What matters more: Great Skill or a Great Team?

CBshuckle

We all know that success in competitive battling is a result of three separate factors - skill (which includes prediction), teambuilding, and luck. While luck can mean the difference in a close game, a "good" battler with some bad luck will always be more consistent than a "bad" battler with some good luck. However, my question is, which is more important out of the 2 categories left? Which is better: A skilled player who makes very few mistakes with a mediocre team, or an average player who makes a couple of mistakes a game but has a team that is extremely powerful? While obviously the best players fit both of these criteria, I simply wonder which would do better in the long run if only 1 of the 2 requirements is met. Discuss
 
I think the team is the most important factor in a pokemon battle, prediction after all is just glorified guesswork anyway.
 
Skill and team really go hand-in-hand, since you would not make a stall team if you suck at stall because even the best stall team can fail time and time again if used by a rubbish stall player. By contrast, the same player might be really good at hyper offence teams and might be able to use the powerful and even the uncommon offensive threats really well because he can use an offensive team well.

In other words, build a team to your style and you can't go wrong.
 
Obviously the best players make great teams, but skill is by far the most important factor in determining a battler's success. How many people do you think steal teams posted in the RMT forum by top battlers or from the Archives? And how many of these people were anywhere near as successful with the team as it's creator? I would guess virtually none of them. Back when Panamaxis posted that Thriller team, I battled tons of people using it, and handily defeated all of them, but Panamaxis and JLei both got to top 5 with the team and no doubt would have easily defeated me with it. How are they different? They're just superior battlers. Also, I don't think prediction is a big part of skill at all. As someone said before, prediction is glorified guesswork and little more. Skill, on the other hand, involves being able to formulate a strategy and carry it through to the end, while at the same time being able to prevent your opponent from carrying out their strategy. It takes difficult and complex maneuvering to come out on top time and time again against all types of teams even in the face of bad luck
 
Skill. Especially at the higher levels of play. I've taken out flawless IV Uubers with crap teams before because they just don't work together.
 
Skill is more important. A great team is important as well, but a skilled player can sweep anentire Uber team with say...Absol.
 
They're kind of intertwined; when you're making a team, you're using your skills to figure out what you need and what clever moves you're going to make in battle, you're making tools for yourself to use. If you don't have enough battling skill, your team will have bad synergy, no victory plan, or both. If a noob copies a team from someone else *cough*Obistall*cough* they will not know the tricks behind the team and how to use it effectively, and will probably not do well at all. A good player with NUs and UUs beats a noob with Ubers practically every day on Shoddy. So I guess skill is more important, but it also kind of decides what the team is in the first place, if you made it yourself.
 
Obviously, a great team in a generation where skill hardly matters and battles are pre-determined by team-matchups. I would say having a better team than your opponent is much more important than having a 'higher skill level' than they do. If this were maybe a different generation where, how well your team matches up with another isn't as important as your ability to play is but its not. DPPt requires a better team than better playing ability.
 
goofball said:
Obviously, a great team in a generation where skill hardly matters and battles are pre-determined by team-matchups. I would say having a better team than your opponent is much more important than having a 'higher skill level' than they do. If this were maybe a different generation where, how well your team matches up with another isn't as important as your ability to play is but its not. DPPt requires a better team than better playing ability.
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At the higher levels of play this is true. When both players are good (and I mean actually good, not 1500 on the ladder good) even if one player is a lot more skilled than the other if he has a team mismatch he will most likely lose because the other good player will recognize and exploit the edge to the fullest. The better player will have to do some creative shit to win if the team doesn't match up well.
 
Skill is important? Seriously, you are funny.

When Deoxys-A with HP Fire(and w/O sash) faces a Scizor in the sun. You are going to rely on prediction. I will throw a coin(if I play vs a better player). It is better to have 50/50 chances than 20/80. It has helped me many times. Of course, if I see that I am playing vs. a noob then I outpredict him to death.

Also, I remember stealing a UU team. When I saw it, I started to like it and there was no reason to not try it. It was a heavy offensive UU Rain Dance team(Electrode/claydol/4 sweepers). I went 8/2 with it(and one of these loses was because of heavy hax, not because of my lack of "skill". I have never made such a good team by myself.

The conclusion: team is more important. But I don't really like stealing teams, I like my own creations more even though they are agruably worse.
 
This is what I think. Each team has a certain potential, some obviously higher than others. It is up to the skill of the player that makes use of the team to its highest potential. SOME teams are really easy to play out to 100% of its potential because the team itself doesn't have much potential, while others require a lot more skill to execute to its full potential because there are many more options, and it is up to the scenario of the battle and the skill of the player to make what the best option is.

Maybe this isn't the best example since I'm not amazing at battling, but if we compare, say, an offensive Rain Dance Team to a more balanced team, it's probably easier to reach the team's highest potential with the rain team because most of the time things can pretty much go one way (set up rain and try to sweep), whereas with a balanced team, there may be many more things to consider (like what to sacrifice, what to switch in, when to do certain things) and would thus require more skill.

So, when looking at it this way, we see why people stealing good teams from RMT don't usually get the same results as the original posters who are high rated, since they do not have the skill to benefit from the full potential of the good team.


EDIT: Oh, maybe this is an better (more extreme) example. A team of Ubers vs a team of NFEs. The team of Ubers obviously (well, generally speaking) has a much higher potential than a team of NFEs, and so, even if it's a horrible player who can only reach maybe 10% of the team's potential, he might still be able to beat the person with an NFE team even if the NFE team player is doing 90% of his team's potential. So, this means, between the two, TEAM is ultimately more important.
 
I think its quite dependant. There are some very tough teams to use, mostly bulky, balanced, more stallish teams. I think of Thriller by Panamaxis and JLei2k specifically, mainly because when the RMT popped out, everyone started using it (I faced it maybe 15 times on the first day). It was remarkably easy to beat them, as they lacked the skill to properly play, as it is a fairly difficult to team to play with, and I never once lost to them. However, I would bet if I played one a good player using that team, they would probably beat me. Skill matters a lot more when teams are similar; I made a team that was the same as M Dragon's Art of U-Turn; he won numerous tournaments, probably hit number one at one point. I made it to 18. So yeah, it was an excellent team, but his skill probably allowed him to steer it better.

Overall though, the team probably matters more, especially if it is something fairly easy to use like raw offense. A team like husk's Astral Projection is not hard to use at all and a complete beginner can immediately begin to win plenty of matches by just using overwhelming power to beat one's opponent into submission.
 
Guys we're not talking about a great team vs. a team of 6 magikarps, we're talking about a great team vs. an average one. I agree that in a match-up between players of near equal ability, team advantage and luck are more than likely going to determine the outcome, but overall I don't even see how it's debatable that skill is the #1 factor. Yeah, if you're using a team of 6 OUs versus a guy using using 6 luvdiscs, skill doesn't matter at all, but that's not a realistic scenario. What about a guy in the apprentice program who makes a great team with his tutor and uses it to get to 1450 on shoddy, what's the difference between him and a guy who uses a great team to get to 1700 on shoddy? Skill
 
I would say that definitely having skills as a battler is much more important, after all, if the team was the more important aspect, anybody who got there team from the archives would be doing better instantly, which is not the case. As seen after obi posted his stall team. That thing was all over the place, but I really didn't have a hard time laddering.
 
I would say skill matters more but it's a pretty grey area.

For example, I'm pretty good with Bulky Offense teams. I can usually predict my opponent with this style and I don't just lose if I screw up once. Give me a great Stall or Hyper-Offensive team and I suck because I am very inexperienced with them and their nuances.

That being said, it is definitely easier to do well with a good team since you do more damage and take less damage by default. But if you can predict very well, thus doing more and taking less damage, you can win with almost any competitive team IMO.
 
cmurph said:
Obviously the best players make great teams
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This isn't necessarily true. A good team builder can suck at battling, and a good battler can suck at team building. The skill in building a team is creating type coverage while covering your weaknesses. The skill in battling is knowing when to use what attacks.
An example; if you were to hand me a good team, I could win a few games. If you asked me to make a team, I'd have no idea where to start.
 
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