Team of Shadows



Episode 7 - GW 35 Wrap-up, the “Much Sameness” edition

(sorry about posting so late, entirely my bad - alon here - but better late then never. keep following along)

Greetings, all!

Welcome back to the weekly demonstration that I have too much time on my hands, an experiment in which I dive down the rabbit hole of second-guessing the timing of my Wild Card. For a full-blown explanation of WTF is going on here, go back to Episode 1.

The Moves

Early WC Team saved a move last week to have a pair of them going into Arsenal’s DGW in 35. They had already played their WC and their TC, and the BB wasn’t going to happen in 37, so there wasn’t much to do last week except to get more knowledge. The Shadow Team had one week left before playing WC in 35, so there wasn’t any point in saving the transfer. They could probably have patched up the defense, but there wasn’t much upside in that, so they decided to take a ride on the Kane Train as well. They dropped Aguero to make room for him, since it looked like Jesus was nearly back for City and rotation seemed to be in Kun’s near future…

The Teams

The Early Wildcard team is in the table below, as is the Shadow Team that I’m neck and neck with. The prices are at the deadline going into GW35 after the moves were made and the points in parentheses ended up on the bench.

The Verdict

This one ended up a virtual draw. Having five of the front seven be the same on each team will do that for you sometimes. JWP dropped to the bench in real life, which diminished the Soton attack but since Gabbiadini is no longer a part of either team, that wasn’t so much of a problem. It did let the Early WC team pull Davies’ six-pointer off the bench, though, which was nice. Both teams ended up with Jakupovic stuck on the bench, and so missed out on his fourteen-point explosion. Each team had a trio of clean sheets from defenders, although the six-pointer from Bailly might seem a bit dubious to some as it was only achieved when the United defender took about four minutes to walk off the pitch. OK, maybe it just seemed that long, but it clearly makes you wonder whether or not Bailly owns himself in his FPL team. The rest of the score was much of a same.

Before I started this experiment, my overall rank was 19,971



Early WC team: 47 points, overall points 1987, overall rank 15,736



Late WC Shadow team: 46 points, overall points 1990, overall rank 14,523



Both teams dropped in rank this week, but 10K still seems within reach



Coming Up

Early WC team has to do some shuffling to maximize for DGW37 but has two FT banked. They’ll probably need to take about 12 points of hits by 37 to get to where they want to be in terms of number of DGW players. Shadow team will be playing their WildCard this week, which may be a bit of a challenge doing it on paper, but we’ll see how it goes. It seems like they have the edge in this whole experiment right now, because they can totally pick and choose from the form players. Or at least that’s the way it looks in theory. We’ll have to see if it plays out that way in reality. And we’ll have to see if there is anything to be gleaned from this mess after it is all said and done. But I guess I’m hoping it can be interesting with any number of ultimate outcomes. I really have no idea which team will end up on top.

Scott (@tempebug)