Why You Should Try: Teamfight Tactics

Hello and welcome back to another part of ‘Why you should try’ series from Team Rankstar in partnership with Inked Gaming. I am NotoriousGHP, avid card game player who’s recently jumped into playing Teamfight Tactic and today it's my job to get you to hit that install button, and lock in some top 8’s.

Normally, we talk about some card game and it’s economy, single player content and what the community is like...but Teamfight Tactics doesn’t work this way. The only economy is for aesthetics and no items need to be purchased in order to play the game. There’s currently no single player content as the game only really makes sense against a group of people and the community is quite fantastic.

Let’s talk about that:
The community is all about improving, and not just because of the streamers. Information is readily available via YouTube videos, streams, websites and of course, Reddit. This has allowed players who want to improve at the game to have tons of resources at there disposal, and regardless of what rank you are playing at, it seems players are always down to discuss what someone could have done better in a given game. The community has been a big selling point for me and I think moving forward I want to be part of communities that are about building each other up and everyone getting collectively better, instead of the classic "I want to be the best and try to hide information" approach commonly seen in card games.

The skill cap:
Every week, Teamfight Tactics receives a patch, either a minor or major one that usually changes up the meta quite a lot. We see things like a new item making a composition better, a new champion making a certain synergy easier to obtain or a champion nerfed in a way that shifts the meta in many ways. With all of this in mind, the game changes rapidly every single week. Adapting isn’t easy, and it takes awhile to figure out each week, which is one of the many ways the game rewards strong players. There’s many other skill testing parts of the game, such as managing your economy, knowing how to build specific compositions using the champions and items given, and knowing when to play for a first place vs a top four finish. Teamfight Tactics is one of the highest skill cap games I’ve played, and although I’m currently ranked within the top 1% of the game, I still feel like I’ve only scratched the surface.

Managing your economy:
This is likely the hardest part of the game, but the most rewarding. You’re given so many options in each game that deciding how to best use your gold becomes quite difficult and almost no one currently consistently uses it perfectly. Between buying champions, leveling up, trying to earn interest and not die, the economy is often the back-break in a tight game. Sometimes you should level up early to try and win streak because you lack items, meaning you shouldn’t scale as well into the later portions of the game and should instead play for a top four finish. Sometimes you should try to save as much as possible, lose some early rounds and bounce back by leveraging carousel priority and having more gold then your opponents. These are only a couple of ways to manage your gold, and that is why the economy is so fascinating to play with and observe how different players approach it.

Approachability:
On the outside, any auto-battler game seems to be very hard to approach, with so many characters, item combinations and a tough economy system, but it turns out the game is much easier to pickup then expected. The fundamentals are extremely simple, make gold, build an army and defeat your opponents. From here, it’s just about optimization, how do I best use my gold, what is the best set of champions I can create from what I'm given and what items can I make to be most effective with my game plan. From what I understand, it seems to only really take players 1-2 games to understand Teamfight Tactics, and there’s plenty of great starter resources out there in case you don’t want to learn by trial and error.

So why should you play Teamfight Tactics? It’s simple, the game is free, easy to pickup but basically impossible to master. With a company like Riot Games behind Teamfight Tactics consistently patching the game and keeping it fresh, alongside a fantastic community of players, I feel like Teamfight Tactics is one of the top games to check out currently and well worth your time.

This has been NotoriousGHP