Why 1234, Team Risk, and Peps belong on your Week 3 roster
Week 2 is in the books for the West, and it was another incredibly good weekend of Overwatch for the viewers. Be sure to check out the recap article if you missed it. For the fantasy players, our personal highlights were Team Liquid coming back swinging, flooding The Kafe and dousing Dallas Fuel’s flame, as well as Virtus.pro dropping both their series against 1234 and Team Risk making their road to playoffs very rocky.
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
Some surprising Week 2 results mean some reasonably significant changes to EMEA’s FDR, with a lot more yellows across the board. Hopefully, this pans out for an entertaining and high-scoring OWCS weekend.
As for specific fixtures you might want to target, in NA any of the ‘Big 3’, Team Liquid, Dallas Fuel, and Spacestation Gaming have good doubles, with DF and SSG specifically playing each other. In EMEA, Geekay Esports are the premium option, but all the other doubles are yellows across the board. You'll almost certainly need to take a player or two from 1234, Team Risk, or Team Peps to round out your roster properly this week.
Fantasy metawatch
The big change in our fantasy understanding is that with Sombra out of the meta, flex Support (think UltraViolet, FiNN, zzz) is performing better than main support again. In all fairness, there are good options on main support, namely Admiral and FiXa, but broadly speaking, flex support is the safer option.
For DPS, we continue to strongly favour flex DPS players. Tracer is very much in meta right now, and your favourite Tracer player is probably feasting. zeruhh is out in front of everyone fantasy-wise, but Sugarfree, WMaimone, and AlphaYi are putting up solid figures as well. If you need a hitscan on the roster, Tr33 is the best we can offer, with Quartz a close second, albeit with a tough fixture this week.
Tank is a bit of a conundrum. The top two performers this week were GoldenPants and Attack, both reasonably affordable players at 19 and 21 cost respectively. Three of the next four were amongst the most expensive tanks we have: eisgnom, TVNT and Kellan. Practically speaking, as long as you pick a tank that isn’t splitting play time, is playing two matches, and is likely to win at least one of those matches, you’ll be in good shape.
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: amdp, Team Risk (cost: 20.5)
It’s always exciting to see an up-and-coming player get his flowers, and amdp has slowly climbed his way to a starting slot on an OWCS team that is outperforming people's expectations at that. TR have a good fixture this week and to quote a very wise investor I once knew “We like the risk.”
DPS: xzodyal, Team Peps (cost: 19.0)
You could very feasibly have any of TR/1234/Peps DPS here, and to be very transparent, we’re putting xzodyal here as the other roles have representatives from the other two teams. As we said back in Week 1, xzodyal is a very potent hitscan player and one of the few who outscores his flex DPS partner. Peps have a great fixture this week, and we hope it reflects in his scoreline.
Support: crispy, 1234 (cost: 17.5)
1234’s results are proof positive that crispy has gotten a good roll this stage, and his place on the support leaderboard reinforces that. Particularly if you want to spend heavily elsewhere, crispy is a good option for the week.
OWTV Fantasy staff team
GoldenPants has been in a bit of an “on-again, off-again” relationship with the OWTV Fantasy writers. After a banger Week 2, we’re excited to have him back on the roster for Week 3.
AlphaYi is being brought on to further the Flex DPS fantasy supremacy agenda we’ve been pushing this stage, especially as we look at Geekay Esports’ matches against 1234 and Team Risk this coming week, who are both overperforming, which might give us even better scores from those matches.
zeruhh exceeded our expectations in Week 2 and is now likely to stay on the roster through Playoffs as well, based on the stellar match with Dallas Fuel, giving us faith in Team Liquid to compete with the top of NA in playoffs.
UltraViolet is taking the watch over from zzz as we go into Week 3. UV might not have been much of a Sombra player, but he seems very comfortable on Doctrine, so we’re comfortable giving him a spot on our roster.
Last but certainly not least, SirMajed rounds out the support line. Last week we postulated that "...even if they lose, he’ll [SirMajed] pump so much healing into amdp that he’ll rack up the points." and if you’re wondering how that idea panned out, I’ll leave you with a quote from the #OWCS-fantasy channel from the OWTV Discord: “Majed ******* pulled 18 while losing badly”.
Prior to making our swaps this week, we were floating around top 150, which we’re pretty happy with as a benchmarking team, and now we’re focused on slowly tuning our roster for playoffs, which we’re currently positioned to have a minimum of three, likely four or even five players on the roster who are in playoffs, giving us lots of flexibility to make optimising swaps for the playoff weekend. Happy drafting!