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đź“ť OWCS Fantasy NA/EMEA Week 2 preview

by Joe "Cryptographer" Peters, Artemis, and SkanGX

Welcome back to the OWTV Fantasy preview! We hope you scored well in your first week. If not, we hope this preview helps you get back on track!

If you haven’t read our Week 1 preview, 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 each week with our own team, Fantasy Watchpoint, and share with you the rationale behind the team we put together each week.

Points/costs/matches

This week, we’re introducing a new statistic we will refer to often in this and future articles: PCM.

PCM stands for “Points/Cost/Matches”; it lets us quantify how much value a player provides relative to their cost. It comes up quite often in our suggestions, so we wanted to make it easier to reference.

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
FDR for NA Week 2

FDR for EMEA Week 2

We think Dallas Fuel, Geekay Esports, and Al Qadsiah have the best matchups for the week. For more budget-oriented options, Team Peps and DSG both have double-match fixtures that could provide reasonable scoring potential. If you really want to gamble on a single match week team, LuneX has a stylistic clash vs Dallas Fuel that could go the distance due to the draft process.

Fantasy metawatch

We don’t expect to see much change in the meta this week, so if you want a slightly more in-depth breakdown of our thoughts, you can check out our Week 1 fantasy preview! However, this week, we have a better idea of which players are frequenting the high-earning heroes, and some stats to help us make decisions.

The “Initiator” tanks (D.Va, Doomfist, Hazard, Winston, Wrecking Ball) largely put up the numbers we expected, thanks to their sub-role passive generating lots of extra healing. It’s not hard to throw a rock and hit a D.Va player in this meta, but a few names to be especially mindful of are Hawk, TVNT, and breakout tank of the week, Sniper! The biggest winners of the week in terms of price efficiency were NA’s two Winston players, Kellan and Infekted. Kellan was #1 on the Global PCM Rankings, and Infekted was the only other tank in the Top 5!

Our statement that “Emre good” stood up to some intense scrutiny this week, and can safely be expanded to “hitscan good”. The first time a flex DPS shows up in the DPS-PCM rankings isn’t until 8th, where Sugarfree and Zeruhh are tied with hitscan player, Zorrow.

For next week, Kronik, Tr33, and Ade topped the PCM rankings and have double-match fixtures, which all offer good scoring potential, and if you’re in need of a deep value option, our top DPS pick of last week, Zorrow, should have an even better scoring opportunity this week!

Well, last week we posited that main supports that don’t play Lucio would be good players to keep an eye on, and what do you know, Lukemino and Vega were first and third on the support-PCM rankings respectively. A special shoutout to Admiral as well, who was fourth and doesn’t flex his heropool nearly as much as Luke and Vega. Another important takeaway from last week is that flex supports are doing quite well, even in tough series and losses. Scuffed and Xeriongdh, for example, are two very cost-effective options from last week, with 0-2 results that scored well for their costs.

Cost-effective players

Part of balancing your fantasy roster is recognising that you can’t just pick all the expensive 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)

We would love to put Sniper here as they had an absolutely incredible opening weekend, but unfortunately, they have another tough fixture in Week 2 that has us wary, so Vestola remains our budget tank pick for the second week in a row. His PCM was almost identical to TVNT, and significantly better than other EMEA heavy hitters like Ziyad and KSAA, making him still an excellent value for the week ahead.

DPS: Ade, Al Qadsiah (cost: 20)

To be completely honest, we absolutely could have left Zorrow here, but we wanted to highlight another good midrange option in Al Qadsiah’s hitscan DPS Ade. After last week’s strong performance, we think he is poised to have an even better week this week in a slightly softer double-match fixture.

Support: Lukemino, Dallas Fuel (cost: 20)

Absolutely dominant scoring from Lukemino in Week 1. He was #2, right behind Kellan, in the PCM rankings, and even though his price increased going into Week 2, his schedule remains very appealing, with double-match fixtures likely through the end of the stage, so you can park him on your team and not worry about that slot.

Honourable mentions: Zorrow / Xeriongdh (cost: 17/18)The Peps duo were really solid pickups in Week 1 and have arguably better fixtures for Week 2, but they may not be ideal to transfer in as you will likely want to transfer them back out for Week 3. However, if there’s an expensive player you want on your squad and need room in the budget, either of these guys could help you free up some extra cash.

OWTV Fantasy staff team

OWTV Fantasy staff team of the week

  • Kellan - Tank (cost: 22)
  • Kronik - DPS (cost: 22)
  • Zorrow - DPS (cost: 17)
  • FiNN - Support (cost: 20)
  • SirMajed - Support (cost: 19)

For Week 2, we’ve pivoted our Tank and DPS from Spacestation Gaming’s Hawk and Lethal to Dallas Fuel’s Kellan and Kronik after their strong performance in Week 1 and their double-match fixtures for Week 2 and Week 3 both. We’ve also chosen to exercise the option for a third transfer for a 15-point penalty to swap Zzz out for FiNN in hopes of making back the difference with FiNN’s double-match fixture vs Zzz’s single-match fixture. Zorrow and SirMajed continue to be good value pickups for Week 2 so we’re holding onto them for another week.

When we challenged you, dear reader, to beat us, we didn’t expect to be tied for 13th on the NA/EMEA leaderboards. So to the 11 of you that did, good work! We will keep competing alongside you all under the name Fantasy Watchpoint and continue tracking our progress weekly, so do try to see if you can surpass us in Week 2!