Let's talk about the philosophy of Teams events, and the ideas behind them. I will post this on UFScards.com at some point but I really want a lot of good feedback, especially if you have played in many team events with some success or championships (OOFS House, Michigan, New York, Venture, Lionstance, Pacific, Foxhound, and the UK teams of Ross and Eggle - I'm looking at you). This is kinda long-winded from my point of view but I had a lot to say and also wanted to get your thoughts on this very cool, very interesting format that often generates more creativity and excitement than Singles events. I know most top players love Teams way more than Singles. You get a forced limitation of power cards which stimulates fun decks for the three players and you have to know the format/top decks very seriously, be prepared for surprises, and especially your worst matchups and best matchups in any given situation. As a team captain, I will try and talk about my experience in these events and relate it generally as much as I can, so bear with me as I ramble for a bit (sorry!).

For the SAS, we had a strong kinda nasty team of Death/Evil Zi Mei (me), the stupid Dan monstrosity that is approximately 1 billion cards (Scubadude), and the Order/Chaos "Oh you fail everything and lose, my bad" Sophitia (Awakenz). We were all really happy with the way the decks turned out, and actually despite winning the previous day I was the one least comfortable with my deck. Scuba had Dan on lockdown for months and he was going to be the worst matchup for our opponents all day, and the Sophitia can deal with anything that isn't running Mortal Strike, and even then Lynette's + SoC can alleviate the problem. Me, I was squishy and from Athena to Zi Mei, I lost Tag Along, Rank, BRT, Experienced Combatant, and gained very little. Still, I knew my deck was fast and my sideboard gave me some strong options, and apparently it turned out great. It's posted in the Deckbuilding forum if you want to check it out. I could write a tournament report, but it would look really boring - Zi Mei does her thing quickly or not well at all, and I had no real interesting matches, so who wants to read about that? My teammates had some drama and tight contests, so if they want to talk about those they are welcome to do so. Onward...

A couple words about Team philosophy; I've been pretty successful in Teams events to date, but my ideas on Teams have changed a lot since our first foray at Worlds '07. Ceejay wrote an excellent article a few weeks ago for UFScards.com here , and I agree with most of what he said. His crew have also had strong success in Teams events so what they discuss and suggest is a good barometer. You will find that the ideas for Teams vary from person to person - I've asked Matt and Jon about their thoughts extensively in the past and Omar and James also had some strong concepts, and currently Andrew and Jeremy have been dominating Teams events this year with some monstrous stuff. So, there is a few ways to look at Teams events.

I want to start with something Ceejay said in his article - every good Team needs at least one monster deck, something with few if any bad matchups. Sometimes, a team has TWO such decks - I remember playing against UFS House at MWCC, and they had Ibuki and Alex - the two best decks in the format at the time, remember - and Matt was playing a strong Mai deck despite being gimped on certain cards. That's definitely one way to do it. At the same event, Andrew, Omar, and Jeremy crushed everyone with Olexa, Voldo, and Alex respectively. Voldo and Alex had very few problems with anything, and Olexa's deck was Evil with all sorts of nasty surprises (like Anti-K + Megafest, commit everything and you still fail). Our monster deck was definitely Dan. Look at the list; he seriously has EVERY **** control piece available to him. I knew throughout the day that anything unexpected would go against Dan, and also that if I had a pairing that scared me I could either throw Dan against it or sacrifice myself or J and try to take the win with Dan and the other deck. That feeling of confidence is what you want to achieve with the monster decks.

Sometimes, the order in which you select, test, and finalize your decks can alter or influence your decisions. For example, we had decided well over a month ago that Dan was going to be a Teams deck, and because of the exceptionally high concentration of power cards that the deck used, we had to be very careful of the card selection in the other two decks. Already, we were out a set of Addes and BRT, not to mention Red Lotus, Oral Dead, Chester's Backing, Military Rank, Curse Broken, and on and on. One thing we did know from the first day we started working on our team was that we wanted to run 8 Addes and 8 BRT somewhere among our decks. Those two cards are far too powerful to gimp them. Also, we had to either split Olcadan's Mentoring, 4-4-0 or 3-3-2. I started looking at All for the second deck but in the end I felt that 1) an All deck was going to make the third deck very weak, because it necessarily eliminated most of the Evil and Order cards and 2) I couldn't settle on a character anyway. the breakthrough for the other two decks came when we settled on Order, and then either a pure Death deck or an Evil/Death hybrid deck without BRT. Yes, the loss of that card hurt the third deck a bit, but we tried to find a way to come up with a solution, and the right character so that it wouldn't matter. In the end, J wanted to play Sophitia and I had no problem with the deck or the ideas behind it, so I settled on a pure Death Cody for a while (also on the forums) but it was overly complicated and though I liked it, I didn't love it. Then I went Death/Evil Cody but because of running 7 assets, 10 actions AND 3 character cards, the foundation base was getting seriously crippled despite finally figuring out the right kill condition - Tsurane Kiri. Then I thought of Zi Mei as a possible sideboard option if I needed to go faster, and Scuba looked at me and said "why don't you just start with Zi Mei and slide in Shinobis?". So that was the specific deck process, over a period of six weeks.

When I first starting playing UFS, I thought we needed to have a really rigid structure as to what to play. At Worlds 07, we had one pure control (Dhalsim), one pure aggro (6CC Sagat) and one hybrid deck (Promo Yun-Seong). We didn't do amazingly well, but for being novices with little preparation I felt good about the 11th place finish. Our next chance at a team event was the Team AoP in New York. Our third teammate, Kennon, had left the game and Scuba and I were looking for a third teammate for a while. Fred offered to step in since Omar wasn't playing and James had his own thing going, and we agreed. This time, me and Chris decided that we were both going to play our best decks, Dhalsim and Morrigan, regardless of what Fred did. Morrigan was a hybrid deck but really, it played control for the long game so we had already settled on two control decks. Fred was going to run a Water Hanzo aggro deck but in testing, he couldn't deal with our two control behemoths and therefore he also switched to a control/hybrid deck at the last second, the famous Cervantes CC Haxxorz. Now we had zero aggro decks and tons of control, but all our decks could win quickly if needed as well. We managed second with this mix, losing out on first place due to the luck of the gods (and Hata, **** him). So now I was really happy that we did so well, but really confused - do you even need an aggro deck???

At the SCC, Omar came down to join our team and we had an odd mix - Water Hata Geri Loop for Scuba, Void (!) Ibuki for me, and Evil Olexa haxxorz for the National Champ. All 3 of these decks were hybrid decks, not a single pure control in the bunch. Again, a second place finish for two events in a row, but again I was happy with the team lineup and I think that we did the best we could, just ran into a bad matchup against Southtown in the Finals. Next up, MWCC, which I went to at the very last second. Scuba had already got his team, so I managed to find two smart and amenable partners in Derrick and Jeff. I knew that Derrick was playing Life Nakoruru, as he won an AoP with her and was comfortable, and Jeff liked Yun-Seong mill. This time, my overriding theme was comfort, as I did not know my teammates very well but in talking to them I understood that they were smart and resourceful and happy with what they had, so I trusted in their talents and that was good enough for me. We ended up 4th, losing to UFS House which there is no shame in, and I went with a weird Earth/All Astaroth on a whim since neither teammate was using Addes and I wanted a tank character to balance out two extremely fragile ones. So, aggro Nako, control Yun-Seong, hybrid Astaroth. Due to the strange machinations of life, I missed Nationals and Worlds sadly, but thankfully the SAS gave me one last opportunity to enjoy Block 2 and say farewell to serious competition till the next calender year.

And that brings me back around - have I learned anything at all? Any general points to glean? I think that for future team events, It breaks down like this:

- There is no fixed method or style of deck archetypes for your team; it comes down to comfort. If your team has three ridiculously fast aggro decks that have been working for you, go with it. Why force someone to play something that they don't know very well, like an arbitrary control deck? Personally, I like to have at least one control deck, because that is what I tend to play, and my teammate Scubadude also prefers control. However, you have to be familiar with what you use or you will make mistakes. The longer you play something before the event and the more matches under your belt, the better.

- You gotta have a monster deck. It's hard to pin down exactly what that is to people; you can think of it as a fierce control deck with answers to everything like Hugo of old, or a consistent aggro nightmare like any Ibuki, or a hybrid assault that can be flexible. The key points, though, are resiliency to aggro assaults in some form, favorable matchups against 90% of the possible field, and versatility.

- Test against everything. I don't mean that literally, but this forum is a great resource for information on what the consistent top decks are, or what the hottest new strategy, or even better - actual results from previous events. You can find out that stuff easily and you must make use of it to find out weaknesses and strengths in all three of your decks. For example, if you don't know that Chaos/Fire Promo Talim is a scary fast aggro deck and what cards are in it to protect her multiple madness, you've been under a rock for months! Two of our decks ran Ichi No Tachi for this exact reason, and all had answers to The Lesser of Many Evils, arguably the key defensive/protection card in the deck. We planned for answers to Defender loops, along with Forethought. You gotta do your homework, through your own creations against the best of the best and see what the result is. This weekend, Ceejay told me that his team will often proxy up an entire Top 8 to test with, a fantastic idea. On a similar note...

- Your worst matchup is just as important as your best matchup . A lot of newer players understand their decks well and know what they win against, but in my view it's almost more important to know what you LOSE against. If you know that own of your decks simply cannot beat Deck X, it makes pairings more manageable. I always try and plan out what happens if I lose the die roll and one of the team members gets an autoloss matchup, NOT the other way around like you would expect. We had one deck that was very susceptible to Mortal Strike, so I made it a priority to avoid a matchup with characters that I thought ran it main or side. Planning with the best case scenario is easy, but planning for the worst case scenario is the real skill.

- Pair matchups on how it affects all 3 of you, not just one of you. To clarify what I mean here, I will give you a very specific example from the 3rd Round of the SAS:

Death/Evil Zi Mei, Tri-Resource Dan and Order/Chaos Sophitia vs.
Death/Chaos Night Terror, Death/Good Dhalsim and All/Fire Promo Alex

So, I won the roll. The first thing that struck me was that Night Terror was a horrible matchup for Dan and Sophitia, for obvious reasons - both of them rely on their characters to cheat their handsize and Night Terror cripples that, whereas Zi Mei just commits him first with her ability. I happened to have seen the deck before the tourney since Ryan showed it to me, but even if I hadn't I knew it ran Addes, a big factor in matchups. Gotta compete with it somehow! The second thought was that I was 99% certain that the Dhalsim killed with Fight or Flight and Yoga Legend, so it's either pure Good or a Good hybrid (and I guessed it would be Death). The Alex I knew was All and Fire, if only because every powerful build I've ever seen of him splits between those two resources and ignores Life almost entirely, and there was no reason that I expected it to be different. I thought all of our decks had good matchup against Dhalsim, and I also thought all three could take Alex, so I paired myself off against the Night Terror first, thinking that even if I lost I would get favorable matches for my two teammates. My point is simply, be aware of the group as a whole, and processing all that information in 30 seconds or so will become second nature.

- Finally - loosen up, relax, and have fun. It sounds like simple advice, or even pointless advice, but I've seen that top teams are filled with players who are confident but also know how to crack jokes amongst each other - it's **** fun to play against Omar, or Lionstance, or Foxhound. Lighten up! You've got 6 people sitting together in a tense atmosphere, so you gotta learn to chillax. There are practical reasons for this as well - if one of your teammates makes a bad mistake or gets angry, it can affect the rest of you if there's shouting or whatever going on. Just keep yourself and everyone else calm, and you won't go "on tilt" to borrow Poker language. Humor alleviates pressure. On a related subject, I've found that If I finish early, hovering around my teammates to see what's going on only makes them more nervous and you don't want that. Once you finish your match, find out what the game count is and the status quickly and leave. It's like the only time it helps to be a smoker here...

So that's that. Again, sorry for the length, but I've been thinking about this issue for a while so I had a lot to say. Please, any comments and feedback are especially welcome.