Why the philosophical difference between Pokemon and MTG?

I haven't played Pokemon in a while, so this question may not actually be valid anymore, but I'll go ahead and ask anyway.

I have played both Pokemon and Magic: the Gathering competitively, which are similar games in that both are strategy games that require you to customize your toolset (team or deck) beforehand. However, I have noticed an interesting difference between the Pokemon and MTG communities. Namely, the former (at least when I last played) looks down on "net-teaming" (copying a team from someone else, essentially) while the latter fully embraces netdecking. I remember reading plenty of posts by Smogonites that shame net-teaming -- for instance, anyone that remembers ObiStall from Gen IV should also remember all the flak given to the number of people who copied Obi's team. Whereas in MTG, original decks are few and far between -- indeed, in any large-scale tournament, each represented deck will have a number of pilots (possibly with very minor tweaks) with only a few rogue decks present. And anyone who tries to complain about netdecking on the Wizards forums is promptly met with widespread criticism.

So yeah, I was curious if anyone had any insight into why this philosophical difference exists between these communities. My immediate guess is that Magic tournaments have more of a monetary incentive and thus winning at all costs is considered more important than originality, but I'm not very convinced that fully explains it.

P.S. Perhaps this is not the best place for this thread because it is Pokemon-related, but it seemed to general for anywhere else... sorry if this needs to be moved.
 
I haven't played Pokemon in a while, so this question may not actually be valid anymore...

^^^

That was quite a while ago. People copy teams from online all the time now, and few see it as a bad thing. Just playing in the Winter Battle a week ago every other freaking team was Cress/TTar/Top/Scizor/filler/filler.
 
People on Smogon complain about everything else, why not net-teaming?

On an internet forum where approval from your peers is the only real reward, they can control net-teaming a little better. In games like MTG with monetary prizes people are gonna net-deck if it means winning. You can't stop them, you can't make it against the rules, you can't really ostracize them either. And why should you, it is a great way for new players to learn the game. It's really not so different from Smogon having detailed sets to begin with. Whether a game has a variety of decks really has more to do with game balance, I've played TCGs with much better variety than MTG.

EDIT: ^^ or it isn't ostracized anymore, whatevs.
 
It may have been a problem awhile ago but much less so now. The metagame is also so damn bad that loads of teams end up looking the same anyway.
 
Every team that I just faced on the ladder was literally Politoed / Tornadus-T / Jirachi / Grass Type / Ghost Type / Filler
 
It may have been a problem awhile ago but much less so now. The metagame is also so damn bad that loads of teams end up looking the same anyway.

There's really very few good teams out there to make, back when Genesect was allowed BW2 was a solvable game and it isn't far off now. Nowadays, anyone who accuses someone of lifting a team or "being an innovator of a combination" should be met with criticism because they require very little effort to make in the first place. A recent team built around Toed / Torn-T / Dug / Gene was praised when honestly those 4 mons were obviously just about required for rain.
 
i have never really noticed any issues with "net-teaming" on the ladder. stealing teams to learn or practice with does not strike me as a cultural taboo in pokemon unless they are so incredibly popularized and overdone that it's seen as a lack of originality. even then, some tiers right now (COUGH OU) are so severely centralized that, at the top level of competition, there really are less than ten viable teams

now idk about the magic community - in fact i'm surprised that netdecking is accepted there - but to give a point of comparison, consider the ygo community, where netdecking is generally decried extensively (not to mention bad ygo players tend to have an obsession with poorly executed "originality"...). ygo has a nasty tendency for the game to center on 2-3 viable archetypes and a pile of tier 2 stuff we like to call "anti-meta", each of which composes somewhere between 30 and 35 cards of the 40-card deck. the remainder is the part that people get accused of copying. attitudes vary but in general it is not looked upon favorably.

ignoring my resentful attitude towards the garbage that is the competitive ygo metagame in general, i would figure that this is mainly because tweaking a single card out of forty in ygo can have non-trivial effect at high levels of play. thus it takes a lot of testing to boil down to what card is "the right one" and copying that is unimpressive. pokemon is, in some ways, more forgiving. tweaking a couple of EVs has little to no impact on the overall play of a team, and some pokemon have different sets with similar enough roles that they could realistically be interchanged (eg specs and LO tornadus-T).

and then ofc ygo also has this huge idea of "omg autopilot decks u haz no skill lululululu" that also tends to tie really heavily into the cultural concept of netdecking... but i digress
 
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