OWCS Fantasy: Where to start when nobody knows the meta
With Stage 3 FINALLY kicking off in the West this weekend, it’s time to crack out the spreadsheets, scroll some OWTV match pages, and spend plenty of quality time with the OWTV Discord Fantasy crew.
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
If you trust our read on teams' relative strength, then the good fixtures really stick out. Spacestation Gaming and Dallas Fuel both have pretty juicy fixtures in NA, and in EMEA any team with a double (Twisted Minds, Virtus.pro, Geekay Esports) besides maybe Team Peps seems exceptional, and even then if you’re a member of the #AuxArmes Army, Peps might be worth a look.
Fantasy metawatch
The good news! We will have a very different meta in NA and EMEA than anything we had in Stage 2. We’ve gotten multiple new heroes, two reworked heroes, more balance changes than you can shake a stick at.
The bad news! We have no clue what the meta will look like. Which heroes will be played, and which roles will score well. What I can tell you is that, at least before this week's big patch, main Support was back on top for scoring in the support role, and Flex DPS was back on top in the DPS role, at least based on Korea’s first week. Will that hold through this week's changes? Hard to say, but it's at least somewhere to start.
Cost-effective players
Part of balancing your fantasy roster is recognising you can’t pick only top-cost players. You need budget options to fill out your roster, so we’ve selected a player from each role to highlight a few valid choices.
Tank: Zeb, The Kafe (cost: 20.0)
It’s not a great week for budget tank options. Everyone cheaper than Zeb is either splitting time or has a non-optimal fixture, and his fixture is only okay. On the upside, Orisa has a potentially good Major Perk now, and that might be all Zeb needs.
DPS: xzodyal, Team Peps (cost: 19)
Cost-effective, with a slight caveat. The young Spanish hitscan has a ROUGH first week back in OWCS playing against Virtus.pro and Twisted Minds, but he is the single best DPS player under 20 cost. If you’re a believer in Team Peps and want a DPS you can hold onto for a while, xzo might be your play.
Support: Admiral, Spacestation Gaming (cost: 20)
Word on the street is that the vibes are high over at SSG, and while Admiral isn't normally a particularly high-scoring player, rising tides lift all boats. There's no risk he’s subbed out, and he’s got a banger of a fixture in Week 1.
Honourable mention: Goldenpants, 1234 (cost: 19)
Is 1234 likely to perform worse this stage? Yes.
Is 1234 only playing one match this weekend? Yes.
Does that make it questionable to take a 1234 player? Yes.
But it’s Goldenpants, and if he puts up scores anywhere close to Stage 2, then you’ll be as golden as he is.
OWTV Fantasy staff team - Fantasy watchpoint
- Tank - smurf, Disguised (cost: 18.0)
- DPS - kevster, Virtus.pro (cost: 23.0)
- DPS - Lethal, Spacestation Gaming (cost: 21.0)
- Support - Scyle, Disguised (cost: 18.0)
- Support - zzz, The Kafe (cost: 19.5)
smurf is back to competitive Overwatch. We and 35.6% of fantasy players, as of writing, decided to bet on him. It’s not just for nostalgia’s sake. DSG have back-to-back doubles, alongside VP and the Kafe. That’s why we’ve also thrown in Scyle, zzz, and kevster.
Arguably, we could have gone for KiWii, who’s likely to be on Cat, Doctrine and Sombra duty, but we wanted to utilize most of our budget.
zzz and kevster have been reliable farmers in the past, and we are glad we managed to fit them in and add Lethal to the roster on top, though we’ll have to transfer him out for Week 2 to maximize fixtures.
Looking forward to Week 2 and 3, our current plans include bringing in TR33 and zox for Lethal and Scyle in Week 2, and bringing GoldenPants, LBBD7, and Xeriongdh for smurf, kevster, and zzz in Week 3. It includes taking one penalty, but it guarantees us three weeks of double fixtures for our entire roster.
You can always keep an eye on our roster movements via the leaderboard (by searching for Fantasy watchpoint), should we make any early transfers before player price changes next week.