Deciding PvP matchups

[Yaggleberry Finn]

For those of you that play PvP, how do you set it up? Do you and your opponent just grab your favorites characters and get after it? Do you try and stay within the tiers? Do you randomly assign figures?

Last night I played my 13 year old daughter in a Kaos-only tournament. Since we have 10 figures in that group, we each were dealt five random cards and then kept them hidden. We both picked our first character by flipping over our card at the same time. After that battle, we did it again. First one to three wins is the champ. We actually went all the way to game five, where Cynder narrowly beat Stealth Elf.

How do the rest of you go about it?

[thierrytng]

Well, recently we've made the switch from Pokémon-style (Skylanders stay around until they are defeated, then replaced by the next, etc.) to 1 round only. I'll admit it instantly made things a lot more fun. I'm pretty good with Bash, up to the point that I can consistantly defeat multiple foes with him. However, I can now only use him for one round, meaning that it's more fun to my opponent (you only get to lose to overpowered characters once) but it also adds some tactics to it (when to deploy him so it'll be most effective?).

We often pick an odd umber of Skylanders, like 3v3 or 5v5, and we can pick our order as we like. We're not so competitive that it leads to problems (no "you pick steath elf so I'll pick terrafin then I'll get slam bam instead"-nonsense).

[tyris01]

Generally we have two piles from which opponents pick seperately. Each picks without the other seeing, and then place them down. If one guy has one with an elemental advantage over the other, either or both are allowed to pick a new guy. Repeat re-pick if this occurs again, unless the guy on the 'weak' end of the choice doesn't mind. If they rematch, they can use the same guys, or pick new ones, but this time from the opposite pile from the one they first started with.