[apologies for the thread messiness, it's a wip! approved by A Cake Wearing A Hat ]
(art by IMakeNoSense)
Welcome to Draft Factory, Randbats' new format and Draft's first ladder! Much credit to Rissoux, Maia, karthik, and Mathy for making this happen.
Draft is a format where players pick Pokemon to use throughout a tournament, building sets and teams to counter an opponents' selected Pokemon, while being aware that their opponent can do the same. Draft Factory is a randomized format that gives you a random team from the 2024 Draft Winter Seasonal, and pits you against that team's opponent from that tournament. That's right - you'll be playing what was a real tournament match during one of Draft's most important tournaments of 2024, a unique matchup pairing that happened excactly once. Draft players build new teams for each match, so the team you get and the team you face were destined for each other like Romeo and Juliet.
Matchups were taken from over 600 individual tournament sets across the 2024 Winter Seasonal, and were further culled to ensure that all matchups were ones where both sides could reasonably win. If you would like to learn more about Draft, you can visit our subforum here. If you want to learn more about the concept behind Draft Factory, you can see Rissoux's post here, which goes into depth.
FAQ (WIP):
"My team/Pokemon is bugged!"
Report here, include a replay.
"My team/Pokemon is terrible!"
We did a lot of work to weed out unwinnable matchups from this format. We will keep an eye on complaints, winrates, and analytics as best we can to further ensure fair battles during play. Please understand that Draft plays very differently than standard formats - stuff that may seem illogical or unviable may have niches in a format where you know what 8 'mons are available to your opponent in advance. Feel free to bring up examples and we can take a look, however - you'll get the quickest responses in #draft-factory-fixes in the Smogon Draft Discord server.
"What's the deal with Tera?"
We have Tera restrictions in Draft, only certain Pokemon can Tera and those Tera selections are known in advance. Draft Factory seeks to mimic the non-randomized format as much as possible, and the Tera gameplay is a major part of Gen 9 Draft.
"Are more teams going to be added?"
Yes! We are intending to collect matchups from our as-of-now ongoing Circuit Championship, and are discussing plans for collection from the higher levels of our World Cup and future team tours. We intend for Draft Factory to be a living, breathing format which replaces older matchups that may have less-than-desirable sets with newer matchups from the highest levels of Draft competition.
"Who are the awesome people who worked on this format?"
You can thank karthik, Mathy, and dhelmise, who handled the lion's share of coding and code review. You can also thank Maia, who hosted the tournament that these matchups are collected from, and spent countless hours collecting teams, and the Draft contribution team, who weeded out unwinnable or unserious sets. Major credit goes to Rissoux as well, who spent a lot of time ensuring this format happened.
"But what do I do if I want to play in an awesome live tournament for this format that will be streamed and raises money for Doctors Without Borders, and have the chance to win a custom avatar prize for winning?"
Lucky you! More news like a date coming soon, but we'll be doing just that sometime soon!
(art by IMakeNoSense)
Welcome to Draft Factory, Randbats' new format and Draft's first ladder! Much credit to Rissoux, Maia, karthik, and Mathy for making this happen.
Draft is a format where players pick Pokemon to use throughout a tournament, building sets and teams to counter an opponents' selected Pokemon, while being aware that their opponent can do the same. Draft Factory is a randomized format that gives you a random team from the 2024 Draft Winter Seasonal, and pits you against that team's opponent from that tournament. That's right - you'll be playing what was a real tournament match during one of Draft's most important tournaments of 2024, a unique matchup pairing that happened excactly once. Draft players build new teams for each match, so the team you get and the team you face were destined for each other like Romeo and Juliet.
Matchups were taken from over 600 individual tournament sets across the 2024 Winter Seasonal, and were further culled to ensure that all matchups were ones where both sides could reasonably win. If you would like to learn more about Draft, you can visit our subforum here. If you want to learn more about the concept behind Draft Factory, you can see Rissoux's post here, which goes into depth.
FAQ (WIP):
"My team/Pokemon is bugged!"
Report here, include a replay.
"My team/Pokemon is terrible!"
We did a lot of work to weed out unwinnable matchups from this format. We will keep an eye on complaints, winrates, and analytics as best we can to further ensure fair battles during play. Please understand that Draft plays very differently than standard formats - stuff that may seem illogical or unviable may have niches in a format where you know what 8 'mons are available to your opponent in advance. Feel free to bring up examples and we can take a look, however - you'll get the quickest responses in #draft-factory-fixes in the Smogon Draft Discord server.
"What's the deal with Tera?"
We have Tera restrictions in Draft, only certain Pokemon can Tera and those Tera selections are known in advance. Draft Factory seeks to mimic the non-randomized format as much as possible, and the Tera gameplay is a major part of Gen 9 Draft.
"Are more teams going to be added?"
Yes! We are intending to collect matchups from our as-of-now ongoing Circuit Championship, and are discussing plans for collection from the higher levels of our World Cup and future team tours. We intend for Draft Factory to be a living, breathing format which replaces older matchups that may have less-than-desirable sets with newer matchups from the highest levels of Draft competition.
"Who are the awesome people who worked on this format?"
You can thank karthik, Mathy, and dhelmise, who handled the lion's share of coding and code review. You can also thank Maia, who hosted the tournament that these matchups are collected from, and spent countless hours collecting teams, and the Draft contribution team, who weeded out unwinnable or unserious sets. Major credit goes to Rissoux as well, who spent a lot of time ensuring this format happened.
"But what do I do if I want to play in an awesome live tournament for this format that will be streamed and raises money for Doctors Without Borders, and have the chance to win a custom avatar prize for winning?"
Lucky you! More news like a date coming soon, but we'll be doing just that sometime soon!
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