Hi folks. Valve finally got around to releasing TI8 groups as well as a group stage schedule, which means I finally got around to writing a fully fleshed out day one guide. I know you're here because you want to take your fantasy card picks and kick them up a notch, so buckle in. We have a ridiculous amount of stuff to tackle, so I'm just going to get straight to it.  

THE INFORMATION

The first thing we have to do is figure out what our actual player pool looks like. For future days, the first thing I'll tell you to do is just strike "poor" teams from consideration immediately. The reason? Players tend to score more points in wins (and also longer games). Players who are on teams that lose a lot don't tend to perform well in fantasy. But this being day one, we don't really KNOW who's good yet, do we? The Serenity's and Pain's and Winstrike's may all surprise us, who knows? So just for today, I'm not automatically taking anybody off the board. Not just yet. The next thing to look at is schedule, which make no mistake, is THE most important consideration. Players who play more games score more FP than players who play fewer games. Period. Yeah, you can find examples of really bad fantasy players with a full schedule being outscored by a great fantasy player with fewer games. But schedule is super-duper important, so much so that you should ONLY consider players on teams with full dance-cards on the day in question. On day one, six of the nine teams in Group A will be the most active with three two-game sets a piece. That means you're only looking at players from Mineski, LGD, IG, EG, Liquid, and VGJ.Thunder for Day One. Next...which players are actually good? Well fear not, my list from a month ago is back (and a little better formatted than it's been in the past). Not only that, it's been UPDATED for several teams, which I will explain below. (You can click that image to make it bigger. By all means do so). First of all, any players from teams who appeared in The Summit 9 have had their numbers updated to reflect their performances in the tournament. In short: SVG and w33 took significant hits to their averages, while Universe moved up to elite status at the offlane position. You can read about that tournament in more detail in my previous post. Second, I've previously mentioned that Open Dota was missing several matches for TI8 China and CIS qualifiers, which meant my averages were incomplete representations of how IG, Serenity and Winstrike performed. Thus, I went in and manually grabbed games one by one, manually plugged them into Open Dota, manually wrote down each players' fantasy score, and manually re-averaged everything with a complete data set (what I'm trying to say is it was kind of a pain in the butt). As a result, players from those three teams have had their scores updated. The big takeaways are that XinQ went from god-tier offlane to just "very good", ALWAYSWANNAFLY is still the top support despite his average dropping by nearly 2 FP/game, Silent fell out of the Top 10 among cores, and nongrata rose from Top 5 to Top 1 (tied) in offlane.  

THE PICKS

You may have noticed or it may have slipped you by, but the main image for this article are my Day One picks. I'll keep that tradition going forward. I personally like to diversify as much as I can, so I want to have a lot of different teams represented (that way, if one of those teams unexpectedly sucks, you're at least protected by not going all-in on that team...there's also just generally more FP available when you spread yourself out). So I'm going to start building my lineup with the very best card available and go from there. Today, that trump-card is Moonn, the very top rated fantasy core entering the tournament. Easy. From there, I'm shifting my focus to support, where I can also grab Q, a Top 3 overall support option heading into the tournament. Moving back to core, I'm penciling in Somnus 'M (next-best core available, and he's on a very legit team). No huge standouts at the Offlane position today (generally speaking, this will be true of all days, offlane isn't that consequential compared to the rest). I'm using this slot to take somebody available from a team I haven't picked yet, which for me narrows it to VGJ.Thunder (Yang), EG (s4) and Liquid (Mind_Control). I'm choosing Yang here because he has the superior average heading into the tournament, and projects to outscore either of the other two by 5 or 6 FP over the course of the six games he'll play on Day One. With my last pick, I'd like it to be somebody from a team I haven't picked yet, which means Fly or KuroKy in my case. Fly projects to have the better average (EG's games go longer too, which is significant). But I'm personally taking KuroKy because my Kuro card is gold, I like gold things, and oh, he has a wards placed bonus. Honorable Mentions Core - Sylar Support - Fly, xNova, DDC Offlane - srf Lastly, I want everybody to have access to the same tools and websites I have access to, because I encourage everybody to be independent if they want to be. If you don't want to read my guides, use these tools instead and draw your own conclusions. PRIZETRAC.KR - This was my go-to website at last year's TI for fantasy data DURING the tournament. It's updated throughout the event, it's extremely customizable, and it's run by everybody's favorite stat-guy Noxville. Fantasy Dota - An uninspired name? Perhaps. But this site has a lot of data to browse through. My personal favorite feature is the Compare Players tab, which lets you compare Player A against Player B, WITH CARD BONUSES TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT, and get a projection of which card will be more fruitful for you. This is good for sit-start decisions, and also good in the dusting process (you can compare two gold Puppey cards and see which one is probably better, for example). The only drawback is this is all based on data from before TI. It's unclear if this will update throughout the tournament or not. DoftheA - Weighs the entire DPC season + TI8 Qualifiers as the sample size for each player's data. Open Dota - Good for seeing individual games' fantasy performances, as well as getting a visual feel for what a player's average really looks like. Also a nifty site because of the feature that lets you plug a match ID in manually and getting fantasy data from a match that isn't showing up anywhere else (like if one of the previous sites isn't updating and by God, you want that data right now). Those are the only four things I'll be looking at for fantasy purposes outside of my compendium, people. Go nuts. The only other thing I'll mention is that, if you want to make sure you don't miss any updates going forward, you can follow me on Twitter @TheDotaScrub And that wraps it up for my day one guide! Remember, I'm not telling you what to do, I'm just trying to show you how to think to help you make your own decisions. Happy Gambling  

TL;DR - My day one picks are Moonn-Somnus-Yang-Q-KuroKy

  PHOTO CREDIT: Zhou "Yang" Haiyang of VGJ.Thunder; image borrowed from JoinDota