It’s a flex DPS world in NA/EMEA Fantasy Week 2
Week 1 in NA/EMEA Stage 3 is in the books and what an interesting weekend it was. We saw glimpses of the French Stage of Domination, with a big Team Peps win over Virtus.pro in EMEA, a fully staffed Kafe taking down Spacestation Gaming in a result that will spark some awesome “Who makes Playoffs?!?” posts, and plenty of other fun series! So let's talk Fantasy. We know so much more now than we did last week.
Our goal with these articles is twofold: to offer thought-provoking options for your team and to keep you up to date on any major developments that might affect fantasy. We will do this by looking at the week's fixtures, 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!
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
After Week 1, we’ve got a little better idea of what team relative strength is looking like, so hopefully we can guide you to greatness with a little more confidence in Week 2. Let's start with EMEA, as they’re the easy sells this week. Twisted Minds and Virtus.pro both have 1234 and Team Risk on the docket, and based on Week 1 performances, the biggest risk is TM and VP rolling over the opposition a little too cleanly, but both teams dropped plenty of maps in Week 1, so hopefully there will be time for point farming.
In NA, the obvious pickup would be Team Liquid, but after seeing Disguised and The Kafe overperform in Week 1, their matches against Spacestation Gaming and Team Liquid respectively are looking a lot more winnable, and they both play NTMR, who have not had a particularly hot start to the stage and will be looking to collect their first map wins!
Fantasy metawatch
Well… I was very excited to have really clean actionable intel for you guys, and I’ll still share what we saw from last week's data, but there was yet ANOTHER patch this week that hit D.Mon, Doctrine and Sombra with nerfs, three of the most common heroes from Week 1, as well as this quarter’s shareholder-mandated Kiriko buff. So there’s a reasonable chance the support meta could be in flux once again.
For now, let's ignore that and talk about what we saw in Week 1 scoring-wise. Our biggest takeaway from the West is that good support players put up big numbers, and the sub-role hasn’t made a huge difference. Main support seems like the slightly safer choice, but flex supports held more of the very top spots in scoring efficiency, as well as more of the below-average slots. For tanks, TVNT and eisgnom crushed everyone in total output but also played nine and 10 maps, respectively. Right now, the key for tanks looks like picking good players with good fixtures more than any other criteria, even including price.
You might wonder why DPS is getting its own paragraph, and the answer is because it is a little grim. Only four DPS players (Xomba, Sugarfree, JaeWoo, and Quartz) met our typical benchmark of PCM >= 1.0 for a player to consider for your roster, and none of them is a super exciting prospect, especially after price changes. That said, the eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that three-quarters of that list are flex DPS, and it is absolutely a flex DPS Fantasy world right now. They tend to be cheaper than their counterparts on the same team and score better. Draft accordingly!
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: smurf, Disguised (cost: 19.0)
The king might just be back. Despite a very convincing loss to Dallas Fuel, smurf put up solid scores in Week 1, and if you apply the classical transitive property of esports
DSG > The Kafe & The Kafe > SSG
=> DSG > SSG?
If that holds, it should mean their Week 2 fixture is even more promising than Week 1.
DPS: Xomba, The Kafe Esports (cost: 19.5)
Xomba was the best-performing DPS when adjusted for cost in Week 1, and they have an even better Week 2 fixture, with no other DPS standing out at any cost.
Support: Vega, Team Liquid (cost: 20)
After seeing Vega get all the playtime in Week 1, and scoring well despite a pretty weak showing against Spacestation Gaming, we think he offers a compelling case to claim a spot on your Week 2 roster. Especially if he can capitalize on any meta changes from this patch.
Dishonourable mention: GoldenPants, 1234 (cost: 19)
Yeah, okay, bad call by me last week. Let's not speak of it again.
OWTV Fantasy staff team (under construction)
- Tank - smurf, Disguised (cost: 19.0)
- DPS - kevster, Virtus.pro (cost: 22.5)
- DPS - zeruhh, Team Liquid (cost: 20.5)
- Support - zzz, The Kafe (cost: 20.0)
- Support - SirMajed, Team Risk (cost: 18.5)
smurf put up big numbers in Week 1 and has an even more favorable fixture going into Week 2, so keeping him around was a no-brainer.
kevster put up slightly more disappointing numbers in Week 1, but has a very soft fixture for Week 2, and while it's been an FDPS world for scoring, we think that against some easier opposition he can farm more easily.
zeruhh simply has a good fixture for the remainder of the stage and good scoring potential at the FDPS position. Hopefully they’re able to make both series this week interesting and get some value going.
zzz absolutely crushed Week 1 with the highest Points/Cost/Match (PCM) of any player and her Week 2 fixture is looking juicy in comparison.
Lastly, SirMajed gives us another double in EMEA, and we’re banking on the idea that even if they lose, he’ll pump so much healing into AMDP that he’ll rack up the points.
This sets us up nicely for Week 3, where we will look to shed smurf and zzz and look for opportunities in both regions to set up for playoffs! You can always keep an eye on our roster movements via the leaderboard, should we make any pre-price-change transfers. Happy drafting!