The Florida Mayhem have been submerged in poor placings, strange roster movement, and look to be in the process of rebuilding the team in order to salvage their 2019 season. As of today, they’ve finally begun to shuffle the deck and announced another round of sweeping roster changes.





This time, the new Mayhem roster isn’t just another 4-card monte.





A “4-card monte” is a variation on a popular sleight of hand short-con used to trick unsuspecting viewers into betting against the dealer. Unfortunately for the player, they never, at any point, had a chance of winning. The card-trick preys on people’s overconfident nature and lulls them into believing they can win an un-winnable game. However, the Mayhem are not here to fool their fans. They’ve made some improvements to the roster that will possibly make them more competitive in the coming weeks.





With that said let's begin to contextualize how much help the Mayhem actually needed.





Compared to the modern era of baseball, the 2017-2018 Mayhem would have the worst seasonal win percentage by a longshot. The 1916 Philadelphia Athletics hold the lowest win percentage with a .235 going 36-117. At least we can remember this iteration of the Mayhem for their goofy entrances.





The Paris Eternal entered the league during season two of the Overwatch League but somehow are tied with the Mayhem for career match wins.





And while the Shanghai Dragons went 0-40 during season one, they’ve surpassed the Mayhem in career match wins. As of Overwatch League Season 2, Stage 3, Week 2, the Shanghai Dragon’s sit at a total of 9-7 match wins. Just in the first three stages, the previously 0-40 Dragon’s have turned their franchise from being the laughing stock of the broader esports ecosystem and have become stage playoff contenders.





At the beginning of Stage 2, the Florida Mayhem had made a public announcement that the roster would be undergoing some serious changes as they looked to field an full Korean roster. Things seemed to be going slightly better as the team tied one map and actually took a map off the London Spitfire to start Week 1. Sadly, these structural changes did not net any more match wins and the Mayhem suffered an 0-7 finish to Stage 2.

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During the mid-season break, the Mayhem began their restructuring by signing former NRG flex support, Lee "Byrem" Seong-ju, and former main tank for the Los Angeles Valiant, Koo "Fate" Pan-seung. The latter half of the acquisitions restored some semblance of faith, but more work was needed before the Mayhem was going to compete with the middle of the pack.





Before the beginning of Week 3 of Stage 3, the Mayhem made another round of changes to the roster by adding a three-man core from the South Korean team WGS Armament. The core includes Zarya specialist Lee "Gargoyle" Beom-jun, flex tank Choi "DPI" Yong-joon, and main tank Choi "Karayan" San-ha. Along with the WGS core, former main support Park "RaiN" Jae-ho was signed a day before to round out the twelve-man roster.





This iteration of the Florida Mayhem actually improves on some of the big weak points they’ve struggled with for all of season two. First, they finally have a competent D.Va player in DPI. With the WGS core, I’d expect the team to be unintentionally forced into playing around their calling and style--which means Fate might not see too much playtime.





On the other hand, if by chance they do stay with Fate as their active main tank, he does bring a lot of experience and has shown himself to be very talented. I don’t think the Valiant let Fate go due to a lack of skill by any means. With teams like the Houston Outlaws and Guangzhou Charge leaning a little more on DPS compositions, we could definitely see much more creativity from this roster now that they have a more solid base. I’d expect to see DPI flexing to Sombra quite a lot on maps that force a lot of tank play and we even might see BQB be injected into the starting roster to pilot the same hero.





How much the roster is improved remains to be seen, but I’m willing to give the team the benefit of the doubt because it’d be difficult to look much worse than they already did. New roster moves seem to almost refresh the “honeymoon phase” of most team dynamics and this morale bonus along with a core of players that have experience playing with one another and I can see how this roster might start to finally show some signs of life.





This extra morale and synergy really needs to pick the Mayhem up quickly because the rest of the team’s schedule this stage is far from easy. During Week 3 the Florida Mayhem will face off against the San Francisco Shock, in Week 4 they face the Hangzhou Spark, and in Week 5 they not only are traveling to Atlanta Georgia to play in the Atlanta home stand but they’re also facing the New York Excelsior and the Atlanta Reign.





The new Mayhem roster might not be another 4-card monte, but they certainly need to figure something out before their season is nothing but a chaotic game of 52-card pickup.



