So you’ve downloaded Pokémon Go, gathered yourself a motley crew of Drowzees and Pidgeys and feel ready to take on your first gym. But before you start battling you’ve got a big decision to make – which team are you going to pledge allegiance to?
Don’t be paralysed by indecision. Here are WIRED’s top tips for picking your team, fighting battles and taking gyms.
Choosing your team
Once you’ve gained enough experience points (XP) to reach level five, head to any gym and select it. Each team leader will give you some spiel about how they’ve cracked the secret behind Pokémon’s powers and tell you that you should definitely join their team.
Team Mystic (blue) is headed up by Blanche. She’ll tell you that “the wisdom of Pokémon is immeasurably deep,” and the trick to her strength is level-headed analysis of every situation. If that seems a bit too scientific, then Team Valor (red) might be more up your street. Its leader is Candela, and she’s looking “to enhance Pokémon’s natural power in the pursuit of full strength.” She claims to be the have the strongest, meanest Pokémon in the game, so if a good scrap appeals to you then her team is a sound choice.
And then there’s Spark, the leader of Team Instinct (yellow). He’s convinced that Pokémon are creatures with excellent intuition and has a hunch that “the secret to their intuition is related to how they’re hatched.” Maybe its his leather trousers, or the fact that Team Instinct is the least popular in the game, but the internet really hasn’t been kind to Spark. Countless memes and Reddit threads sprung up poking fun at Team Instinct and its supposedly incompetent leader.
Whoever you chose, remember this decision is for good as you can’t change your team later in the game. It doesn’t impact which Pokémon you can catch or how you’ll play the game, though, so there’s no real ‘bad’ decision to be made here. If you’ve got Pokémon Go-playing friends, find out which teams they’re on and decide whether you’d rather help or battle against them,
Teams and gym battles
Pokémon Gyms can be ‘claimed’ on behalf of your team by battling and defeating the resident trainers there. If you tap on an opposing team’s gym and defeat all the Pokémon in there (you may need to do this a few times to claim the gym) you’ll eventually be able to claim the gym for your own team. Defeated gyms are grey-white – tap on one of them and you can put a Pokémon in the gym, at which point it’ll change colour to match your team.
You can take six Pokémon into battle against an opposing gym, but battling your own team’s gyms works a bit differently. You can only select one Pokémon to take into battle and if you defeat all the resident Pokémon then you will increase the prestige level of the gym by a variable number of points. For every 2000 point increase in a gym’s prestige level, another Pokémon can be added to defend the gym. The more prestige a gym has, the more Pokémon can be stationed there and the harder it will be for another team to defeat.
In essence, battling against your team’s gyms helps make them stronger – but only if you’re able to defeat all the Pokémon in that gym with a single Pokémon of your own. Gyms change team often throughout the day, especially in cities, so taking a look at which teams hold your local gyms might influence your decision either way.
Legendary Birds
Each team’s logo refers to a different legendary bird Pokémon – Articuno, Moltres and Zapdos are the respective birds for teams Mystic, Valor and Instinct. Right now, this doesn’t mean much, but it may well have an impact later in the game. Niantic hasn’t spoken publicly about their plans for the legendary birds, but early in August they started appearing in the game for some players in the United States. Niantic quickly removed the legendary birds from those players’ accounts and left it unclear as to when they will be back, though users on reddit have already put forward their own ideas about the birds’ significance.
Team Leader advice
The latest Pokémon Go update – 0.35.0 for Android, 1.5.0 for iOS – promises to make the team leaders useful for the first time in the game’s development. According to a Facebook post from Niantic: “Trainers will now be able to learn about a Pokémon’s attack and defense capabilities from their Team Leader (Candela, Blanche or Spark) to determine which of their Pokémon have the most potential for battle.”
As each Pokémon, even within the same species, has specific hidden stats, this should help players make more accurate decisions about which critters they should evolve or power up and which they should send away for Professor Willow to grind into more candy. How useful this information will be remains to be seen, but you can bet the internet will soon be flooded with fans making memes out of Spark’s advice.
