Ideally you should try to pregame a team that plays similarly to the team ur facing in match imho

if a warm up scrim fucks with your team's mental your team just has shit mental to begin with

playing against a better team for a pregame is definitely better if you can find one and don't tilt. it's like how baseball players put a weight around their bat while practice swinging before taking it off when they step up to the plate. same concept.

Baseball player who tilts at how hard the bat is to swing with weights on it

to me pregames are mostly about warming up and getting into gear so its nice to win or go even so im in a good mood going into the match. if ur gonna schedule difficult scrims to stress test your defaults and work out flaws i prefer that to be on a non-match day when there's time to review before scrims and have all night to try different things

pregaming is just doubting your team's abilities

not all of us are blessed with teammates that have normal functioning mental but we thuggin it out

brody has it mostly right on target

Pre-match scrims should not be to possibly "emulate" the opposing team. That's just stupid to try as all teams are different and you should always be adapting to your opponents gameplay during the match anyways.

Use scrims to Warmup and get sharp way before the match actually starts so you hit the ground running and don't waste a round or 2 getting into the game. Its a mistake I have seen and experienced so many times in the past with some of my teammates.

Even if your team gets demoralized from the pregame, I found it was still much more useful to play better teams. Pre-game getting shit stomped by froyo two maps in a row is Very Unfun but it means you can't get caught with your pants down and you're ready for the worst, and we would always play better after it. But if the skill gap is too large of course it's not beneficial at a certain point.

Always play a better team so you know what has to be fixed. Of course there's a limit to this, like no point if ur a low adv team to pregame a high inv team cuz everything will go wrong. But like a mid adv team should try to pregame a high adv team, because the high adv team will win off of a few small mistakes from the mid adv team.

https://i.imgur.com/ga32kkx.jpeg

play an even team on same maps you gonna play.

troll and lose scrim 0:5 0:5 to relax and then win offi

Seconding brody & SpaceCadet. I think that the best pregames are the ones where your team is slightly better than the opposing team. The benefit I often see by getting the "slightly better than them" type of pregames is that they give some of the clearest insights on what adjustments your team needs to make while also boosting everyone’s spirits a bit.

If your team gets vaporized by a way better team in the pregame, chances are that the opposing team exploited many different weaknesses simultaneously. Since there's not a lot of time to digest wtf happened, there's no way your team is going to fix all of it between the pregame and the official. This can lead to your team overcorrecting in the following game, e.g. playing too passively or too aggressively, abandoning legit strategies, etc. On the other end of the spectrum, if your team vaporizes a way worse team in the pregame, this can solidify bad habits and may not lead to any insights at all.

In short, pregames where your team goes, say, 5-3 are the Goldilocks. You get your warmup in, you get the nice confidence boost and you probably catch a couple of things that you could be doing better, too.

https://www.spinthewheel.cc/

5-0 the scrim team and lose the official because ego >>>

the most evil way to spend ur time in tf2 is taking 10:20 to 10:40 on a match night to argue about what went wrong in ur 2-10 pregame

I really enjoy the losing scrims to team dying pipeline theory, remember to have at least 2-3 roster swaps during the season too.

"scrims dont matter" mfs when you lose to a "super beatable team" that was ringing 2 players 3 divs above you and then spend 30 mins post game crying about how it was so winnable!!!

^

weed