blog Pokémon Team Challenge – A fun initiative to find the best team!

Pokémon Team Challenge – A fun initiative to find the best team!

Hi everyone! This is Elena from Gaia Storm TCG and welcome to another article here at CCG Castle. Today, I want to talk about a very cool initiative that The International Pokémon Company started this year: the Team Challenge Competition.
The Team Challenge is an online event that unlike many others aims to foster collaboration around the Pokémon Trading Card Game. The idea is pretty simple. Every official store from all around the world can participate and when the season starts, the store hosts 4 qualifiers. After they finish, the 4 different winners of each qualifier advance and build a team together. Then, it is when the funny part begins! Week after week, each store Team is paired with another one in an elimination bracket and has to fight its way to the top until someone beats them in a best-of-9 rounds format.


The interesting thing about this approach is that in order to play each round, the Team has to choose 3 players and 1 captain from among its member. The 3 players, as you can imagine, are the ones who will be playing TCG games against the chosen competitors from the opponent store. The captain, however, plays a coordination role, providing support during the games. And by support, I am referring to real coaching. The official rules allow (and in fact, encourage) players to share thoughts and ideas during the games so the wins of every member are nothing but the result of a team effort
The process of deciding which decks to play is also crucial for achieving success during the rounds and, to me, this is one of the most interesting aspects of the tournament. The team needs to make sure that weaknesses are covered and that requires a lot of thinking. Should we all play the same 4 lists? What is the strongest combination? Lists are secret until one of two days before the actual pairing so choosing decks that gives you chances against the majority of the meta strategies is absolutely important.  
As someone who has participated in the first edition of the Team Challenge, I can say that this has been an amazing journey so far and that I enjoyed every discussion, idea and laugh I shared with my team. However, it is true that not everyone has liked this initiative. In order for it to become truly enjoyable, you need a good team around, not necessarily the best players but people with a good attitude and willing to commit every week to play. I know many people who had been disqualified in the very first rounds because other team members didn’t bother to submit the lists on time or just didn’t show up when the games where scheduled.


Nevertheless, I still think that the initiative was very interesting and, even if there are of course some aspects to improve, provides players with a lot of fantastic rewards like exclusive digital items for the Pokémon Trading Card Game Online and card codes. I would absolutely encourage people to participate and give it a try. Right now, the second Team Challenge Tournament has already started so don’t miss this chance. Thanks for reading!