Fantasy preview: Who to target as Korea's chaos rolls on

Welcome back to the OWTV Fantasy preview! After a weekend full of 3-0 sweeps, sweating over Fantasy points and enjoying O2 Blast's sweet gifts instead of MCD's coffee, we also found out who the sixteen teams are heading to the Overwatch World Cup Group Stage. We hope you had a blast alongside your O2 assets, because we certainly did. Now it's time to turn our attention back to Korea as Stage 2 rolls on. 

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 with 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

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.

The week kicks off with Cheeseburger taking on SuperBad, the team featuring the three brothers in AZENT (0.24 PCM), SENTIER (0.52 PCM), and Univ2r (0.48 PCM). We don’t expect any surprises in this one. After that, Cheeseburger face Crazy Raccoon, who are likely to treat them the same way they are aiming to treat SuperBad.

Crazy Raccoon also play ZANSIDE GAMING. ZANSIDE failed to win a single map last week, which was disappointing. We weren't expecting them to become another ONSIDE, but we also weren't expecting them to drop a tier immediately post-merger. That said, if there was ever a week where they were most likely to disappoint, it was Week 1. For now, we're still treating them as a team with an "ONSIDE calendar" and one whose assets are worth holding. After Crazy Raccoon, they face Poker Face, and we'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they won't come out winless again.

Elsewhere, Poker Face are also still looking for their first map win. Last week, we got to see LIP (0.56 PCM) play the entire series against them. This week they face Team Falcons, so who knows what shenanigans Korea's most practical team will pull. Whatever happens there, Falcons then move on to play T1 in a classic D0NGHAK (1.25 PCM) vs ChiYo (1.01 PCM) matchup to close out the week. No matter how hard D0NGHAK tried in the past, or how close the games got, he never managed to get one over on ChiYo. Perhaps this will motivate D0NGHAK and his teammates to come out as winners and give us Fantasy players another five-map banger.

T1 also face O2 Blast in a clash between Korea's current “New Gen” of overwatch players and the team responsible for scouting what feels like half of the region's talent. In fact, the match features both Bliss (1.23 PCM) and Proud (1.48 PCM), who previously spent time at O2.

O2 don't get much of a break either. They also clash with ZETA DIVISION, who will be eager to erase last week's loss to T1 from everyone's memory. Perr (1.53 PCM), last week's highest-scoring player not playing for T1 and highest PCM overall, faces a much tougher challenge this time around.

As for ZETA, they finish off their week against SuperBad. Perhaps this is where they'll unveil the next meme composition that will take over the meta, much like they did with the Cat compositions last stage. Worth noting, when that happened last stage, Shu (0.64 PCM) was the one who missed out the most on Fantasy points scoring opportunities.

Fantasy metawatch

The meta is all over the place right now. Everyone’s playing a little bit of everything, both in terms of heroes and the players. Every tank player got maps last week except for ZANSIDE’s HEISER and Poker Face’s HYEON. We may see HEISER next week, as ZANSIDE failed to pick up a single map win with Void starting. At some point they need to try something different, even if Void (0.49 PCM) arguably looked like their best player. ZANSIDE might also pull a ZAN Esports move and go on to swap hitscans by bringing in Probe for Kilo (0.27 PCM), a move that backfired last stage after Probe went on to get suspended by ZAN after making an unfortunate jape at a fan’s parent.

The Roster Roulette may not end here. Falcons continued rotating between Someone (0.55 PCM) and Hanbin (0.66 PCM), as well as Checkmate (0.20 PCM) and SP1NT (0.43 PCM). With both Falcons and Crazy Raccoon already qualified for the Midseason Championship, we don't expect either team to take the regular season too seriously until playoff time.

Crazy Raccoon managed to give all of their DPS players play time. We saw LIP (0.56 PCM) close out the final map against Falcons and then play the entire series against Poker Face. Only the CR supports are guaranteed full playtime. The same cannot be said for T1, where Coach Fleta (0.10 PCM) decided to push skewed onto Lucio, push Bliss into the bench, and go on to get a couple of dings on Kiriko.

Despite T1 and ZETA DIVISION being the only realistic contenders for Korea's remaining Midseason Championship spots, we expect both teams to experiment throughout most of the stage before locking in for the seeding tournament. During Champions Clash, we saw Viol2t (0.69 PCM) take on the Mizuki duty, which didn't quite work out. This time they moved Shu (0.64 PCM) onto the hero instead. These Mizuki compositions are starting to trend in Korea following Crazy Raccoon's success. The composition revolves around Kiriko, Mizuki, Sigma, Symmetra, and either Bastion or Mei. Fantasy-wise, the Sigma and ground Bastion tend to come out as the biggest winners. Kiriko still outperforms the second support in most cases, but Mizuki has a much better chance of keeping pace than a traditional Lucio would.

Finally, we would like to apologize for suggesting Becky (-0.05  PCM) last week. He struggled on Symmetra and finished as one of only five players to go negative this week, alongside SuperBad's Soae (-0.17 PCM), Dumbbell (-0.19 PCM), and SORI (-0.23 PCM), plus Poker Face's Symmetra player D0D0 (-0.27 PCM). Whilst we’re at it, ZETA have been awful scorers in map losses, as we witnessed against T1, something we could not have predicted after going undefeated in both Korea and Asia in Stage 1.

PS: O2 Blast’s support player Gamjung is the last of five players that got no game time last week.

Cost-effective players

Let’s discuss some players who we think have potential to be hidden gems:

Tank: SENTIER, SuperBad (cost: 16) (0.52 PCM)

Despite what we said about SuperBad last week, SENTIER has limited time on SuperBad, mainly opening the series on control maps as the team's dedicated main tank. If you factor in the ongoing roster roulette, going for a “hole” strategy is a valid option. At just 16 cost, he scored 16.5 points last week from the three maps he played. Though that total is heavily boosted by his 14.5 points on Map 1 against O2 Blast. Without that outlier, he would have finished with 2 points, the same score as Poker Face's Fearful (0.06 PCM), who costs 0.5 more.

DPS: Argon, Cheeseburger (cost: 17.5) (0.74 PCM)

Cheeseburger face SuperBad this week, making them one of the prime teams to target for budget options. If you jumped on Perr (1.53 PCM) or WuTian (1.17 PCM) last week, you might be looking to jump ship. That's where Argon comes in. If you prefer the hitscan route, M1nut2 (0.58  PCM) is available at 0.5 cheaper.

Support: WooChan, Cheeseburger (cost: 17.5) (0.91 PCM)

Even after facing ZETA DIVISION, WooChan still managed to get 31 points, finishing only two points behind Viol2t (0.69 PCM). If you're looking for another ship to jump to, assuming you had one of Misin (1.26 PCM) or Faith (1.29 PCM), though there's a strong argument for simply holding WooChan or Faith for the rest of the stage if they continue delivering around 30 points per week at their prices. TenTen (0.82 PCM) is also another route that comes at 1 cost cheaper.

Honourable mention: Bliss, T1 (cost: 20.5)  (1.23 PCM)

If you didn’t ride the T1 wave and find yourself priced out of their premium options in Proud (1.48 PCM), skewed (1.38 PCM), or D0NGHAK (1.25 PCM) after their huge performances last week, Bliss offers a more affordable way to buy into T1. He may not have the same ceiling as T1's star names, but he can help minimize the damage of not owning them.

OWTV Fantasy staff team

• Void - Tank (cost: 18) (0.49  PCM)
• Argon - DPS (cost: 17.5) (0.74 PCM)
• Proud - DPS (cost: 22.5) (1.48  PCM)
• skewed - Support (cost: 22.5)  (1.38   PCM)
• WooChan- Support (cost: 17.5) (0.91 PCM)

We're keeping grandpa Void for another week. ZANSIDE looked shaky in the opening week, but we're willing to give them one more chance. That said, the same can't be said for IRONY. Keeping both Void and IRONY would leave too much of our budget tied up in ZANSIDE assets, and if they fully commit to being a flop, escaping becomes much harder.

Instead, we're moving to WooChan, who comes in after a price rise, and doubling up on Cheeseburger by bringing in Argon for Perr. Both Argon and Perr have gone up by 1 cost. 

We head into Week 2 with a 1.5 increase in team value and 3.5 in the bank. Which will grant us greater flexibility in the coming weeks.

As for the T1 boys, we're more than happy to keep rolling with them. Unless something major happens, they're staying right where they are.

Last week we finished joint 38th, sitting at 223.5 points, a significantly stronger start than our Stage 1 start. Let's see if we can keep the momentum rolling into Week 2. Good luck to everyone!