📝 OWCS Fantasy Korea Week 5 (Last chance qualifiers and playoff seeding)

Welcome back to the OWTV Fantasy preview! The regular season in Korea is over, and now we’re off to a seeding tournament and a last chance qualifier to shape up the playoff brackets.

If you haven’t read one of our earlier previews, here’s a quick reminder of our goals: We try to offer thought-provoking options for your team, and help keep you up to date with any major developments that might affect OWCS 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 also play along with our own team, Fantasy Watchpoint, and share the rationale behind the team we put together each week.

Fixture review

After four weeks of teams clashing against one another, the regular season is officially over, and New Era, led by MCD, have been sent to the promotion/relegation. 

This week, we haven’t prepared a Fixture Difficulty Rating because the format has changed entirely. In the seeding tournament, the top four teams, ZETA DIVISION, Team Falcons, Crazy Raccoon, and RØDE ONSIDE GAMING, all face each other in a round robin. The matchups feature rematches that already proved to produce solid point returns throughout the regular season, and as such, they are the clear place to target this week.

On the other hand, the LCQ looks far less appealing for fantasy. T1, despite having the two highest-scoring players (skewed and Proud) in weeks two and three, they are only expected to play a single series this week. Meanwhile, Poker Face, Cheeseburger, and ZAN Esports are expected to play at most two series, making it difficult to justify investing in the LCQ teams.

The strategy for this week is straightforward: cover the top four teams, even consider doubling up on the ones you feel most confident in, and don’t settle for assets playing in the LCQ, unless you are constrained by the budget. 

Fantasy metawatch

Hazard has officially taken over Korea! He was the most-played tank last weekend. We’ve also seen a few matches feature Winston or Wrecking Ball, such as when D0NGHAK (0.59 PCM) and Mealgaru (0.54 PCM) faced each other. Team Falcons’ Hanbin (0.87 PCM) decided to stick to his comfort zone playing Zarya, D.Va, and Ramattra.

On DPS, the region seems to have collectively accepted that Tracer is simply better than Vendetta, which makes flex DPS players like HeeSang (0.87 PCM)  and SP1NT (0.78 PCM) far more relevant than they were earlier this stage. This is great news for OWCS Fantasy managers, as it opens up more options beyond the hitscans. It’s also worth mentioning that Team Falcons also played CheckMate (0.69 PCM) on the Symmetra comp in their 3-2 victory over RØDE ONSIDE GAMING.

Support remains unchanged, with teams defaulting to the familiar Lucio/Kiriko backline. We still see the occasional Ana/Brig and double flex setups. Of course, we couldn’t go a week without any Ana/Jetpack Cat shenanigans, with ZETA DIVISION bringing it back once again, and Crazy Raccoon following suit against New Era.

Cost-effective players

With the format change and a clear, winning approach of targeting seeding tournament teams this week, we decided to shed some light on hard data to help you make more informed decisions.

Here is a list of the top 10 players with the highest expected points for next week. Unsurprisingly, they’re all taking part in the seeding tournament and, as such, will make for good picks.

We’ve also included a list of the top 10 players expected points-wise from the LCQ teams in case you are forced into an asset from the LCQ.

And finally, here we’ve added a list of the top 10 players that cost less than 20 by their expected points, in case you are working on a tight budget.

OWTV Fantasy staff team

• Attack - Tank (cost:22) (1.40 PCM)
• Proper - DPS (cost:23) (1.12 PCM) 
• MER1T - DPS (cost: 22) (1.06 PCM)
• CH0R0NG - Support (cost: 21) (1.13 PCM) 
• irony - Support (cost: 21) (1.23 PCM)

Attack is Thanos, so of course, we’re keeping him. He is currently the joint-highest scoring player of the season and also has the highest expected points going into next week, making him the easiest lock-in decision possible.

MER1T also stays in the squad after emerging as the third-highest expected points player for next week, only behind Stalk3r and Proper. Speaking of which, Proper joins our team this week, replacing Proud. With Proud expected to only play a single match in the LCQ, it’s difficult to justify holding him when the seeding tournament teams offer both more competitive fixtures and more volume.

We’ve also revamped the backline once again. Ideally, we’d want to field the two highest-expected-point supports in Viol2t and Vigilante, but the budget simply doesn’t allow it. Instead, we’ve settled for the next best thing: Vigilante’s teammate CH0R0NG, who sits top four in expected points, alongside irony, who ranks as the third-highest expected points support. Hopefully, this will be the last of our backline overhauls for some time.

Last week, we climbed from 517th overall to 449th, which looks like progress on paper. In reality, our transfers backfired. If we had simply kept KIVIS and irony instead of taking a penalty to force in skewed, we would have scored 17 more points, plus the 15 points we lost from the penalty. Those extra 32 points would have put us at roughly 354th overall. Painful, but that’s fantasy. Let’s see what this week has in store.