Fantasy preview: 1234 and Goldenpants keep rolling, and Youbi's grand return

Wowie, what a weekend of Overwatch that was. Every match in EMEA (that didn’t feature Telacy) went to a Map 5. It was one of the highest-scoring match weeks in the West ever, the highest even, if we don’t include playoff weekends, where fewer teams tend to play more matches. Hopefully, you got your Team Great Britain subsidised budget increases from 1234 and are ready to build for Week 3!

If you’re joining us for the first time, our goal with these articles is to offer some thought-provoking options for your team and help keep you up to date with any major developments that might affect fantasy. We’ll take a look at this week’s fixtures, cost-effective players, and any other clever ideas we can come up with. We’ll also play along each week with a team picked by our writing staff and try to do as well as we did in the last stage.

Fixture review

If you’re looking to review the fixtures yourself, we’ve included a full Fixture Difficulty Rating (FDR) to help you visualise them and make your own decisions. We’ve pre-colored them according to our own opinions:

• Green indicates what we think should be a favoured match
• Yellow indicates a matchup that could go either way
• Red indicates little upset potential

This time, we’ve also included previous results in the graphic to save you a few clicks. Let us know if you like that addition in the #owcs-fantasy channel in the OWTV Discord!

I cannot imagine this week being higher scoring than last, but we’ve got some promising fixtures again this week, so the chance to give your leaderboard position some motion is very real.

In NA, both Dallas Fuel and Spacestation Gaming have really strong doubles this week, with neither team wanting to give Disguised their first win of the stage. Tr33 (PCM 0.98), and the rest of Team Liquid are also bootcamping together this week to try and finish the stage strong. Ultimately, the risk-to-reward likely isn’t there, but you never know…

In EMEA, Twisted Minds and Al Qadsiah play each other, as well as Geekay Esports and Telacy, respectively. If all of those matches play out as closely as they did last week, it would be hard to say no to adding some Saudi firepower to your roster. Last, but certainly not least, 1234 play Virtus.pro and Telacy and unless VP can put a stop to Goldenpants’ (PCM 2.30) baller attitude, it's difficult to see a world where having a 1234 player or two doesn’t fill out the roster nicely.

Fantasy metawatch

This week, we’re going to step away from the in-game meta and hit the fantasy scoring meta a little harder. Is this also an excuse to give a tiny statistics lesson? No comment.

A quick crash-course in box and whisker plots, the blue boxes are where the middle 50% of players in that sub-role are, the tails on either side are the top and bottom 25% of players, the white line in the middle of each box is the median, Individual points outside the tails are outliers whose PCM is more than 1.5x the Interquartile Range (IQR), don’t leave I’m done!

Now, how does this apply to Fantasy? The point of this exercise is to learn more about which roles to target in your team building. Two commonly held maxims of Fantasy are that hitscan scores better than flex DPS, and flex support scores better than main support. Both of these hold true so far, but you’ll notice FiXa (PCM 1.70) as an outlier there in Main Support, dwarfing everyone else, just going to show that you cannot completely write off any role in your analysis.

Tank is perhaps the most interesting role on display here. Main tanks don’t have a lot of representation, with Kellan (PCM 1.09) and Zeb (PCM 1.24) with everyone else in the sub-role benched or splitting play time. You can see they don’t reach the heights of the best off tanks, but both are better than the median off tank.

Is this something that should be reviewed weekly? Not really, but any time the meta shifts,  whether that's new characters or a new style of play, it's worth a quick look.

Nota Bene: This plot 1234 with <0.20 PCM (mostly substitute players). This is because they do not change the results, but do make the plot a worse teaching tool.

Cost-effective players

Part of balancing your fantasy roster is recognising that you can’t just pick all top-cost players. You need to find some budget options to fill out your roster, and we’ve selected a player from each role to help highlight a few valid options.

Tank: Goldenpants, 1234 (Cost: 19.5 | PCM 2.30)

Despite a winless week, Goldenpants continued to outperform everyone else in the tank role by a wide margin, which makes him something of a no-brainer, as evidenced by the fact that he’s currently enjoying space on more than 40% of rosters in fantasy!

DPS: Youbi, Twisted Minds (Cost: 20 | PCM 0.00)

Guess who's back, back again? Youbi's back, tell a friend. We’ve had no less than three different sources independently corroborate that Youbi has been back in the scrim line-up for the week and is seeing most, if not all of the play time, and that means he’s an opportunity to tap into TM's great fixtures this week, and also to get JaeWoo out of your starting lineup if he’s there. That’s the real gem here.

Support: Galaa, Al Qadsiah (Cost: 18.5 | PCM 1.39)

Galaa started this stage presumed benched. He has since returned to the form he showed on Virtus.pro in 2025. In terms of fantasy scoring, he offers a compelling differential vs. many of the other likely candidates and is highly likely to continue into the playoffs.

Honourable mention: Not a 1234 player?

Slotting in another 1234 player this week is definitely the easier path forward, and the staff team will have two (see below). Having said that, if you have the budget to go for someone more expensive and save yourself a transfer going into the playoffs (should 1234 fail to qualify), it could be worth considering.

OWTV Fantasy staff team

• Tank - GoldenPants (cost: 19.5) (2.30 PCM)
• DPS - Lethal (cost: 21.5) (1.42 PCM)
• DPS - WMaimone (cost: 19.0) (1.63 PCM)
• Support - FunnyAstro (cost: 21.0) (0.98 PCM)
• Support - UltraViolet (cost: 22.0) (1.31 PCM)

A template team has developed this stage, many managers have settled for two 1234 players in GoldenPants and WMaimone, two SSG players in UltraViolet and Lethal, and Dallas’ Lukemino. Though we managed to cut our rank in half and currently sit in the top 450, we decided to opt for FunnyAstro instead of Lukemino to stray away from the template.

There isn’t really much to say about the 1234 duo; that team has been something of a cheat code this stage. As for SSG, they speak for themselves. Both UltraViolet and Lethal scored 60 points or more last week, with Lethal finishing the week as the highest scoring DPS player.

A gift from SirLemon, knight of the graph-table

To wrap this week's article up, we want to showcase a new feature in the Fantasy Section, and that is the dynamic graphs! Thanks to OWTV Developer SirLemon, now everyone can do data visualizations using the OWTV Fantasy database. With seven different axes to choose from, and team and role filtering, you can glean a lot of information from Lemon’s handwork.

I’ll leave you all this week with my favorite graph, which isn’t actually that useful for building your roster, but is very interesting to look at, and that is Roster % vs PCM, essentially looking at the relationship between scoring efficiency and how popular a player is with Fantasy managers.