Discussion Garbodor has arrived on PTCGO

Just out of curiosity, are you also recording the time of day of the games? It would be interesting to see if there are more "Competitive" players/decks on at say, 9pm Eastern time (Then most of the US is out of work/school) as opposed to say noon or some off peak time.
 
Not specifically but I would say that well above 90% of the games are played between 8PM and midnight eastern time. I rarely get to play until the kids go to bed.
 
Small sample size but in the past couple days I've run into greninja break 6 times with my m mewtwo/Garb deck. Three out of the six scooped turn 2 when I had a trubbish down with a float stone attached, which was interesting to me. The other 3 I didn't have one down until later into the game and we played it out.
 
I played 4 matches the other night as Greninja against M Mewtwo Garb, testing specifically for that matchup and the new promo. The only game of the 4 I won, my opponent failed to get out the Garb until too late. I have retooled Greninja and am going to try some more.

Pretty much every deck that doesn't rely on abilities is running Garb. You can pair it with Yveltal, Darkrai, Scizor, Mega Ray, Audino, Gardevoir (except that uses Dragonite now), probably even some others could as well. Basically any pokemon without an ability runs Garb because there are so many Volcanion and Greninja out there and carrying Garb against those is almost an auto win.

But what I really want to know is why the algorithm pairs Garb more frequently with Greninja and Volcanion than it does other decks. That's the real question here.
 
21times said:
I played 4 matches the other night as Greninja against M Mewtwo Garb, testing specifically for that matchup and the new promo. The only game of the 4 I won, my opponent failed to get out the Garb until too late. I have retooled Greninja and am going to try some more.

Pretty much every deck that doesn't rely on abilities is running Garb. You can pair it with Yveltal, Darkrai, Scizor, Mega Ray, Audino, Gardevoir (except that uses Dragonite now), probably even some others could as well. Basically any pokemon without an ability runs Garb because there are so many Volcanion and Greninja out there and carrying Garb against those is almost an auto win.

But what I really want to know is why the algorithm pairs Garb more frequently with Greninja and Volcanion than it does other decks. That's the real question here.
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I don't think the game pairs them like that. I come across these decks a lot as well. I think most people are just playing them because they are so good. For Volcanion-EX, only two, maybe 3 decks run Garb and one of them it autowins. For Greninja BREAK, it wins against anything that doesn't run Garb. I think this is coming down to a psychological thing. I think most people don't want to play Garb because they want to other fun things and it prevents them from doing that.
 
Nope sorry Crystal it's not psychological. Last Friday I noticed that against my Greninja deck, I've come across Garb 10 times in 57 matches (18%) and against my Volcanion deck, I've gone against Garb 4 times in 21 matches (19%).

Against my Rainbow Road deck: once in 55 matches. Against my Mega Ray Garb deck: once in 29 matches.

It might be coincidental, but it is far more likely that something was changed in the algorithm to cause it to pair decks running Garbodor more frequently to decks that are highly dependent on abilities. If it were simply a case of more people running Garb, I would have seen Garb a lot more than twice in 84 matches for Rainbow Road and Mega Ray Garb. And as I mentioned earlier, I've seen Garbodor somewhat less frequently over the past few days when I've been almost exclusively running decks without abilities.

And I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing or a conspiracy against Greninja and Volcanion players. Ability based decks should be paired against Garb from time to time. I just want to know why the algorithm is almost going out of its way to match Garb with ability based decks when it didn't do that a month or even a couple of weeks ago.
 
If that is the case then I wonder why they are doing that. Seems like the wrong way of running the game if they are trying to force losses rather than actually fixing the problem with these cards.
 
21times said:
It might be coincidental, but it is far more likely that something was changed in the algorithm to cause it to pair decks running Garbodor more frequently to decks that are highly dependent on abilities. If it were simply a case of more people running Garb, I would have seen Garb a lot more than twice in 84 matches for Rainbow Road and Mega Ray Garb. And as I mentioned earlier, I've seen Garbodor somewhat less frequently over the past few days when I've been almost exclusively running decks without abilities.
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I'm confident that PTCGO doesn't care at all about what's in a player's deck when they pair you for a match. It makes no sense for them to deliberately pair some players against good matchups and others against bad matchups, or for them to favor Garbodor in particular.

If there were an "algorithm" that paired based on matchups, I think we'd have heard about it by now.
 
I haven't found anything about their logic behind how PTCGO determines your opponent nor how it determines who has the advantage. And, again, I'm not saying that it's a bad thing - if it's built into the algorithm that sometimes you're going to play a difficult opponent, then Greninja decks are probably going to get matched up against Garb. Besides N, there is no deck that Greninja fears (well, maybe Yanmega Vespiquen). Every deck in the meta has a weakness, it just comes down to what you want your weakness to be.

I played 33 matches with Greninja last night and came across Garb 5 times (about 15% of the time). I lost 4 out of 5 of these matches (in the one win he was unable to get out Garb). I was 20-13 overall, 19-9 if you take out the Garb matches. I can deal with that, it's not the end of the world. And I have actually won 2 of my last 9 matches against Garb, so it's not a complete autoloss.

I will say, though, that trying Minccino and the promo Greninja were completely useless against Garb, and I pulled them out about halfway through my marathon Greninja session last night.
 
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