📝 NA/EMEA Week 1 fantasy preview

Welcome to the first in our weekly series of articles, where we will preview the weekend ahead in OWTV Fantasy. Our goal 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 will do this by looking at the fixtures for the week, players we think offer notably good value, and any other clever ideas we cook up! We’ll also play along each week with a team picked by our writing staff. Also, check out the week 1 preview for OWCS Fantasy Korea for some extra tips!

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

We think Twisted Minds, Spacestation Gaming, and Virtus.pro have the best matchups for the week. For more budget-oriented options, Al Qadsiah, Team Peps, and LuneX Gaming all have double-match fixtures with upset chances, though they are quite difficult to pull off.

Fantasy metawatch

The tank meta is somewhat open at the moment, with D.Va clocking the highest playtimes; however, Ramattra, Zarya and Sigma are also prominent picks. If you’re a Fuel fan, they seem to be playing Winston a lot. What to look for here is players you think will consistently pick the “Initiator” tanks (D.Va, Doomfist, Hazard, Winston, Wrecking Ball) because the healing their sub-role passive generates will score some crucial extra points.

The DPS meta is significantly simpler to talk about. Emre good. The sheer volume of damage that Emre puts out, even in losing maps, is something that fantasy managers must consider to stay competitive. Not all hitscan players will pick Emre, so correctly identifying who will is key.

When we talk about supports, what stands out is that Lucio players, specifically, don’t tend to score much, so they are priced accordingly. However, if you sign a main support player who also plays other support heroes, they can provide excellent value. For example, Wuyang in 2025 Stage 3.

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: Vestola, Al Qadsiah (cost: 20)

Vestola is our pick at tank for Week 1. He’s priced modestly compared to most of the EMEA tanks, and notably has no other tank to split playtime with on Al Qadsiah. More importantly, he has an appealing fixture with matches against Team Peps and Virtus.pro, both of which could be matches where he scores well.

DPS: Zorrow, Team Peps (cost: 16)

Team Peps’ hitscan, Zorrow, is a true budget pick priced at 16, just one cost above players who are expected to see no playtime at all. While he has a difficult double-match fixture this week against Al Qadsiah and Twisted Minds, we think that if he plays Emre, his points-to-cost ratio will not only be positive but quite strong.

Support: Zzz, LuneX Gaming (cost: 19)

Rounding out our picks for the week is Zzz, the LuneX Gaming flex support. She could well be the third-best flex support in North America right now, but still only priced at 19. Zzz also has a reasonable fixture for the opening weekend with matches against Gorilla’s Disciples, a team we’ve seen LuneX Gaming be competitive against in FACEIT League Master, and Spacestation Gaming, a team that ChrisTFer in his recent interview, has touted as being pretty good and a challenge. A lot of scoring potential, we may even see her price increase soon to reflect her position as a top flex support in the region.

Honourable mention: Lukemino, Dallas Fuel (cost: 19)

Lukemino falls directly into the “main support who plays other support heroes” category that we mentioned above. He only has a single match this week against Disguised, but he could see price appreciation if Dallas live up to their potential.

OWTV Fantasy staff team

• Hawk - Tank (cost: 23)
• Lethal - DPS (cost: 22)
• Zorrow - DPS (cost: 16)
• Zzz - Support (cost: 19)
• SirMajed - Support (cost: 19)

Hawk and Lethal both have a great fixture this week, and are playing a fair amount of D.Va and Emre, who we think will be good for scoring. However, they will likely end up as our two outgoing transfers next week, to maximise our team’s double-fixtures.

We covered Zorrow and Zzz in slightly more depth above, and they both have enough fixtures in week two to keep them around for the long run.

SirMajed has a decent set of fixtures this week, and helps to round out the team while leaving a buffer in the budget for future price changes.

We will compete alongside you using this very team under the name Fantasy Watchpoint. So, as an extra challenge, see if you can beat the OWTV in-house fantasy masterminds, and we will see you on the leaderboards!