Shortly after I started playing Pokemon Go, I picked the yellow team. The main reasons were that I like Zapdos, and I like Raichu, which is the same type. Knowing that it wasn’t a popular team didn’t discourage me; instead, I felt a certain desire to bring things up for the underdogs.

It’s been about a year-and-a-half, and I made it up to level 37. After all that time of playing the yellow team, I broke down and got a Team Medallion, and used it to change teams to the blue team.

That’s right, blue people. You win.

It’s not so much anything against anyone in any team in particular as it is Niantic’s failure to effectively disincentivize everyone choosing the same team. I got tired of people not wanting to raid with me because I didn’t contribute to the popular team bonus. I also got tired of hammering away at a gym in one place for about ten minutes, then seeing my pokemon get sent right back to me shortly afterwards with only a few PokeCoins as reward. Not only that, I got tired of only having a few Premier Balls to catch a legendary pokemon after a successful raid.

Being on the yellow team was largely a cynic’s quest, where the main reward is to say that you got as far as you did. Now I’m on the blue team, where the main drawback is the angst of watching as your gym defenders actually succeed in holding down a gym for a significant period of time. Now I consistently reach the 50 PokeCoin a day limit.

Sometimes, the key to victory really is to walk the path that’s been beaten so flat that Eratosthenes could have used it to accurately calculate the curvature of the earth.