Adapting our tournament formats to an expanding pool of Pokemon

[jpw234]

So, I'd like to start an open-ended discussion about a broad problem (or rather issue, it's not strictly negative) that Smogon is going to have to come to grips with as a community at some point. So why not start that conversation now?

Basically, as we're navigating through OU in the 6th generation of Pokemon games, the concept of "matchup" has been an increasingly prevalent concern. Lots of players feel as though OU is not a very rewarding tier to be playing competitively because certain matchups are seen to be "unwinnable" from team preview. Certainly not everybody feels this way, but there is definitely an increasing sentiment to this effect.

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I recently had a conversation on PS! about this topic, and I'll c/p some of my relevant thoughts here:

Hide

[12:09] %jpw234: previously the pool of mons was limited enough
[12:09] %jpw234: where you could realistically act like you were finding the best team
[12:09] %jpw234: as the pool becomes bigger
[12:09] %jpw234: competition shifts to like a magic/hearthstone style where you're to an extent playing against the meta
[12:09] %jpw234: and you have to accept some matchups
[12:09] %jpw234: but those games still thrive based on their tournament formats
[12:10] %jpw234: in those TCGs you have a bunch of viable deck archetypes and they have better/worse matchups against each other
[12:10] %jpw234: some innovation comes in tweaking an archetype to improve matchups or like "spiking" atournament with a totally new unexpected type of deck
[12:10] %jpw234: and people just know like some matchups are worse than others and that's fine
[12:10] %jpw234: so i think mons will start to shift towards that style
[12:11] %jpw234: where maybe we know that like manectric offense has a meh matchup against ttar balance but you can change up your manectric team in some ways to improve that
[12:11] %jpw234: and then maybe you come in with a totally wacky new stall that is unexpected and wins
[12:11] %jpw234: and then gets absorbed into the meta

So, to expand on that idea in a clearer way: when the pool of Pokemon is small enough and reasonable similar in terms of power, we have a situation where teambuilding is, in a pretty real sense, a search for the single "best team". DPP OU is probably the quintessential example of such a phenomenon. The threatlist is manageable enough that you can realistically attempt to handle every relevant threat with just 6 Pokemon. Obviously there is some matchup in even these smaller tiers, and there is still room for different playstyles and etc. But we typically don't think of matchup being a major factor in this type of environment.

As the pool of Pokemon gets much bigger, the ability to handle every relevant threat in the metagame diminishes rapidly. We've seen this moving into ORAS with a pretty significant expansion in our threatlists and in the number of viable Pokemon. In this sort of situation, you can no longer search for the single "best team" in the abstract, rather, you have to search for the best team in a particular metagame, based on its expected matchups against the other common teams you will face. There will always be some Pokemon or matchups that you accept a worse win percentage against. This doesn't have to mean an auto-loss in those bad matchups by any means, and there should still be room (except in the absolute worst of cases) for a skilled player to overcome these matchups, but matchup becomes a more controlling concern.

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Now, we don't have to necessarily agree exactly where exactly this line is drawn. Maybe you believe that you're perfectly capable of handling most of the relevant metagame threats in ORAS (I hold this view; I know plenty of good battlers do, WhiteQueen being the most prominent example off the top of my head). But given the trajectory that GameFreak has established - power creep is kind of a necessity for them to keep selling games - we all kind of have to acknowledge that there will be a tipping point at some point, and that has serious implications for what we do here.

The most important thing is that a situation where matchup is a relevant factor in teambuilding does not mean that a game can no longer be competitive. The analogues I'm going to refer to are the competitive Magic: the Gathering and Hearthstone scenes, simply because I'm familiar with them. I'm not arguing that these TCGs are "the same" as Pokemon, there's obviously massive differences, but the style of metagame in particular is a relevant thing to reference.
In a game like Magic, particularly in older formats with a larger card pool, it's impossible for any deck to have positive matchups against the entire expected metagame, and that's okay - Magic's competitive scene is growing now more than ever. Instead, each archetype has a typically accepted backbone of cards, and then some room for flexibility to improve different matchups, where you can tweak your deck to have better or worse percentages against the decks you're expecting to play against. At a big tournament, you can personalize your deck with these tweaks to perform better against the expected metagame, pick the deck that you expect has particularly good matchups against the expected field, or even innovate an entirely new deck that the metagame isn't prepared for. What's more, there's still plenty of room for in-game skill to control your destiny, despite an expected amount of variance.

I anticipate that Pokemon could possibly settle into a form of competition similar to this. We already have a number of established archetypes - Sableye Stall, rain offense, hippo balance, Sand offense, manectric volt-turn, etc., so this type of thing is beginning to form already. We can, similarly, understand the winrates of "typical" teams of each archetype - for example, hippo balance has a decent matchup against manectric offense but has a poorer matchup against rain. There's room for tweaks within each style to change this - maybe the volt-turn team runs a GK Thundy to beat hippo, or the hippo team runs a Gastrodon to beat rain, etc. And there's room for in-game skill to overcome the effects of matchup with good predictions and decisionmaking.

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The biggest issue with transitioning into this style of competition is our tournament formats. TCG tournaments are capable of tolerating a pretty large amount of variance and matchup because of their formats. For example, most large Magic tournaments have up to 15 rounds of Bo3 Swiss games, where you can lose plenty of individual games and even one or two matches to variance or bad matchups. The fields are also very large, so you have to ability to just dodge your bad matchups sometimes. Because of this larger sample size, better decks and players tend to shake out toward the top, although there's always the potential for newer players or weird decks to have an explosive run, or for very good players to have bad days and finish poorly. This is also offset by the fact that the tournament cycle is pretty short, with the biggest tournament happening twice a year and major events happening as often as 3 times a month. So even if the best player in the world has an awful day this weekend, he has plenty of opportunities to redeem himself.

Our current tournament formats, particularly the individual tournaments, are not structured in a way that can tolerate a similar amount of variance. For example, check out the OST, which is billed as the biggest individual Pokemon tournament anywhere. The OST is an entirely bracket-based format where each round is just a Bo3. In a world where matchup is a larger factor (maybe you think that's this gen, maybe you should be imagining gen 8 right now), it's entirely possible that much worse players simply get good matchups in 2 games out of 3 and knock out deserving players in very early rounds. This might be tolerable on its own, except OST is only run once a year - so a good player who gets poor matchup once is just SOL until next year. This applies similarly to Smogon Tour playoffs (although the Smogon Tour point system is itself a good example of a way that we can hedge against these concerns) and as well to individual games in team tournaments like WCoP and SPL (although the fact that you win/lose as a team, with up to 10 matches played each week, also helps hedge against matchup/variance).

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Now, I'm not saying that we just can't run any tournaments like OST. But we're already seeing this concern manifest itself, where SPL/WCoP players lose interest because they can get screwed by matchup, and of course OST had plenty of matchup concerns this year (pokeaim/char-y?). We have limited resources - due to the complications of scheduling games over the internet and a limited amount of staff, we can't run the OST (or a similar high-profile tournament) every two weeks. I get that. And I don't have all the answers (I'm not a TD or heavily involved in the tourney community, so I'd like to hear from those people). So, I'd like to have a discussion - is there a way we can change our tournament structure to better accomodate what Pokemon is becoming? Do you disagree that how the metagame works is going to change as power creep continues? Did I type way too much? Discuss.

 

[BKC]

The last two paragraphs of this post are excellent and sum up my thoughts on this topic more eloquently than I could articulate myself so I will just link it http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/identifying-a-design-philosophy.3487084/#post-4793617

 

[jpw234]

BKC, it appears your position is that more desirable metagames (DPP, ADV) had a "power range" that was smaller (i.e. the ceiling for power of an OU legal mon was lower), and that subsequent metagames have expanded this range to a negative effect, and that a more aggressive policy toward banning should be used. This is a short- and possibly medium-term solution to the problem I've posed, but not a long-term one, because even if we maintain a lower power range with aggressive bannings, new generations will add more Pokemon in this range, expanding the number of OU legal threats (e.g. maybe you'd ban Mega-Alt and Mega-Meta and etc., but ORAS still adds TFlame and Chesnaught and Dragalge and etc). So this would delay the problem, but I'm not sure it would conclusively fix it.

Edit: allow me to take another shot at this because the above is not very articulate. A metagame's ability to handle threats can be stretched vertically or horizontally. To use extreme examples: if a metagame had 2 pokemon in it, each of which required you to have 3 specific, disparate counters to beat, you wouldn't be able to team build well because you'd need 6 mons just to beat those 2 threats, and the metagame would be quite matchup based - an example of vertical pressure. On the other hand, if a metagame had 500 similarly powered threats, each of which had 30 viable counters, none would individually be broken, but the metagame will become matchup based because each team can't beat every threat - horizontal pressure. An aggressive banning strategy can solve vertical pressure to an extent, but horizontal pressure seems inevitable as more pokemon are introduced, unless we lower the power ceiling of OU in each subsequent generation (which seems backwards, but maybe that's the answer).

 

[ryan]

MtG and Hearthstone have ways of helping out with the undeniable matchup issue. As you mentioned, MtG requires many, many more games played in tournaments as well as a sideboard of 15 cards that can be subbed out after each game in the Bo3. If your deck struggles against other decks of a certain type, you can put those more matchup-related cards in your deck so that you do have a fighting chance at winning against them. Hearthstone has shifted from the suboptimal last hero standing format to a new one (which has a name I cannot remember at the moment; I've been out of the competitive Hearthstone scene for a couple months) where after a deck wins, you can no longer use it for the rest of the match. Some tournaments still include pre-match bans to eliminate decks you might otherwise struggle with.

These measures obviously aren't as easy to implement in Pokemon because the number that you can bring is six rather than 30 or 60. Still, something akin to these ideas could be implemented for competitive Pokemon. A "sideboard" of one or two Pokemon could be allowed, whether those Pokemon are predetermined or completely open to do with as you wish. We could also restrict the same six Pokemon to be used every match but allow their movesets to be changed between games. I'm not sure if there's anything we can take from Hearthstone to adjust our formats, but I like this idea of adjusting the way we play this game in order to account for the increasing number of Pokemon available. We should hold an unofficial tournament with a format like this to see how some of these ideas would work out in practice.

 

[toshimelonhead]

BKC, it appears your position is that more desirable metagames (DPP, ADV) had a "power range" that was smaller (i.e. the ceiling for power of an OU legal mon was lower), and that subsequent metagames have expanded this range to a negative effect, and that a more aggressive policy toward banning should be used. This is a short- and possibly medium-term solution to the problem I've posed, but not a long-term one, because even if we maintain a lower power range with aggressive bannings, new generations will add more Pokemon in this range, expanding the number of OU legal threats (e.g. maybe you'd ban Mega-Alt and Mega-Meta and etc., but ORAS still adds TFlame and Chesnaught and Dragalge and etc). So this would delay the problem, but I'm not sure it would conclusively fix it.

Edit: allow me to take another shot at this because the above is not very articulate. A metagame's ability to handle threats can be stretched vertically or horizontally. To use extreme examples: if a metagame had 2 pokemon in it, each of which required you to have 3 specific, disparate counters to beat, you wouldn't be able to team build well because you'd need 6 mons just to beat those 2 threats, and the metagame would be quite matchup based - an example of vertical pressure. On the other hand, if a metagame had 500 similarly powered threats, each of which had 30 viable counters, none would individually be broken, but the metagame will become matchup based because each team can't beat every threat - horizontal pressure. An aggressive banning strategy can solve vertical pressure to an extent, but horizontal pressure seems inevitable as more pokemon are introduced, unless we lower the power ceiling of OU in each subsequent generation (which seems backwards, but maybe that's the answer).

There is also a third type of pressure: Movepool pressure. With each passing generation, pokemon gain moves that can eliminate prior counters or create new diverse sets to deal with. Greninja with Gunk Shot (and Low Kick, to an extent) eliminated Clefable and Azumarill as checks, making it impossible to deal with in OU. Another example of movepool pressure is the expansion of a move such as Baton Pass, which led to the creation of even deadlier Baton Pass chains with Scolipede instead of Ninjask. More moves = more viable movesets = more threats to deal with even without expanding the number of pokemon available in a tier. The diversity of these movesets (think Charizard having two very distinct forms with distinct counters) places a huge hidden constraint on teambuilding.

The biggest thing I am afraid about in future generations is the need for more complex suspect testing. Not only are pokemon potentially causing matchup issues, but also individual moves, abilities, and items are leading players calling for more suspect testing (Scald in UU and Eviolite and Berry Juice in LC, for example). Even worse, certain combinations of pokemon that might not be broken on their own might be broken together (hello Deosharp). I don't want to have suspect tests every two weeks to test every single combination of pokemon + move + ability + item that "might" be broken in order for people to have fewer concerns about matchup issues. Lowering the power ceiling of OU isn't going to change that either; UU, RU, NU, LC and Ubers all have their Suspect issues and controversies. As the series of BW Suspect tests showed us, it's not possible to get down on an miscroscopic level in the three or four years we might have an active generation to ban everything worth banning for an optimal metagame; at some point we are going to have to accept a metagame that is optimal enough and not perfectly optimal.

 

[jpw234]

MtG and Hearthstone have ways of helping out with the undeniable matchup issue. As you mentioned, MtG requires many, many more games played in tournaments as well as a sideboard of 15 cards that can be subbed out after each game in the Bo3. If your deck struggles against other decks of a certain type, you can put those more matchup-related cards in your deck so that you do have a fighting chance at winning against them. Hearthstone has shifted from the suboptimal last hero standing format to a new one (which has a name I cannot remember at the moment; I've been out of the competitive Hearthstone scene for a couple months) where after a deck wins, you can no longer use it for the rest of the match. Some tournaments still include pre-match bans to eliminate decks you might otherwise struggle with.

These measures obviously aren't as easy to implement in Pokemon because the number that you can bring is six rather than 30 or 60. Still, something akin to these ideas could be implemented for competitive Pokemon. A "sideboard" of one or two Pokemon could be allowed, whether those Pokemon are predetermined or completely open to do with as you wish. We could also restrict the same six Pokemon to be used every match but allow their movesets to be changed between games. I'm not sure if there's anything we can take from Hearthstone to adjust our formats, but I like this idea of adjusting the way we play this game in order to account for the increasing number of Pokemon available. We should hold an unofficial tournament with a format like this to see how some of these ideas would work out in practice.

It's interesting because as I understand it (and I'm no VGC expert), VGC games are bring 6, pick 4, best of 3 matches, and you can pick a different 4 for each match? So to an extent, the official doubles format has already worked in a type of "sideboarding", which as you correctly pointed out, is pretty critical to managing the matchup concerns. I would be very interested to see a tournament with, say, 9 pick 6 with the ability to "sideboard" after each game of a Bo3. The problem, of course, is that there's no precedent or real in-game analogue for that, so there'd be the question of staying true to the carts.

 

[Bughouse]

MtG and Hearthstone have ways of helping out with the undeniable matchup issue. As you mentioned, MtG requires many, many more games played in tournaments as well as a sideboard of 15 cards that can be subbed out after each game in the Bo3. If your deck struggles against other decks of a certain type, you can put those more matchup-related cards in your deck so that you do have a fighting chance at winning against them. Hearthstone has shifted from the suboptimal last hero standing format to a new one (which has a name I cannot remember at the moment; I've been out of the competitive Hearthstone scene for a couple months) where after a deck wins, you can no longer use it for the rest of the match. Some tournaments still include pre-match bans to eliminate decks you might otherwise struggle with.

These measures obviously aren't as easy to implement in Pokemon because the number that you can bring is six rather than 30 or 60. Still, something akin to these ideas could be implemented for competitive Pokemon. A "sideboard" of one or two Pokemon could be allowed, whether those Pokemon are predetermined or completely open to do with as you wish. We could also restrict the same six Pokemon to be used every match but allow their movesets to be changed between games. I'm not sure if there's anything we can take from Hearthstone to adjust our formats, but I like this idea of adjusting the way we play this game in order to account for the increasing number of Pokemon available. We should hold an unofficial tournament with a format like this to see how some of these ideas would work out in practice.

one thing that Braverius has brought up in Doubles is that actually the reverse might be true. Doing teamlock in bo3, as is done in VGC, according to him, incentives building more generally useful teams and not angling for favorable matchups and picking otherwise suboptimal teams just because you think it'll get the jump on your opp. Instead, if you're wrong, you're just using a less good team for all 3 matches, which is obviously not good.

Doubles has experimented with teamlock at his suggestion. I personally didn't like it, and I also think singles is inherently more matchup based (so it might actually exacerbate the luck of team matchup by condensing it all into one choice, not three) but it's food for thought.

 

[Stratos]

we tried teamlock in dou and without a 'side board' it fucking sucks

 

[blarajan]

MtG and Hearthstone have ways of helping out with the undeniable matchup issue. As you mentioned, MtG requires many, many more games played in tournaments as well as a sideboard of 15 cards that can be subbed out after each game in the Bo3. If your deck struggles against other decks of a certain type, you can put those more matchup-related cards in your deck so that you do have a fighting chance at winning against them. Hearthstone has shifted from the suboptimal last hero standing format to a new one (which has a name I cannot remember at the moment; I've been out of the competitive Hearthstone scene for a couple months) where after a deck wins, you can no longer use it for the rest of the match. Some tournaments still include pre-match bans to eliminate decks you might otherwise struggle with.

These measures obviously aren't as easy to implement in Pokemon because the number that you can bring is six rather than 30 or 60. Still, something akin to these ideas could be implemented for competitive Pokemon. A "sideboard" of one or two Pokemon could be allowed, whether those Pokemon are predetermined or completely open to do with as you wish. We could also restrict the same six Pokemon to be used every match but allow their movesets to be changed between games. I'm not sure if there's anything we can take from Hearthstone to adjust our formats, but I like this idea of adjusting the way we play this game in order to account for the increasing number of Pokemon available. We should hold an unofficial tournament with a format like this to see how some of these ideas would work out in practice.

I hosted a tournament like this called the sideboard tournament a few years ago. It got relatively good acclaim as interesting at least but I'm sure it would be more valuable as a test for ORAS than BW.

(idk where the tournament is)

 

[Bughouse]

I hosted a tournament like this called the sideboard tournament a few years ago. It got relatively good acclaim as interesting at least but I'm sure it would be more valuable as a test for ORAS than BW.

(idk where the tournament is)

i got u
http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/sideboard-tournament-round-1.3458415/

 

[nyttyn]

Well, I think a sideboard type concept is actually a great idea. Before I go any further, I want to discuss the concept of the sideboard in MTG and its role in the game, as I'm a (somewhat casual, admittedly) player of the game myself.

What purpose does the sideboard serve?

Magic is a game with a CRAPLOAD of cards. What's important to note is that there are actually distinct blocks in the game's most standard, 60 card format (I'm not even going to get into stuff like Commander/EDH or two-headed ogre) - Constructed (Block/Standard/Modern), Eternal (Legacy/Vintage), and Limited (Sealed/Booster).

The Eternal formats are basically Ubers / Anything Goes - Legacy is more akin to ubers, allowing ALMOST every card (and that is thouands upon thousands of cards) to be played, but making certain bans of completely unreasonable, game-warping cards. Vintage, on the other hand, lets you play almost any card - with a few restrictions even then to keep the game from being completely unplayable.

Obviously, this causes a lot of centralization, power creep, and relies upon players purchasing cards that are SUPER old (imagine if acquiring a Wish Chansey-level rarity mon for every team was a requirement for competitive pokemon!), so the Constructed formats exist. These ban cards that were made past a certain date - Modern is the most inclusive of the three, allowing cards from Core Set Eighth Edition and Mirrodin and beyond. Obviously this still gets kind of expensive, which is why Standard exists - only allowing the Core set along with the two most recently released blocks. Blocks are the most restrictive - only allowing cards from a single 'block' (three sets = one block). Even in these formats, however, the Sideboard exists, beyond reasons of sheer card volume (which is still a large factor), with two kinds of cards being able to exist and benifitng immensely from the sideboard's existence. More on that in a moment.

So, even narrowed down, MTG sets still have a lot of cards, hundreds of cards - many of which have situational uses, and some which are completely useless outside of extremely narrow functions. In addition, matchup is a huge factor, and without the sideboard, your entire night at a local tournament could be completely ruined just because your archetype is weak to that specific matchup - Sideboard allows you to fit in prior-mentioned narrow-use cards, without compromising the viability of your deck as a whole.

Now, I'd like to talk about the two kinds of cards - cards that only fit in a sideboard, and cards that, without the existence of sideboarding, would be extremely toxic and disruptive to the format.

Cards that mandate sideboarding - Blood Moon

Blood Moon has a very simple effect - "All non-basic lands are Mountains." However, this seemingly innocent effect can have an enormous, outright disruptive effect upon the game - for decks that rely upon nonbasic lands, this card might as well read "target opponent forfeits." Or, in pokemon terms, it's a field effect that completely drains the PP of non-fire status moves (it doesn't have quite as extreme of an effect, but it's the best parallel I can come up with). Arguably, this fits best in the sideboard, but it's an extremely powerful card that can be difficult to fit in answers to in your main deck, as it will likely disrupt your plans - which is where sideboarding comes in, allowing you to fit in otherwise niche cards such as Wear // Tear to allow you to combat it. Frankly a lot of 'answer' cards fall into this category, much like how pokemon like Kyurem-B can completely demolish entire archtypes.

Cards that only fit in the sideboard - Slaughter Games

Imagine if, back in the DPP era of pokemon, there was a pokemon with an ability that, when sent out for the first time in a match, would instantly set the HP of a pokemon to zero on the opponent's team - but you had to name the pokemon first, and without team preview, you would have no way of knowing that mon's name. That's basically what Slaughter Games does - obviously, it'd be lunacy to try and use such a card in a standard deck, it'd be a dead draw most of the time with such a high cost! But as a sideboard card, it absolutely shines, allowing you to completely remove a single card from the game, no ifs, ands, or buts - under the condition you know what that card is beforehand.

Honorable mention to Tormod's Crypt, which exists literally just to screw over a specific type of resource management, making it perfect for the sideboard.


Now, where does pokemon fit into all of this? The existence of a 'sideboard' in Pokemon would allow for the reduction of match-up, certainly, but more importantly, it would allow more 'niche' pokemon and sets which would never see play to find new life as situational benchwarming partners that could potentially turn a hopeless matchup around, as well as help take some of the edge off of centralizing match-up tyrants. We can draw direct parallels to how MTG's sideboard works, and see that it's already a pretty good idea - one that I feel will translate well to Pokemon, which is, much like MTG, tied heavily up the numbers and statistics of the picks you make for a limited team. And as a hypothetical, perhaps a good start point would be a 'sideboard' of two Pokemon - enough to allow you to swap out to address extreme matchup woes, but not enough to completely change how your team operates.


tl;dr sideboarding in MTG reduces matchup woes, but goes beyond that and also allows for the use of things that otherwise might not see play - this will likely be the same case in Pokemon.

 

[jpw234]

Well, I think a sideboard type concept is actually a great idea. Before I go any further, I want to discuss the concept of the sideboard in MTG and its role in the game, as I'm a (somewhat casual, admittedly) player of the game myself.

What purpose does the sideboard serve?

Magic is a game with a CRAPLOAD of cards. What's important to note is that there are actually distinct blocks in the game's most standard, 60 card format (I'm not even going to get into stuff like Commander/EDH or two-headed ogre) - Constructed (Block/Standard/Modern), Eternal (Legacy/Vintage), and Limited (Sealed/Booster).

The Eternal formats are basically Ubers / Anything Goes - Legacy is more akin to ubers, allowing ALMOST every card (and that is thouands upon thousands of cards) to be played, but making certain bans of completely unreasonable, game-warping cards. Vintage, on the other hand, lets you play almost any card - with a few restrictions even then to keep the game from being completely unplayable.

Obviously, this causes a lot of centralization, power creep, and relies upon players purchasing cards that are SUPER old (imagine if acquiring a Wish Chansey-level rarity mon for every team was a requirement for competitive pokemon!), so the Constructed formats exist. These ban cards that were made past a certain date - Modern is the most inclusive of the three, allowing cards from Core Set Eighth Edition and Mirrodin and beyond. Obviously this still gets kind of expensive, which is why Standard exists - only allowing the Core set along with the two most recently released blocks. Blocks are the most restrictive - only allowing cards from a single 'block' (three sets = one block). Even in these formats, however, the Sideboard exists, beyond reasons of sheer card volume (which is still a large factor), with two kinds of cards being able to exist and benifitng immensely from the sideboard's existence. More on that in a moment.

So, even narrowed down, MTG sets still have a lot of cards, hundreds of cards - many of which have situational uses, and some which are completely useless outside of extremely narrow functions. In addition, matchup is a huge factor, and without the sideboard, your entire night at a local tournament could be completely ruined just because your archetype is weak to that specific matchup - Sideboard allows you to fit in prior-mentioned narrow-use cards, without compromising the viability of your deck as a whole.

Now, I'd like to talk about the two kinds of cards - cards that only fit in a sideboard, and cards that, without the existence of sideboarding, would be extremely toxic and disruptive to the format.

Cards that mandate sideboarding - Blood Moon

Blood Moon has a very simple effect - "All non-basic lands are Mountains." However, this seemingly innocent effect can have an enormous, outright disruptive effect upon the game - for decks that rely upon nonbasic lands, this card might as well read "target opponent forfeits." Or, in pokemon terms, it's a field effect that completely drains the PP of non-fire status moves (it doesn't have quite as extreme of an effect, but it's the best parallel I can come up with). Arguably, this fits best in the sideboard, but it's an extremely powerful card that can be difficult to fit in answers to in your main deck, as it will likely disrupt your plans - which is where sideboarding comes in, allowing you to fit in otherwise niche cards such as Wear // Tear to allow you to combat it. Frankly a lot of 'answer' cards fall into this category, much like how pokemon like Kyurem-B can completely demolish entire archtypes.

Cards that only fit in the sideboard - Slaughter Games

Imagine if, back in the DPP era of pokemon, there was a pokemon with an ability that, when sent out for the first time in a match, would instantly set the HP of a pokemon to zero on the opponent's team - but you had to name the pokemon first, and without team preview, you would have no way of knowing that mon's name. That's basically what Slaughter Games does - obviously, it'd be lunacy to try and use such a card in a standard deck, it'd be a dead draw most of the time with such a high cost! But as a sideboard card, it absolutely shines, allowing you to completely remove a single card from the game, no ifs, ands, or buts - under the condition you know what that card is beforehand.

Honorable mention to Tormod's Crypt, which exists literally just to screw over a specific type of resource management, making it perfect for the sideboard.


Now, where does pokemon fit into all of this? The existence of a 'sideboard' in Pokemon would allow for the reduction of match-up, certainly, but more importantly, it would allow more 'niche' pokemon and sets which would never see play to find new life as situational benchwarming partners that could potentially turn a hopeless matchup around, as well as help take some of the edge off of centralizing match-up tyrants. We can draw direct parallels to how MTG's sideboard works, and see that it's already a pretty good idea - one that I feel will translate well to Pokemon, which is, much like MTG, tied heavily up the numbers and statistics of the picks you make for a limited team. And as a hypothetical, perhaps a good start point would be a 'sideboard' of two Pokemon - enough to allow you to swap out to address extreme matchup woes, but not enough to completely change how your team operates.


tl;dr sideboarding in MTG reduces matchup woes, but goes beyond that and also allows for the use of things that otherwise might not see play - this will likely be the same case in Pokemon.

This is a very good point. MTG has "silver bullets", cards that can do huge work in one or two matchups but are dead otherwise. Having something like that for Pokemon would be very interesting - for example, a really heavy hitting wall breaker for offense to bring in against a stall team, or something like that. Maybe you could sideboard really niche stuff like Doublade or Slurpuff which have the potential to be completely useless, but can also shut down certain teams.

 

[Braverius]

I'm a huge fan of the sideboard idea and think it's much better than straight teamlock, fwiw. I think teamlock has more benefits than switching teams does in a best-of-three series, but in the end I think the sideboard gives you the best of both worlds. Something definitely worth looking into. Makes teambuilding more of an art and makes the game have another level of depth along with keeping the information game mostly intact.

I've played both the non-teamlock and teamlock and come away thinking that the sideboard would blow both out of the water since I think it's something that can only extend the amount that player skill factors into the game. I've wanted to start a discussion in the VGC community about this concept as well, think it's a universally good idea to test in our game throughout most tiers, although I can't say as much about singles formats because of my serious lack of experience there.

 

[jpw234]

A major issue with sideboarding (say in singles, just for the sake of argument, you bring your team of 6 with 2 pokemon in your "sideboard) is that you'd have to pre-submit your 8 Pokemon for every tournament using the role, because otherwise there'd be no way to check that you didn't just sideboard the perfect Pokemon for whatever matchup you faced. This would certainly put a strain on TDs, particularly for non-major tournaments. Given that resource restrictions seriously implicate the range of viable solutions, I'd love to hear from some TDs or similarly involved people.

 

[FireMage]

I'm not supporting sideboarding for official / non-offical tournaments. Especially if teams are required to be sent in prior.

Reason being - Like other tournament hosting regulars and (some) TD's, I often have multiple turnaments running at once, some of which require additional information being sent over PM (For example Battle Factory) This would cause a massive buildup in my PM inbox; in which I also use for other methods of cmmunicating with other users (Help requests, The Smog PM's, General Conversations with people looking at hosting and Chit chat PM's with users I dn't talk with Often). I imagine that other hosters AND TD's inboxes would include more policy discussions that would be otherwise buried under the crushing weight of approx 512 (* Multiple) Teams for OST alone.

Sure, a middle gorund bot account could be used - but then teams would have to be monitored by TD('s) not involved in the tournament - and usually a lot of them tend to get involved and want to play in the tournament at hand (Aldaron probably being the one who enters the least - but he has a lot more responsibility elsewhere onsite) Leading to those who don't want to enter being put on extra pressure / strain because of this. Don't get started on a best of three situation!

In order to be resource efficient sideboarding would need people to either lock in their teams round 1 and use the same throughout (lol - no-one in their right mind would go through ANY official tour with the same team) Or have a larger base of trusted non-players helping out with the inputting of data - and as we all know, larger teams have an incresed risk of leaking the information.


Just getting my thoughts out there - my mind hasn't quite woken up just yet. If you need better clarification please let me know.

tl;dr - good idea in theory but the practical implications are awful.

 

[Vinc2612]

Unless you create a "tier" on the simulator where everything is already setted. You build with 8 Pokémons, click on chall. Before the preview, the simulator asks for your six Pokémon. Then you play normally, and once a player wins, the second battle starts automatically.

That may force you to play the whole Bo3 in a row, but since you are not supposed to fix your builds between battles, it should not be a problem.

 

[jpw234]

Unless you create a "tier" on the simulator where everything is already setted. You build with 8 Pokémons, click on chall. Before the preview, the simulator asks for your six Pokémon. Then you play normally, and once a player wins, the second battle starts automatically.

That may force you to play the whole Bo3 in a row, but since you are not supposed to fix your builds between battles, it should not be a problem.

Zarel, not asking for this to be done right now, but is something like this feasible?

 

[Zarel]

Zarel, not asking for this to be done right now, but is something like this feasible?

Yes, this is basically just Team Preview. VGC already does this with choosing 4 out of 6 Pokémon; wouldn't be too hard to change it to choosing 6 out of 8.

 

[soulgazer]

If I come off as rude in this post, it was not my intention :(

The last two paragraphs of this post are excellent and sum up my thoughts on this topic more eloquently than I could articulate myself so I will just link it http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/identifying-a-design-philosophy.3487084/#post-4793617

I agree with this 100%.

• Why are we trying to change the way we play Singles by discussing stuff like a sideboard (which will be like, impossible to do on WIFI) when we can simply fight the matchup issue by just.. banning stuff?
• Why are we not trying to make a fun and playable metagame instead of banning the less 'mons possible? What is wrong with that?
• Is it that hard to change our mentality? Are ''traditions'' regarding the way we ban things more important than the way we have been playing Singles since the first generation?

I would honestly love to get answers for these questions if you are against it!

e:

Mainly because we can't ban something just to ban it.

We should ban for the sake of getting a better metagame, even if the Pokemon in question isn't 'broken' by previous gens standards. Why should we keep Pokemon that cause our matchup issue? Note that I am not saying Altaria or Charizard are the problems; I am just speaking in general.

---------------------------------

I just don't get why we should work our ass off to create some new way to play the game when we can simply be a little more banhappy. That's why we have Tiering Councils after all; we trust you guys to take good decisions for the metagame you are leading. If we didn't trust you, you wouldn't be in said council (well, I hope its like that)! If people hate us for banning their favorite Pokemon, well, Smogon was probably not the website for them.

I also think that kokoloko's Tiering process in XY is a good exemple of what we should try to do :)

 

[Luckstard.]

Why are we trying to change the way we play Singles by discussing stuff like a sideboard (which will be like, impossible to do on WIFI) when we can simply fight the matchup issue by just.. banning stuff?

Why are we not trying to make a fun and playable metagame instead of banning the less 'mons possible? What is wrong with that?

Is it that hard to change our mentality? Are ''traditions'' regarding the way we ban things more important than the way we have been playing Singles since the first generation?

Mainly because we can't ban something just to ban it. If we have 50 viable mons in OU, but none of them are actually broken by themeselves, we won't ban anything. We can't ban Altaria and Metagross just because we need less threats.
The other way would be to unban stuff (over)centralizing the metagame like we tried with Aegislash but it got rejected by a super-majority of 72% while haunter clearly etablished the fact unbanning Aegislash would help against match-up concern before the voted stage started.

I agree on the fact we should not change our way to play the game (especially in official tournaments, it's supposed to be standard OU rules).

 

[AM]

That's the point. I'm saying that we should be more banhappy if it's to make the metagame better. Why should we keep Pokemon that cause our matchup issue? Note that I am not saying Altaria or Charizard are the problems; I am just speaking in general.

The problem with this line of thinking is now we're hitting a pretty fine line of subjectivity as far as "to make the metagame better" is concerned. Same thing with matchup issue. Matchup issue, or the one perceived by those who establish it as such, is a concern of or going to be in the future, too many pokemon and not enough resources. You're basically saying let's ban for the sake of banning, which is kind of destructive and not necessarily the right approach to amending the issue at hand here.

On the flipside, your idea is nice, until we come to the realization that the community isn't a community more so specific groups of individuals with different motives and justification to remove or keep something in the metagame. Whether or not this stems from a lack of concrete tiering philosophy amongst Smogon at this point in time or something else I must be missing remains to be seen, but outside of some of the more obvious ones like Greninja and Landorus removing stuff from the metagame isn't necessarily going to make it better.

In regards to the OP itself, if matchup is established as much as it is here, the OU meta is going to start needing some astronomical centralizing forces to diminish the usage of a lot of stuff in order for matchup to be alleviated. Considering the result of the Aegislash suspect this is much easier said than done.

 

[soulgazer]

MB I didn't mean to literally ban for the sake of banning, but for the sake of having a better metagame :( sorry if that was not clear.

--------------------

About the point where everybody has his/her own idea of a good metagame, that's why I mentionned that the decisions should be in the hand of the Tiering Councils. Again: we trust you guys to make a good decision. Yes, that means the vast majority of players might not get to vote. For most of them, they will probably just be able to post their opinions to help the council take their decisions. The way it will be done isn't up to me anyway, so take those words as you want lol

Also that's why I mentionned the system kokoloko implemented for XY UU (and still use): The council members votes on some Pokemon that they think should be looked on. If there's a majority, the Pokemon in question goes to BL. It will then get retested later on. etc.

^ You will have better explainations by looking up threads about that system in IS and (I think?) the UU forum.

Overall, what I am trying to say is that we should look at the Tiering Philosophy we currently have (and that clearly isn't as good as it was for previous generations and their smaller pool of Pokemon) instead of looking for a way to change how Singles is played.

 

[Mazinger]

I don't think it's "looking for a way to change the way singles is played" but rather adapting to what's changing with the actual games instead of trying to adapt the games to standards set by the older ones. Why even play the newer gens when you're just trying to make them similar to the old ones?

soulgazer

 

[jpw234]

If I come off as rude in this post, it was not my intention :(



I agree with this 100%.

• Why are we trying to change the way we play Singles by discussing stuff like a sideboard (which will be like, impossible to do on WIFI) when we can simply fight the matchup issue by just.. banning stuff?
• Why are we not trying to make a fun and playable metagame instead of banning the less 'mons possible? What is wrong with that?
• Is it that hard to change our mentality? Are ''traditions'' regarding the way we ban things more important than the way we have been playing Singles since the first generation?

I would honestly love to get answers for these questions if you are against it!

e:

We should ban for the sake of getting a better metagame, even if the Pokemon in question isn't 'broken' by previous gens standards. Why should we keep Pokemon that cause our matchup issue? Note that I am not saying Altaria or Charizard are the problems; I am just speaking in general.

---------------------------------

I just don't get why we should work our ass off to create some new way to play the game when we can simply be a little more banhappy. That's why we have Tiering Councils after all; we trust you guys to take good decisions for the metagame you are leading. If we didn't trust you, you wouldn't be in said council (well, I hope its like that)! If people hate us for banning their favorite Pokemon, well, Smogon was probably not the website for them.

I also think that kokoloko's Tiering process in XY is a good exemple of what we should try to do :)

I just don't think this is a question of tiering policy. We can ban more aggressively, fine, but it's impossible for us to ban to keep the number of threats in OU constant across additional generations unless we lower the power level of OU with every new release (which I don't think is an option). An aggressive banning policy can stem the tide but it's not a long-term fix. This is a separate discussion.

 

[nyttyn]

banning more shit ain't gonna cut it when we get more and more pokemon every generation. putting aside the fact that it's incredibly stupid to ban just to cut down on the number of threats (for a number of reasons, foremost being how arbitrary you'll have to be with them), maybe if gamefreak hadn't introduced mega evolutions into the mix that might actually work, as stupid as it would be. however, gamefreak insists upon not only introducing more threats per generation along with buffing old threats, but now that mega evolution is a thing, the number of threats per generation (and even in the middle of generations as BW2 and ORAS have shown) is getting outright ludicrious. hoping for powercreep to try and keep the number of threats in check only goes so far as well, especially with all the buffs gamefreak likes to hand out.

the number of threats in oras is already subjectively batshit large, and it just keeps rising and rising every generation. even if you go kokoloko's method of tiering (which would be suicide for the OU council to even attempt lol) the number of 'reasonable' threats is still increasing by a rate that anything except arbitrary powercheck bans cannot handle (in fact, a system like kokoloko's is even MORE problematic in this regard, as it does not allow for centralizing forces (which cut down on the number of threats in a metagame considerably)). and OU can't go/hope for a centralized metagame without anything short of tier voting outside of councils being completely removed (which would be, again, suicide), as voters have pretty clearly established time and time again that they vote heavily against centralized metagames (aegislash says hi from ubers).

like sideboarding, hate sideboarding, support it, vouch for your own solutions as you will, but trying to argue that OU can just ban its way out of this problem is foolish at best. threat creep has been a growing issue ever since BW2, and it's arguably already completely out of hand in ORAS. something needs to be done to address it now, because it is literally almost impossible for this problem to go away on its own. even if gamefreak released 20 ultracentralizing pokemon that would redefine OU next generation (imagine 20 flavors of aegislash), they'd all get the boot to ubers anyways so the problem would just continue, and with how hard gamefreak has been selling the new games on power creep and mega evolutions there's a almost 0% chance that there will be anything less than a batfuck huge number of new threats in whatever the next generation is. unless of course you think matchup deciding games is fine in which case enjoy tournaments slowly homoginizing themselves to feature only the playstyles which get screwed the least by matchup after a steady period of time in which increasingly large numbers of matches get decided by one or more pokemon completely demolishing the enemy team with a near-zero chance for a turnaround (both of these are reasons why matchup is such a huge issue, and why threat creep steadily increasing the possibility of extremely lopsided matchups is so toxic to the future enjoyment of the metagame. it's just freaking not fun to play or watch a one-sided matchup.).