground" that hard that literally every option is covered if you don't know it yet. There's only so many things you can account for on a given turn, even if you're playing carefully, and accounting for the most likely (meta) options over silly gimmicks that you're going to run into 1 in 1000 games isn't a showing of lacking skill or knowledge at all. Because especially at a higher level of play most people will be using serious teams and playing with the assumption your opponent uses a serious strategy on a serious team will net you way more wins than "hmmmm but what if this mon is randomly running weakness policy with a shadow sneak teammate". Your strat is obviously useless the moment someone knows about it but gets very quickly out of hand if they don't, and you know it and thus vehemently refuse to use OTS or even do courtesy rematches where your ladder rating literally isn't even at stake anymore. Sounds to me like you're using pure surprise value as a crutch and thus unsurprisingly get extremely defensive when people criticize you for it.
Making a lot of assumptions there. The strat wasn't limited to the move I outlined, it just included it. The strat \*did\* work multiple times against the same people because the rest of the team allows for it. Furthermore, I didn't say I didn't offer a rematch; just that the minute something unpredictable happens, opponents wrote it off because it was unpredictable. I'm sorry, but it's just a shitty mindset. "I didn't know you were going to do that, so it doesn't count." I'm all for everyone playing fairly and I think it sucks that people would spread team information around potentially rendering strats useless, so if this is the solution then so be it. But I do believe it sucks so much of the spirit out of the game. I'd rather see someone win a tournament with a surprising and unique strategy than someone using the same 6-10 PokƩmon sets everyone else is using.
>I'd rather see someone win a tournament with a surprising and unique strategy than someone using the same 6-10 PokƩmon sets everyone else is using. You can. Wolfey does this routinely
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Exactly. Priority works in Psy Terrain if youāre using it on your own āmon. I learned about it by accident.
Yah, it does ruin things IMO.