Fantasy Underworlds
Better late than never on this. Some time has passed since we originally did our fantasy draft for the world championship and even longer since I last completed an article for this blog, but my fingers finally started working again and any technical barriers that existed before have been resolved. With some amount of hindsight and this originally being my brainchild, the time has come for me to put my thoughts down and finally get some more articles out on here.
Fantasy Underworlds?
For episode 183 - Success on Draft we at What the Hex decided to try our hand at creating the equivalent of a fantasy sports pool for our beloved game. Being that this hadn’t been attempted before to our knowledge we had to figure out how it all would work.
What Are Fantasy Sports?
For anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of participating in the world of fantasy sports, the concept is fairly simple. Members of the fantasy league (hereby coaches) select players in the actual sports league. Depending on how these players perform points are awarded to the coaches and eventually a winner is determined based on these results. Typically coaches will ‘play’ one another each week throughout a season of the actual league, with the best coaches making the playoffs (think top cut) toward the end of the regular season. These top coaches then compete to be named champion of their fantasy league. An award that bestows a similar level of honor and recognition upon the victor as does a real sports team’s championship.
The whole thing basically serves as a way for those of us normies to live vicariously through those who were able to make the big leagues. It’s all in good fun and lets fans be more interested in games they otherwise wouldn’t have much care about.
Why bring Fantasy to Underworlds?
We wanted a way to discuss the meta we expected to see at the world championship. As easy as it would be just to run down all of the warbands we would expect to see there, that’s been done. Spicing it up by making a game out of it seemed to be a great way to provoke an interesting discussion and to prove once and for all which member of the podcast knows the most about Underworlds (at least on that one day we drafted for a single event with a slew of new things released shortly before it). We also liked the idea of the potential of allowing other members of the community form their own leagues and join us in living vicariously through the competitors.
With yearlong bragging rights up for grabs, we just needed to figure out how to decide who gets them.
Scoring
Before deciding which warbands (and deck pairings) we wanted to selecting the question of how you actually score point and determine a winner needed to be answered. Looking at how the tournament for last year’s World Championship was formatted and wanting to keep scoring simple for the inaugural outing we decided on the following scoring system:
For each match victory in pool play for each chosen warband, the coach earns 1 point (i.e. if there are two players at the tournament playing Kammandora’s Blades and they win 4 and 5 matches respectively, that coach would be awarded 9 points).
For each instance of a chosen warband making the top cut, the coach is awarded 1 point (i.e, both Kammandora players make it to the top cut, that coach would earn 2 points)
For each match victory in top cut play (round of 16 and round of 8) for each chosen warband, the coach earns 2 points.
For each match victory in the semi-finals for each chosen warband, the coach earns 3 points.
If the world champion is a chosen warband, the coach earns 4 points.
We also decided to select a single nemesis deck pairing and the scoring for that went as follows
If the winning deck contains either of the decks in a chosen pairing, the coach earns 3 points (i.e. if the winning pairing is Realmstone Raiders and Raging Slayers and a coach selected Realmstone raiders and Countdown to Cataclysm, that coach would earn 3 points).
If the winning deck is exactly the chosen pairing, the coach earns 7 points.
Why this Scoring System?
Adhering to the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) method seemed like best practice, especially with this being the first time.
Tracking match wins and losses for all competitors was going to be a difficult enough task on its own, no need to complicate things by adding in game wins or total glory.
The decision to only include top cut games on the later half of the tournament was made to try to have all games that count towards score be pretty guaranteed that a player was at a more peak performance. I know if I had been lucky enough to get a qualifying ticket and knew I was out for the win after pool play, I would not prioritize sleep and clearheadedness going into the last days.
We decided to include a deck pairing as a selection to add more discussion points in the episode and add a little more intrigue to the final game beyond the warbands represented. The daunting idea of trying to track down each player's deck pairing meant scoring for the deck pairing needed to be relegated to later in the tournament.
The Draft
Now that we knew how to scare it was time to decide what would be scoring for each of us.
With 49 Warbands in the game we knew that we wouldn't want to take all of them. For podcast length reasons we figured 20 made sense, and this also meant that we would leave some good warbands on the table.
With 4 of us participating that meant we would each be drafting 5 warbands along with the one deck pairing. This gave us a nice even 6 round draft.
The standard draft rule of each warband only being selected once would be in place. We also imposed a set of categories that we all had to fill with our picks. Each coach needed a warband from each of the grand alliances (Chaos, Death, Destruction and Order) and then had a flex pick that could come from any of them.
The draft was conducted in snake fashion. For the uninitiated this means that each round the order would flip. So the order for our four person draft would go ABCD in the first round and then DCBA in the second, and so on.
Draft Results
The order in the first round being Zach, Skyler, Brian, Davy and then Davy, Brian Skyler, Zach in the second and alternating in that way for each subsequent round.
The draft ended up like this:
Which leads to each of our teams looking like this:
A pretty good smattering of Embergard and Spitewood warbands (at least the new versions of v1 warbands). Notably Death and Order make up the flex warbands, showing how deep the rosters are for those grand alliances. Also worth noting that the first chaos warband wasn't taken until the third round. I think this was more about the uncertainty as to which one would perform the best more so than thinking none of them were good.
I also like seeing that we ended up with a good spread of warbands we thought would be prevalent and some that were taken more for potential for a single player to do well with them.
There's also a good spread of elite and horde warbands, proving that none of us felt confident of the standing of those within the new meta.
Tournament Results
The warband breakdown at worlds ended up looking like this:
We seemed to have correctly read the meta as the majority of the most represented warbands were among our first picks. The big exception to this being Gnarlspirit Pack, which were tied for 4th most prevalent warband, despite none of us even drafting them.
Going into the draft they were nowhere near the top of my board and I think we could've done several more rounds before they would've been picked. Just goes to show how local metas can create a sort of bubble where certain things slip by. Even one as healthy as ours in Madison can have major blind spots to excitement and potential strength around warbands that other areas of the world pick up on.
Our final results based on my tracking looked like this:
Due to some issues finding who was playing which warband on the first day, my tracking system wasn't complete until well into the tournament with the first scoring update I was able to provide being after the top cut had already started.
This meant that we didn't see score develop and it became pretty clear who was going to win our little pool by the time any scores were available. This is something that I would like to do a better job with in any future version of this. A big part of the fun in fantasy sports is going into the last game knowing you need something spectacular to happen and then seeing the improbable become reality.
Congratulations go to Davy for absolutely dominating with the highest and second highest scoring warbands in the whole tournament, in the form of Mollog's Mob and the Wurmspat. He was also the only one of us to score any points on our deck pairing. A true testament to his knowledge of the meta heading into the world championship.
Skyler also performed quite well, being led by Elathain's Soulraid.
Brian and I can always look forward to next year.
Overall scores
The results for all present warbands looks like this:
As we can see the top performing warbands were all among the most represented (as to be expected). With the top 3 highest scoring being the most represented, followed by the tournament champion and the runner up.
The best possible team would have been Wurmspat, Thorns, Mollog, Soulraid and Gitz. Nothing too surprising there, save maybe for Gitz after they took a heavy nerf coming out of their Spitewood re-release.
Thoughts For Next Year and Scoring Variants
While it was good that drafting the winning and the most prevalent warbands was worthwhile, I would've liked to see less disparity with the scores of other warbands.
I think for next every match should be counted toward score, not just pool and top cut games. Keeping the points for winning the non top cut matches at 1 should be able to strike a balance. After all, in fantasy football a player's stats don't stop counting once his team is eliminated, they count the same.
In that case, this would be the final scores:
Not too different overall in terms of which warbands score the highest. The biggest difference being Grymwatch, who gained 14 points and jumped from the 6th best warband to the 3rd best warband. This perhaps indicating that Grymwatch’s place as better than the field, but not so good against the top tier things.
This would bring our scores to the following
Davy still wins (as he should with the winning warband and most prevalent warband). Amusingly Brian and I are still tied and we even managed to close the scoring gap from 43 to 42 points. Even though this didn’t move the needle much in terms of our scores, I think counting every game will be more likely to lead to a more tense final round since every game could be the difference rather than only a single warband getting points for winning the championship.
I also thought of some fun scoring variants that I think could be fun to try. These would mostly be to target increasing points for warbands that had less representatives, but still performed well. I've also taken the liberty to give these names so as to refer to them easier
Highlander:
If there is exactly 1 representative of a warband, each match win is worth an additional point.
Cut Above the Rest:
If 50% or more of the representatives of a warband make the top cut, 3 points
If all representatives of a warband make the top cut, 7 points instead
I would also like to give some consolation points if a warband doesn't show, as those picks felt real bad. I also like the idea of adding in a draft pick that we would use on a warband that we think won't be there and then only earning points if that warband doesn't show up. Those options would be like this
No show:
Option A: If any warband selected has no representation, 3 points for that warband.
Option B: Coaches will draft one warband they believe won't be represented. If there is no representation for that warband, 4 points
If all of these scoring variants were in play these would be the final scores:
The standings don’t change, and nor should they, Davy drafted both the winning (Wurmspat) and most prevalent (Mollog) warbands. If you can get both of those, that should be a recipe for victory. However, the points are closer together and if any of those Highlander warbands had made a run in the top cut, this could’ve looked drastically different.
With the scoring we had, the more prevalent warbands were almost guaranteed to score significantly more points than less prevalent warbands. While it should be advantageous to draft prevalent warbands that also do well, an improbable run to the finals from a warband no one saw coming should be appropriately rewarded as well.
If we do this in the future I think I’d like to include the Highlander and Cut Above. Going for a sleeper pick in the draft should come with some possibility of scoring beaucoup points.
As for no show points, just draft better.
Conclusion
All in all a good trial run of a fun format for discussing the meta. I think this being a one off for worlds each year is the way to go as the scoring might get wonky with some of the small tournaments.
I know it's been quite a while since the episode aired, but if you have any thoughts or suggestions regarding this please reach out to me on discord.
Until next time, stay drafty.