HoN Tour is not an individual challenge, it takes a complete team to dominate the competition. To give you an unique insight, we asked several professional players about their thoughts on what makes a team strong, how you can deal with adversity and what are the traits of a good team.

The teams who stay together the longest obviously benefit greatly from it.
Of course, there will be tournaments that don't turn out how you want them to, but being able to persevere and learn from your mistakes is how you ultimately improve as a player and as a team. Also, I've found that teams who have a captain that makes the drafting decisions himself function better. It's easy to fall in the trap of taking in everyone's ideas when you're coming up with a strategy, but it's the captain's job to put his foot down and have the final say.

My experience with building a team has gone from the local scene to an international team - i started off with some friends from my city to take down the local LAN tournaments, was soon recognised and I had played a lot with the other Australian players in inhouses. We formed a team and we managed to qualify into the last qualifier spot for DreamHack Winter 2024. Since then we have had to adapt to the constantly changing player shuffle, using both Australian players and US players.
Every player knows each other in the competitive scene, especially also when we consistently match up against or with each other in the top tier matchmaking, so when you need a new player you think of who is available, who might work and what role they play. Trialling players also works, but can take time as you can't easily judge people after only a few
games.
Success doesn’t come easily – it is something that is earned. I think this is something a lot of teams can forget and may be too quick to play the blame game. When things don’t seem to be going well for your team if you have been around for a while you can revert back to your old style that did work, even if the “metagame” is outdated, or to get your confidence back draft strong lanes and take the early game and see what happens from there. It isn’t easy where there can be large skill discrepancies for new teams forming facing tried and true teams, although with HoNTour coming you should be placed in the appropriate skill bracket, helping new teams become.. old teams?

You have to look for a solid foundation to start the team with, a.k.a. yourself + 3 other players who you trust and know they want to make a competitive clan with you. This way when you're going through a bad period they will keep you going and viceversa. It's very important that all members in the clan feel of EQUAL skill otherwise it's not gonna work out. That's what I look for when I build a team.

What's important for success is 2 things:

1) all players must be relatively talented (to make it easy for people to judge say they need a skill-level of around 1950+ mmr)
2) your team has to be dedicated and play a lot of scrims - an example of this is the recent success of QSQ and how they broke into the top 8 teams right now in such short time

What can be done in real shitty times from my experience is:

a) take a small break or play some smurf games to gain back confidence and then try scrim again
b) watch the replays and look for your mistakes and how to correct them but the most important thing is for people to actually enjoy playing with one another. I've been in the skype of some teams I've ringed for and they literally only spoke around 10 words in a total of a bo3 tournament series and that team is bound to fail.