Teambuilding / Abstract Building Blocks

What is consistency?

Pokémon is a game that in every way contains variation– your opponents’ knowledge and tendencies vary. The Pokémon on your opponent’s teams vary. If given the same situation two different times, an opponent might make two different choices. Your luck will vary from day to day. 

Consistency, then, is about finding victory no matter what variation stands in your way. Consistency can be searched for in any aspect of Pokémon:

• Consistency in teambuilding. Reduce reliance on random chance in battle from the teambuilding stage.

• Consistency in strategy. Find strategies that are so powerful that you can execute them reliably, even versus opponents who know they are coming or who have prepared counters.

• Consistency in play. Choose actions that give your opponent no opportunity to counter them, regardless of the choices they make. Furthermore, make your odds to win the battle as high as possible, and leave little to chance.

Consistency is very challenging to achieve, and is more of an ideal than a reality in most cases. However, consistency is a very useful goal to be in search of, and chasing it will help you to form good habits in both teambuilding and battling. We’ll define what consistency means to us and how we approach it ourselves.

Consistency in Teambuilding

You will win more games by reducing variance in general, and you can reduce the amount of variance in your battles at the teambuilding step: we expand on this idea more generally in this article. 

If you can use a move on your team to stop opponents’ setup, gimmicks, or hijinks in general, we’d say that that move is consistent– no matter what your opponent is trying to do, you have tools to stop it cold in its tracks. These moves reduce your opponents’ options. We’re talking about moves like Fake Out, Taunt, Haze, and Safeguard. Not every utility move works consistently, though– Lucky Chant only helps you in a small margin of games. Roar always moves last, and is reactive– if your opponent uses a damaging move, you might end up taking damage and giving them a free switch.

Consistency in Strategy

A strategy is consistent if it can be executed no matter who your opponent is, what knowledge they have about the game, or how thoroughly familiar they are with your team– maybe they’ve even played against it a few minutes ago! There are, of course, many strong opponents out there, but there are also plenty of strong Pokémon, and even the toughest opponents will have to tread lightly against them or risk defeat. 

A consistent strategy is in direct opposition to a gimmick, which is a strategy that cheekily attempts to take advantage of an opponent’s lack of knowledge or preparation. Gimmicks are fun to use, but they may not be optimal for best of three play or a long tournament versus strong opponents, and we aren’t well-versed in their use. A strategy stops being a gimmick when it works regardless of your opponent’s knowledge.

When I review other people’s teams, one of the first things that I do is attempt to get a handle on how consistent their strategy is. Here are some questions so that you can guide yourself through this process. Remember again that consistency isn't a binary, and it is often an ideal rather than an achievable goal, so don’t be too hard on yourself if you can’t answer all of these questions positively.

Consistency Checklist

Theorymonning:

• Does the thought process behind this decision make sense to me?

• (optional) Does the thought process behind this decision make sense to my friends?

  
  

Ladder play:

• Can I consistently beat people on the ladder with my team? More so or less so than other teams I have built?

• How common are the Pokémon that my teambuilding choices shine against? How common will they be at the tournament I compete in?

• Are there particular combinations of enemy Pokémon that I have no hope of defeating? How common are they on the ladder /  at the tournament I will compete in?

• If I run into the same opponent twice, how does the second game go? If I feel my opponent knows what I want to do, does that affect whether or not I can use my strategy?

  
  

Best of 3 practice:

• Can I consistently do well against people who don’t know anything about the decisions I’ve made in teambuilding or about my strategy?

• Can I consistently do well against people who know what the decisions I have made are, but haven’t prepared for them in teambuilding?

• Can I consistently do well against people who know what the decisions I have made are, and who have prepared to beat them either with a detailed game plan or modifications to their team?

Consistency in Play

Consistency in play is about reducing variance during a battle on your path to a win.

• In team preview, can you find a lead that works against your opponent’s strategy no matter what they lead?

• In battle, can you avoid relying on luck? (for example, if you need to hit a Sleep Powder or lose the game-- can you find another path through the battle?)

• During any given turn, can you find a move that works no matter what your opponent does?

• If you’re close to closing out a game, can you find a path to a win 100% of the time (or as close as possible?)

Wrapping Up

At times, it can feel like Pokémon comes down to random chance, and losing in those scenarios can be discouraging. Luck is a part of Pokémon that we can’t ignore. However, by giving luck its due, and focusing on reducing variance at every stage of the game, you’re minimizing the impact that luck will have on your performance. 

That’s not to say that consistency is at all easy to achieve. In fact, searching for consistency is probably one of the toughest perspectives with which to approach the game. Many people can win a game in its final turns 90% of the time, but it takes a great deal of knowledge and foresight to navigate to endgames where you win 99% or 100% of the time. We’ve spent a good deal of our lives in pursuit of this kind of excellence. When you’re analyzing your performance, no matter how the battle went, you’ll nearly always find a better way that you could have approached it from a viewpoint of consistency. In a way, hunting for consistency is a method of imposing control on the uncontrollable. That’s part of what we love about competitive Pokémon.