Fantasy preview: NA/EMEA Stage 2 Week 2

What a week of OWCS in the West. Both regions’ champions, Dallas Fuel and Twisted Minds, were very convincingly defeated. TM dropped four straight maps, including one to the newly promoted Telacy roster. Speaking of promotion teams, 1234 had a breakout performance in Week 1, but we’ll address that further below.

If you’re joining us for the first time, our goal with these articles is two-fold: 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 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 our Discord!

Going into Week 2, the Match Fixtures are a little more interesting to talk about. In NA, Spacestation Gaming have what should be a smooth schedule until playoffs. Grabbing someone like UltraViolet (1.20 PCM) or Hawk (1.33 PCM) and riding out the rest of the stage with them would smooth out your transfers nicely. Despite a loss to Team Liquid in Week 1, Disguised look noticeably improved from Stage 1, and their Week 2 fixture is very winnable. If you’re looking for more budget-friendly players, DSG is worth considering.

Hopping across the pond to EMEA, Virtus.pro has a nice pair of matches against Al Qadsiah and Telacy, which should be good matches, and if you think that Geekay Esports will return to form, there might be an opportunity there as well. Lastly, the hot topic of the week is definitely 1234 and their matches, but we’ve dedicated an entire section of this article to them, so check out cost-effective players below if you’re interested.

Fantasy metawatch

Coming out of Week 1, we’re immediately getting a new patch with a new hero, so our meta knowledge is going to remain a little light, but we did see a few major archetypes develop.

Sigma/Mizuki  - This comp was probably the most common comp we saw played over the weekend, sometimes with a Symmetra teched in over Mei, and showed the sort of generic strength that you would expect from a “meta” comp, though of particular note was its dominance over D.Va and Rammatra compositions

Kiriko/Lucio - No surprise here, we still saw a fair bit of Kiriko/Lucio rush-y compositions across both regions. Lots of Tracer, lots of D.Va, with some variety across all roles besides the Kiriko/Lucio core. This comp generally performed well outside of the Sigma/Mizuki matchups.

Cat/Bastion - There was still plenty of aerial gunnery happening this weekend, with Jetpack Cat flying Bastion around causing plenty of mayhem. Results were mostly good, albeit map dependent. Notably, this is a comp that many people expect to die with Season 3's release, but we will have to wait and see.

As for Fantasy specific insights, nothing in the data is speaking to us like it did with Emre in Stage 1, there seems to be a trend of flex support players —Zzz (2.04 PCM), Kivis (1.68 PCM), Teksol (1.74 PCM), and Khenail (1.94 PCM), overperforming their costs, but in general we recommend filling your supports out with flex supports anyways, so this is still par for the course.

Cost-effective players

This section would normally be dedicated to helping you identify potential value picks for the week. This week, however, there is one team worth talking about—1234. They occupy four out of the top five spots for PCM (Points per Cost per Match), with only Khenail failing to make the Top 5 in sixth place. Notably, Goldenpants (3.49 PCM), the starting tank for 1234, put up the single highest match score we’ve ever seen.

The question on every Fantasy GM’s mind this week is whether 1234 can rerun the script, this time with two matches instead of just one. If they pull it off and you don’t have their players on your roster, that will be a tough hill to climb to the top of the leaderboard.

Looking at the fixtures for the week, by the transitive property, since 1234 beat Al Qadsiah, who beat Geekay Esports, we would expect them to deal with GK handily. However, where exactly does Twisted Minds fall in the power rankings? They also beat GK quite handily in Week 1, but were far less convincing than they should have been vs. Telacy, the other team recently promoted to OWCS alongside 1234, which could mean there is a real chance of a close match.

If you do choose to support the mostly Team Great Britain, then all of them are priced comfortably under 20, which will give you plenty of room to fill out the rest of your roster with more expensive options.

If you are less convinced that 1234 can bring the thunder again in Week 2, but do fancy Team Great Britain, it could be worth taking a look at Disguised in North America. DSG have their two most crucial games against The Kafe Esports and LuneX Gaming in Week 2, which will likely decide whether they have to go through promotion/relegation again. If there was a time for DSG to unleash their best form, it is this week.

OWTV Fantasy staff team

• GoldenPants - Tank (cost: 18.5) (3.49 PCM)
• LBBD7 - DPS (cost: 20.5) (0.51 PCM)
• WMaimone - DPS (cost: 18) (2.50 PCM)
• FiNN - Support (cost: 20) (0.49 PCM)
• UltraViolet - Support (cost: 22) (1.20 PCM)

Off to a rough start in the wild west, we finished the week at 988th in the overall leaderboard. So far it’s been a reverse Stage 1 experience for us. We got a good read on Korea and avoided a 597th finish, but completely misread NA/EMEA.

To salvage our situation, we considered taking an aggressive approach and completely overhaul our roster with five transfers. However, the schedule did help that approach with SSG and 1234 as the only appealing teams with back-to-back doubles, so we settled for taking a single-15 hit.

We brought in GoldenPants and WMaimone from 1234 with a price rise. They’re here to replace our Al Qadsiah duo, which was always going to be our priority heading into Week 2. We also upgraded scuffed (0.99 PCM) to UltraViolet. Despite scuffed having a double this week, UltraViolet offers a much higher ceiling, and we could really use that upside.

The Geekay duo survives another week. They dropped in price after a disappointing opening week. We came out of the transfer window with a +1 in the budget. This upcoming week is a make-or-break week for Geekay, and we’re willing to bet on that. Good luck to FiNN and LBBD7, as they’ll need to carry both their team… and ours.

A new challenge(r) approaches

One other small thing we wanted to bring to your attention this week is a fantasy mini-game called the “Kellan Challenge”. It’s as simple as creating a second account on the OWTV website with ‘Kellan’ in your username, putting Kellan (0.76 PCM) on the roster, and never taking him off. 

It’s purely for fun, but even people who aren’t playing have enjoyed some of the creative team names the community have come up with. If you’re interested in taking up the Kellan Challenge, there’s still time to compete for the weekly leaderboard!