Managing Your FaB Team

Today, we return to our discussion on building competitive teams. While the first piece made the case for why teams are valuable in a TCG and how to go about forming them, this piece seeks to talk about the realities of being on a team. There are many ways to manage a team, and surely many approaches to this subject in particular, but I can only tell it from my perspective. These tips come from my experience of team management, with the hope that you can glean some benefit from them and add them to your tool kit.

Being on a team can be very exciting, no matter what the sport is. There's a huge sense of camaraderie that comes with being on a team, no matter where you sit at the round table. But it can be a daunting task too, especially if it's your first time. Taking on an emerging meta is a multi-faceted challenge, which by itself would be enough to occupy all of your time; but as a team, you must also plan for how you'll approach tournaments, scheduling, public and private policies, and more. Although being on a team is, ideally, going to be useful to all of your teammates, it doesn't come without its own stresses and obligations.

What kind of team are you? Do you want your team to regularly 'Top 8' large events? Make day two? Is simply being there enough? What about winning your local events, be they Armory or the elusive 1K?

Not every team must aspire to 'Win the Calling or Bust!' For Team All Carded Out (TACO), we started off as just a group of friends who played the game at the same times in the same places, and we have grown from there. We set out with this general idea in mind: we all wanted to do better at the game. That's it! We had no aspirations for winning every local tournament, or even doing particularly well at any large event; we just wanted to play FaB with each other, and get better. Your expectations can change and evolve- or devolve- as you go. Ours certainly have.

All of this is salt-to-taste, as well. If your team wants to commit and go hard, then you will want to be practicing together multiple times a week. You'll also want to encourage playing with others, and not just always within the team environment. Going out and getting your ideas cross-pollinated before bringing them back to the hive can net absolutely massive gains! There are so many examples of this working out for our team that it would be folly to list them all, but for the sake of illustration, Drawn to the Dark Dimension was totally off of our radar before a local testing friend put our eyes back on it for Viserai; and Lead the Charge was the same way until I was shown the light from an outside perspective.

Think about it like this: when you sign your kid up for t-ball practice, the kids can sort of just run around and maybe show up to play or not. Kitchen table play is much the same: it's not the game that's the focus, so much as just getting together. When you start to organize into Little League, maybe you are practicing once or twice a week with your team. The focus shifts from being just a meetup to being a Thing You Do With Purpose. Once you get up to Rec League, or even onto a AAA Team that is seeking to bring home glory in victory, you are definitely practicing 2 to 5 times a week, usually with your team and sometimes not. You're spending time with your team on and off the field.

A similar scale can be applied here, and this article will be focusing on the highest levels of team play, or very near to it. There's always more that a team can do to improve together!

If you want your teammates to regularly place in the top 10% at tournaments, then you have to act like it. Get a schedule together for your team that works and makes sense. Make sure that your times and commitments are tenable- that you are not setting unrealistic expectations of your teammates. Try to get together two, three, or more times per week for several hours at a time. Develop a group chat, either for free with text messaging or discord or one of the many popular social media or chat applications. Funnel conversations about the game through the group chats so that everyone on your team can hear from, and speak on, any topic that might concern them. Even if you are just sharing your shower thoughts about Ninja, there should be a place for that discussion to be appraised, in case it might yield some spice.

Effectively, you want to develop a realistic training regiment that is commensurate with your desired outcomes. Playing card games well is a skill that can be developed and nurtured; there are going to be those who are born with some innate talents or abilities that help them play card games, just like any other innate skill, but anyone who wants to improve this skill can do so with effort and determination.

Your training should include most or all of the tools I mentioned in the first article:

1. test sessions of tens of games
2. honest and open feedback/criticisms during and after gameplay
3. match play for increased capabilities and understanding
4. maintaining a deck library, and
5. splitting your efforts effectively

What's more, you should devour strategy articles from across the internet and from your local players' brains. You have good players in your local meta, perhaps even excellent players, who just don't want to join up on a team. Pick their brains and observe their games; take, and make, opportunities to learn.

In the midst of this, never lose focus of your private and family lives. Make sure that you don't let this game consume you and all of your free time! Spend time with your loved ones. If you're lucky, maybe they'll want to play Flesh and Blood- my wife certainly does, and my teammates are among my best of friends. This can be an often-overlooked aspect in games, but it is certainly one that I want to shine a light on: maintain your mental health, and your interpersonal relationships. I am advocating for you to spend a lot of time on Flesh and Blood, especially by treating it as a team sport- but don't lose sight of what exists beyond the game! No prize purse is worth weakening your bonds with friends and family.

Once you can set a schedule that works with everyone on your team- and doesn't impinge upon your ability to work and live a healthy life- now you have to stick to it. Read the articles, try out new decklists, play with your friends, play in different events in different places (be that online or in person). Play with different heroes and against different heroes. Get the reps in. Practice does not make perfect, but it can make better. The more you see a given matchup or deck, and the more frequently you have to navigate different board states, the better prepared you will be for when those circumstances arise again. Eventually, when you come across those familiar battlegrounds in a tournament setting, you will have the practice and skill to come out on top.

Don't over-commit yourself, and don't ask your teammates to over-commit themselves. As a team leader, it is your responsibility to coordinate team activity. This includes getting all of the scheduling that has already been talked about, cross-referencing that with schedules of tournaments that are within reach of you, and figuring out a plan of attack for both training and performances.

Being a team leader is not about being a boss or a tyrant. I'm not “in charge” of my adult friends who agreed to play this card game with me and wear matching shirts sometimes.

Good leadership, in my experience, is much more about facilitating effective communication than it is about keeping the troops in line.

(I'm not some great leader, and I'm certainly no guru. There are plenty of great resources out there on how to lead groups of all types, and if you need help being a better leader I can not recommend highly enough that you seek out a better qualified person than myself.)

What I can tell you is this: being a leader isn't the position for your best player by default. Leadership is its own skill, and the Lead position deserves to be at the confluence of whomever is most qualified and most willing. It is not, and should not be, “about” being in charge. Leadership is often a subservience, a submission to a duty higher than the individual.

As a team member, it is your responsibility to commit to the team at the agreed-upon levels. Team members really just have to stick to their word, to play, and to perform. You can set your own team expectations for victory- at TACO, we don't require W's to keep your shirt on. We always strive to do well, but there is no strict requirement of 'Top 8 or Else', or any such thing like that.

There are some requirements that we have made for maintaining team membership, however. For one, you have to play in the group with some frequency. One of our team members is a teacher and a parent, and an excellent player; how can we hold him to the same frequency requirements as our other, childless teammates? Instead, we have looser requirements: play with us when you can, and represent us at tournaments when you can.

Act with integrity and honesty; uphold public safety and public good. We have a vaccination requirement, and we try not to act atrociously in public. Our team is small, and we want to have a good public face, so we don't tolerate anyone in our group representing us in ways that we wouldn't all appreciate. You can behave how you'd like in private, and indeed many of our test sessions are accompanied by beers and loud noises. But when at a tournament representing our team, we just can't have any unsporting or unbecoming conduct.

This is of course salt-to-taste as well, but I prefer that we put our best foot forward and make good impressions- even if we are absolute goblins at home.

Team All Carded Out endeavors to have a good public face at home and away. When we play at our local game stores, especially on open play nights, we aren't necessarily showing up to get W's over new players. Part of being on a team is having a bit of a public face.

If your teammates are showing up to league nights or other open-play style events and just straight-up dunking on new players, you are effectively shrinking your community, not growing it. Regardless of whether someone is on your team or not, it's always better to build someone up than to tear them down. I'm not saying you should give up free wins, but rather, a rising tide lifts all boats.

You don't have to be the biggest pillars in your community, but as soon as word gets out that you are a competitive team, some people are going to look at you differently. Some people are going to start looking your way at all, for the very first time: be sure that the way you present yourself as a team is the way that you want to be perceived as a team.

While we're talking about public perceptions, let us talk about social media. TACO doesn't have a social media page just yet (and maybe we should). There are benefits to having a public page for your team, especially if you are seeking sponsorship from advertisers.

If you do develop an online presence for your team, one or more people on the team is going to have to be in charge of those public relationships. Posting updates and pictures from events, posting deck techs and decklists on sites like FABDB, tweeting out event coverage: these are all things that fans expect out of pro-level teams. It can be a real prospect- and it isn't one that we're quite ready to take on yet- but nevertheless, a social media presence is something that your team may want to have.

There have to be ways to join the team, and ways to leave the team. TACO is always scouting for players to add to our ranks, but remember: a good team is only so big. We all work really well together, and adding another cog to the machine might not necessarily make it a better machine. We are always expanding our stable of testing partners, but the team is only so large.

We allow ourselves to be vulnerable to our teammates so that we can improve together. Anyone who betrays that vulnerability doesn't belong on your team any longer. The one time we had to eject a team member, it was due to this. It is almost always joyous to add to your family, and it is almost always difficult to remove someone- so be careful who you let through the gates!

With that said, we do try to make it worthwhile. On our team, we pay dues in the form of buying cards together. Each time a set comes out, we pitch in and buy an equivalent amount each, then split the spoils. By doing this for Monarch, Crucible of War, and Tales of Aria as they hit the market, we each have playsets of cards for each of our preferred classes, including Majestics and Legendaries. We also have a pretty beefy binder of shared cards that anyone can take from, but typically what it is used for is trading for the team. So, even though we all joined in the Monarch era, we all have our Tunics, Skullcaps, Command and Conquers, WTR and ARC Legendaries, etc. That's all thanks to the trading power produced by our shared efforts- and that's only something that I would have the trust to do with my teammates.

There are a lot of organic benefits to being in a team, not least of which is the joy that comes with victory. By testing and training, honing and sharpening your blades for hours on end, you and your team can achieve ever greater heights. The Pro Tour is coming, and I do hope to see you on it.

Thanks so much to everyone who engages with the articles in the comments- we really have such a great, positive community here at the Rathe Times. In the comments of the first article, I noticed two things that I really wanted to address here in the body of the second article.

Firstly, for those of you whom are having trouble getting people motivated to join a team: keep at it. That isn't to say you should pester people who have already declined- maybe the time is not yet right for a local team. Try reaching out on Discord or social media to create a digital team, not unlike a guild or clan for online games.

If you have the fire in you to be on a team, don't let the lack of local tinder douse you: join a Discord league, or start hosting a league night at one of your Friendly Local Game Stores. One of our next members may yet come from the gauntlet at the FLGS, we'll just have to see! Keeping the flag planted at your local store is a great way to let people know that you care about the game, and someone may yet approach YOU about starting a team!

For those who think that they want to join but are not yet ready: the best time to start is today. Ask around your local stomping grounds to see if anyone is interested in getting better together- you might just find that there are a few more people who feel just like you do, and all you need is each other to get that fire roaring. If you really want to join up with a team, I guarantee to you that you already have one of the most important qualities needed in a team-member: gumption. With that, with just the get-up-and-go, you've halfway there already.

Be sure to check back for the final companion article, where I include discussions with other teams from around the world about their perspectives. Thank you for being a Pro subscriber of the Rathe Times. If you have any questions, or want to ask me about things that you wish I had covered in the article but didn't, hit me up in the comments and I will get back to you there.