NRL Fantasy My tactics for team selection

After getting frustrated at the high price of so many no so great players in this years comp I have come up with a new strategy.

   For the initial team, 13 potential cash cows.  For the bench 8 mid to low priced potential improvers.

The budget- around 5 million.  

Reasoning-
most of the highly priced players are going to drop in value in the first few rounds,  most will have to play at peak performance levels to maintain their price. That just won't happen. If most of the 13  CC potentials rise in price that will give a fair bit of cash to start scooping up the keepers.
Also it gives an opportunity to keep the hot CC's at minimum cost.

   With around  4.6 million up the sleeve plus gains it gives the opportunity to pick up 5 -7 guns
over the first 3-5 weeks . Also you can drop any non performer CC  pretty much at cost.  This will burn up trades in the early rounds, say 12 trades. Then just sit there with the same team, using trades judiciously for the rest of the season.

  Thoughts?

Who are you going to reliably captain then

Frankly you're going to be outgunned (pun intended) by players with some of the main guns (e.g. Taupau/Fifita, Tedesco, DCE etc etc) because there is still a decent probability that the guns pass their BEs (Fifita 58, Taupau 60, Cleary 52, JTurbo 58, Smith 60) meaning you might end up having to buy at a higher price

Also most of the people on the forum have probably minimum 6 or so cash cows (Brown/Keighran and Nikora notable examples that will likely be in some people's 17)

This is an interesting prospect for a team, but one that ultimately is a poor strategy in Overall. If you are H2H only there is merit in throwing a couple games at the start of the season to make cash, but Overall you will slip too far behind.

For instance Cook is worth 900k for the year. As long as you don't trade him out, you effectively don't lose that money you invested. If he drops to 850k you still haven't technically lost money. Yes you could make some by picking him up cheaper, but you lose his scores those weeks.

Everyone will be burning trades at the start of the season, so that isn't an issue. But there is an issue with your team needing to burn mote trades. Team A might have 7 CashCows and 3 might under perform. But they have the depth of their bench, and starting 13 that the poor scores don't impact their team. Meaning they can still trade those players out, or they can sit on them for awhile as they still slowly churn out money.

While Team B has 13 CashCows with 6 of them not panning out. You are well and truly behind the others if you have to put up with poor scores in your playing 17 and are also trading two guys each week.

It's all well and good saving 50k-100k on someone like Cook and getting him cheaper. But the 3-4 weeks that he outscores your Captain by 20 points. Equates to 120 - 180 point difference and that is just one player.

I would love to see this tried, with an Alt team but not your main one. Far too much risk involved and you already admittedly are giving everyone else a head start.

With that said there is merit to picking up and playing cheaper guys if you think you spend the cash elsewhere effectively to not lose points.

Not having Cook because you want McCullough/Mahoney and think Fifita/Taupau/Taumalolo/J. Trbojevic are going to score just as well as your Captain. That's a fine choice.

Everyone's goal is to get the best team come end of season, and most have to compromise on spots. If you can get there but your compromise is throwing away the first 5 rounds essentially, then that's too much of an investment.

Great points made there random.

I see what you mean about dropping too many points overall and not being able to catch up. Say Cam Smith doesn't score 60+ in the first round, he is probably going to score say 50. He drops in value , but the CC @ 212k scores say 40 and goes up. 10 point loss.

Multiply that by 17 players 170 points per round x say 4 rounds you drop 680 points as a swap for the cash benefit. Probably insurmountable in terms winning the comp. But hey, who am I kidding, I am not going to win the comp anyway!

This season seems a case of the established guns being priced very highly and a big group of essentially plodders being priced in the 500/600k range. Taking say 6 guns is going to cost you say 4.5/ 5 million.Leaving about the same for the remaining 15 picks. Let's say you take all 15 as CC's and spend say 3.5 mill. Total about 8 mill. Leaves you 1.6 up the sleeve, 6 keepers and a good spread
of CC's. Better plan?