Fantasy Top - Classic
This is a breakdown of how to consider “value” from the perspective of different player types in Fantasy. There are two major factors to consider when valuing a hero’s score potential. Their consistency and their upside. People incorrectly price the consistency provided by the top end. I’ll use some specific examples, but the relative valuation of many of these cards are ridiculously disconnected from their ability to produce hero score which is their only utility. By the end of this you should have a framework for valueing heroes and targeting leagues.
Hero Score per Eth:
The most points I can score on a common card is 1000. Let’s examine common Greg vs common Mert.
Greg is perennially in the top 5 spots and cost ~.4 ETH, producing ~950.
Mert is always in the 5–10 rank range and costs .2 ETH, producing ~850.
Paying .2 ETH for an extra 100 hero score is terrible value.
If a player is targeting elite or gold leagues there are much more efficient ways to purchase 1000 score. A reliable 30–50 rank rare will clear that easily for significantly cheaper, and you can play as many rares as you want in those leagues. There’s a variety of heroes which provides more flexilibity, rares offer upside beyond 1000, and many of these cards are at a lower star count which is relevant for the gold league. RWLK, Mika, Vydamo are a couple examples right now.
If a player is targeting silver league where there’s a requirement of atleast 2 commons. Due to the star requirement the player would want their high star cards to be rare for the maximum amount of upside. So the common Greg or Mert don’t make a ton sense here valuewise. If a player is going for the win and has unlimited capital then they can pay an extra ~1.2 ETH for the extra ~150 score they get from a rare Greg vs a rare Mert, abysmal value.
The only possible justification for the cost premium on a common Greg is if the player is trying to place top 10 in the bronze league. Top 10 in the common tournament will yield ~150 gold, 5 cards, 40k fan points, there’s also Eth rewards, those are in flux at the moment. Compare that to the gold tournament where I can earn the same rewards for a top 50 placement.
High End Player:
A top 10 position in bronze needed to clear a score of 3350. A player pays .4 ETH for their top end card and the previous winning supporting cast cost .1 currently, so lets say it cost .2 pre-tournament because those cards had higher value when their star count was lower. Total cost to compete for a top spot rewards at .6 ETH.
A top 50 position in gold needed to clear a score of 5150 for comparable rewards. Right now, rare DCF, WarDaddy, Icebergy, Easy, Apix, Iced, Arthur, Mckenna, YieldFarming, Jenn are all reasonable options where 5 of those can get you close to 5000 score for less than .5 consistently. That leaves the player with an extra .1 to splurge with on either consistency or upside in one of those slots depending on their play style and hero conviction.
Looking at the last bronze tournament results, the cards they had in common were Marusha, Mckenna, and DCF God. At first glance it looks like Greg drove high end results, but upon closer inspection it was these low star cards as well as Heart which accounted for the results. You’ll even see Heart present without Greg in some of the other top 10 entries. It’s clear that the low star cards drive tournament results.
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There’s a ton of variance in Fantasy, top 50 in Gold easier to hit because there’s more potential combinations of cards that can get a player there. Gold leagues also has better rewards distributions if a player misses that top 50 placement. A top 400 placement is still a decent consolation prize and extremely likely.
Where as with bronze there is less margin for error and picking one wrong hero likely means missing the top 10 spots and getting a significantly worse reward as a result.
The high end player pays .6 Eth for that one entry and high variance in performance with steep reward drop offs.
Value Player
A top 200 position in bronze needed to clear a score of 2774. There’s a lot of congestion around the score and most of the players around this score hit one or two of the best 2–3 star cards that decided high placement.
Mert, Blockgraze, Evanss6, BaseD16z, Trading Axe, are all in that rank 5–15 range and are very consistent performers that can serve to anchor strong performances in perpetuity similar to Greg, but at half the cost or less. Combine one of these good value high ends with at least one hit on the best two stars to play in a week, round it out with decent filler, and consistent top 200 placements are possible.
There’s old data on fantasydata.xyz as well as the rank trending data in the Fantasy interface that can be used to identify good filler heroes. Minh, Mikado, Larp, DCF are all good examples that consistently hover in the 70–90 rank, but have their moments where they’ll pop up to the 50 range and give you that upside. These are the “consistent” performers with a bit of upside, they usually occupy the 3–4 star range.
Then to round out the star requirement of 18 an assortment of 2–3 star heroes are needed. Cards like Zac, Herro, KJ, Satsdart all run below 100 regularly, but have seen multiple pops up to the 50 range or even higher. These are the “upside” performers and where the majority of skill comes in when playing Fantasy. Identifying when to play these heroes and picking them up while they’re cheap will make or break the best players and portfolios.
Putting this all together, a strong value player can put together a consistent 200+ rank performing deck with about .26 Eth. The top end bringing in 850, the two mid tiers bringing in 400–650, and the 2 bottom tiers upside heroes accounting for 250–600. It still takes skill to execute, but the nice thing about playing value is that a player could run two of these entries for .52 Eth, still below the .6 Eth price point of high end players and get significantly more rewards as a result.
Volume and variety mitigates the negative effects of variance if the heroes are played.
Budget Player
Now that there’s a framework in place for how to categorize and evaluate cards, a budget player can take a simple approach for a low maintenance low cost Fantasy strategy. The priority is to not have wasted cards that need to be churned for others to make viable entries. Thus the priority for budget players is consistency.
Targeting the 3–5 star range with heroes that are consistently rank 90 or better which should mean each hero averages around a score of 500 for a total of 2500. This will land players comfortably above the bronze 1000 position for a modest stream of cards, gold, and fan points. Easily achievable with .05 Eth.
Wrap up
A lot of this advice is subject to change as updates roll out quick and personal things can come up in a hero’s life. The foundational framework of evaluating which heroes are purchased primarily for their score potential rather than their notoriety is a solid base. Each player will have to sort out their own play style from that, there’s plenty of value to be had with current relative valuations for a variety of strategies.
