Fantasy preview: Top tips for the Korea playoffs
Welcome back to the OWTV Fantasy preview! It was a week of paybacks in Korea. ZANSIDE Gaming got their revenge with a 3-0 over O2 Blast, and D0NGHAK finally managed to beat ChiYo... with a little help from Jasm1ne. Thank you, Jasm1ne. But in OWCS Korea fashion, most of that carried zero actual stakes. The matches that really matter begin now.
If you haven’t read any of our previews, here’s a quick reminder of our goal with these weekly previews: to offer thought-provoking options for your team while keeping you up to date on any major developments that might impact OWCS Fantasy. We do this by breaking down the fixtures, highlighting players we think offer strong value, and sharing any other strategies we come up with. We’ll also play along each week with our own team, Fantasy Watchpoint, and explain the reasoning behind the roster we lock in.
Fixture review
Crazy Raccoon and T1 will be waiting in the semifinals for the winners of ZETA DIVISION vs O2 Blast and Team Falcons vs ZANSIDE Gaming, respectively.
We’re not expecting either O2 Blast or ZANSIDE to cause too many problems for ZETA or Falcons.
Since Crazy Raccoon and Team Falcons have already qualified for the Midseason Championship through previous LAN results, every remaining Korean team not called ZANSIDE will be cheering for Falcons. If Falcons beat ZANSIDE, both T1 and the winner of ZETA DIVISION vs. O2 Blast automatically secure Korea's two Midseason Championship spots. In other words, a Falcons victory means the rest of the tournament will only influence bragging rights and prize money distribution.
Fantasy metawatch
Taking a page from last week's featured guest, SolarGiraffe, the teams you want to target this week are: ZETA DIVISION (thanks to their projected three-series run), Crazy Raccoon, and T1, whose players have consistently scored highly.
Team Falcons, despite being projected to play three series, looked shaky throughout this stage, and the seeding tournament was no different. They experimented with all possible DPS combinations, kept rotating their tanks, and went winless last week.
It's also worth noting that:
- Sigma/Mizuki and Mauga/Reaper/Shion remain the most popular comps.
- ZANSIDE have stuck with the roster that worked, with no sign of either Void or Kilo.
- Mealgaru once again didn't play a single map.
- Jasm1ne and D0NGHAK split playtime.
- Despite finishing as the 3rd-highest-scoring DPS and the second-highest scorer on T1 last week, Proud's ceiling could have been even higher.
- His numbers were held back by playing some Symmetra, and historically he tends to need some time to adapt whenever a new hitscan hero enters the meta.
- We saw the same pattern when Cat/Bastion first appeared: his Fantasy output dipped initially, before bouncing back once he got more familiar with the meta. The same seems to be happening with Shion. Something to keep in mind for the Midseason Championship and future stages.
Data pinch
With the budget increase and after several weeks of price fluctuations, most managers should have enough funds to build the roster they want. Because of that, there isn’t a real reason to highlight bargains this week.
Instead of recommending individual players, we'll let the numbers do the talking. The tables below include every player, along with their weekly and cumulative PCMs, as well as their projected number of series and expected points.
OWTV Fantasy staff team
- Tank - Bernar (cost: 22.5) (1.38 PCM)
- DPS - SORI (cost: 16) (0.07 PCM)
- DPS - Proper (cost: 24) (1.26 PCM)
- Support - CH0R0NG (cost: 22.0) (1.28 PCM)
- Support - vigilante (cost: 24.0) (1.32 PCM)
If this were a real roster, SORI would have no excuse not to perform. We've gone all in on ZETA’s three projected series, while backing Crazy Raccoon over T1 for the teams with two guaranteed series.
That means saying goodbye to Proud, Perr, and WooChan. To afford this lineup, we had to embrace the hole strategy, and thankfully, SORI –the only 16-cost DPS– is here to save our hides. At the end of last stage, we tested what the optimal playoff teams would have looked like across several budget brackets, and the hole strategy came out on top more often than not, with Haksal as the de facto hole.
We currently sit 38th overall and 1st on the VIP leaderboard. As of writing, Proper and vigilante sit at 12.5% and 4.8% ownership, respectively, and we're hoping they remain differential picks by the time the first match begins.
May your Fantasy team triumph and your favourite teams qualify for the Midseason Championship. We'll see you there.