[MattRain]

The Vex Platform is a lot cheaper. Which is part of the reason my teams stay away from joining vex....

We have fallen in love with FIRST over the 7 years that our team has been competing. We have looking into doing vex, but we just don't find the community there, as well as the robots pretty much looking the same every year. There seems to be a lot or restriction on build types and the games themselves.

So FTC. Granted your going to be a first year team, so Tetrix will probably be your best option. Matrix is more of the off-brand that is cheaper for over-sea teams. (The motors are weaker than tetrix, as well as plastic gearing, etc.)

But we don't use either the Tetrix or Matrix platforms. We have found it to be much cheaper for us to custom build all of our robots from factory based items. (1x1 tubing/2x1 tubing/angle/etc.) The only thing we use of tetrix is the required items, Control Boxes, Nxt, etc. We have switched to the new Andymark motors as well. Much cheaper when you factor in the encoders that most of our autonomous programming needs.