S5: Who to Draft?

Last year, the top players in GoT fantasy were the killers. All the sexing, insulting, and drinking couldn’t get you more than a handful of points. But oh that sweet sweet killing! The top five scorers for Season Four were: Tormund Giantsbane, Ygritte, Jon Snow, The Hound, and Styr. By a wide margin. So even though the point balance has been spread out a little bit, at the end of the day, killing and injurying someone is still the best route to fantasy success. Does it skew who’s actually good in fantasy GoT? Of course it does.

If you go over last season’s archives, you’ll see that a majority of points were awarded during the big battle scenes. Therefore, this season, the key is to grab players who will be in fighting scenes and slice and dice their way across the screen.

Basically that means some of the more popular characters, the ones that will appear on-screen the most, are nigh useless. But who should go #1 for Season 5? Well, the clear answer is our man in the North, Jon Snow. He was drafted #1 overall in our league last season and I see no reason he shouldn’t go #1 in everyone’s league. Jon is a five (six) tool GoT fantasy player and he’s guaranteed to be in lots of swordfights. After that though, it’s a toss up. I mean, three-fourths of the top five from last year — Ygritte, The Hound, Styr — are dead or presumed dead, so that elevates Mr. Snow to the top by default, unless you think Tormund Giantsbane can repeat his huge scores from last season.

With a player roster full of new names, and a changing landscape in Westeros and Essos, we’re gonna take a few guesses at which players could likely end up the season as top scorers. And look at some dark horses and overrated players.

Arya Stark: She finished last season at #6 (albeit with scores far below Styr) and since she’s about to become a full fledged killer, that ranking can only go up. We wouldn’t argue with making Arya a top pick for Season 5 drafts.

Daario Naharis: Daario II is going to play a bigger role this year and since he complained about having nothing to do last season, it’s likely he’ll get a few more battle scenes in Season 5. Plus, he’s guaranteed at least a few nudity and sexing points since he’s Khaleesi’s new boy toy.

Tormund Giantsbane: He was our number one overall scorer last season on the strength of basically two episodes so it’s possible he’ll finish up high again. Of course, it’s also possible he’ll get killed in a battle right away, so draft him at your peril.

SLEEPERS
Stannis Baratheon: Here we go, maybe the most likely candidate to win “Most Improved Player.” Stannis is finally in a position to do some fighting and even if he is a Type-A bore, he’s going to get much more to do this season. Assuming Stannis is involved in at least one big battle, he should easily outpace last year’s paltry point total. Similar to: Mance Rayder. Both leaders tend to stand around planning a lot but not doing much of anything, can that change this season?

Sand Snakes: There’s three of these dangerous ladies being introduced to us this season: Tyene, Nymeria, and Obara. Surely the Red Viper's bastards will get to avenge their father in some way right? Also, keep an eye on Ellaria Sand as she could definitely find her way into some drinking and sexing points.

Missandei and Grey Worm: We don’t care if they score a lot, we just ‘ship them and it looks like we’ll get our dream come true this season. Give them all the points! Can Missandei tutor us in Westerosi? Give a hand for Nathalie Emmanuel’s star turn in Fast & Furious 7 as the most beautiful hacker ever! (Also, Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella featured Robb Stark / Richard Madden as the prince, plus Xaro Xhoan Daxos / Nonso Anozie as his captain of the guards! Who else did sharp eyed GoT fans see in the movies recently? Oh, and Sophie Turner is going to be Jean Grey in the next X-Men!?! What!)

YOU DECIDE
Cersei and Tyrion Lannister: It's a shame more points won't be awarded for screen time or political manipulation. Instead, these two siblings will have to count on copious amounts of verbal daggers and drinking to pump up their value. While neither are likely to kill -- even though Tyrion gets a few low blows in per season -- both get so much screen time that they're guaranteed to rank as some of the higher scoring players. Just beware that their fantasy ceiling is limited by how little they actually do.

Petyr Baelish: He's potentially a five tool player but won't do enough of any one thing to outperform most of the battle heavy no-names. Still, Little Finger is a safe selection just to get some points on the board.

STAY AWAYS
Daenerys Targaryen: While’s she’s a central figure in the show, Dany’s dragons don’t count for kills or injuries and she’s not going to do a whole lot else. Maybe a few drinking scenes, a few (body doubled) nudity scenes, and one or two sex scenes. Let the Mother of Dragons fall in your draft, she’s not going to score much for you. Keep Khaleesi in your hearts but off your roster...

Jaime Lannister: Last season he got two instances of sexing and one of drinking for a grand total of eleven points. Bran Stark, Petyr Baelish, and Samwell Tarly each got more kill points than the Kingslayer. This season, Jaime will be traveling to Dorne to retrieve his daughter and maybe he’ll get into some verbal spats but since he’s useless with a sword now, it’s unlikely he’ll be getting any killing or injury points. At least his pride has somewhat returned now that he has a golden hand.

Varys: Ha, you must be kidding right? Varys is the "most screen time, least scoring main character,” unless you count Margaery Tyrell. While both Varys and Margaery have many gifts, none of them include fantasy GoT scoring.

SLEEPERS
Anybody with a sword basically. I’m talking to you Thoros of Myr, Yara Greyjoy, Brienne of Tarth, Davos Seaworth, Bronn, Beric Dondarrion, Barristan Selmy, etc. Basically, don’t draft Doran Martell, Oberyn’s brother, who we hear is chairbound from, um, gout?

Season 5 is Here!

Well, here it is! After months of waiting and teasers and having all your friends (but you) go to the Season 5 premiere in San Francisco, GoT is finally back in our lives. The excitement of starting a second year of fantasy GoT is almost as good as standing six feet away from the entire cast. Almost... But don't let my bitterness over missing a once-in-a-lifetime event bring you down. It's Season Five, here we go!

The S5 rules have been modified a bit from last year but remain similar. Mostly, scoring categories have been adjusted, with the a new category being added: nudity. Also, there are now no negative points (last year there was negatives for getting injured or being insulted). Once again, thanks to Daniel of Fantasizr and Ryan for scorekeeping and coming up with the whole idea for Game of Thrones fantasy!

• Killing (KIL): +9 points for killing someone.
• Sex (SEX): +8 points for getting down. Shown or implied, judged by the scorekeeper.
• Nudity (NUD): +8 points for male or female nudity, including butts.
• Insult (IST): +7 points for every good insult.
• Drinking (DRK):+ 6 points for every scene their character is seen drinking.
• Injury (INJ): +4 points for every injury inflicted (non-kill).

If you want to take a look at our inaugural fantasy season stats in review, here they are: Season 4 Review.

S5 Rules

What Is This?
Fantasy football plus Game of Thrones, run by Fantasizr

How Do You Score?
Each player on your team accrues points in each of the six categories for actions performed on-screen. Points are awarded for each episode. See below for details. [Note: Last year's scoring was slightly different.]

• Killing (KIL): +9 points for killing someone.
• Sex (SEX): +8 points for getting down. Shown or implied, judged by the scorekeeper.
• Nudity (NUD): +8 points for male or female nudity, including butts.
• Insult (IST): +7 points for every good insult.
• Drinking (DRK): 6 for drinking (per cup) unless you are Ser Dontos. +6 points for every scene their character is seen drinking.
• Injury (INJ): +4 points for every injury inflicted (non-kill).

Which Characters Are Eligible?
Click on “players” tab in Fantasizr to see who is eligible to be drafted. There are almost 100+ players in total.

How Does the Draft Work?
It will be a snake style draft, meaning if there are ten teams in your league, the first round will be picks #1-10, and then reverse to #10-1 for round two. Round three starts at #1-10 again and so on.

How Do You Win?
Depending on if you are playing cumulative or head-to-head (H2H), whoever scores the most points after the ten episode run wins.

What's the Prize?
You get to lord it over all your friends. Duh.

Is There a Facebook Group That I Can Join?
Of course there is! Right here!

Season 4 Review

I was thinking of going over our draft and teams from pre-season to do a full evaluation but let’s agree that it’s not really necessary. Especially when my #3 overall top pick, Daenerys "Sits on the Wrong Throne" Targaryen, turned out to have only scored six total points on the season! Dany was arguably the biggest bust in the draft, along with Jaime Lannister, who went #4 overall, but at least Mr. Goldhand got into double digit points -- and returned into his true love's embrace.

What is interesting is looking at the high scorers in each category, and seeing if there were any standouts and surprises. Overall, our top scorers were Tormund Giantsbane (142), Ygritte (138), Jon Snow (125), The Hound (117), and Styr (98). After those five is a huge drop off to Arya Stark with 37 points. Twenty seven characters accrued points this season — out of forty four — and all of them were positive scorers save one, Theon Lovejoy. The average character scored 33.5 points but that’s very misleading as the mean score was only 13 points. Basically, if you had a top five character, you did great! And if you didn’t, then it was a loooong season. In our league, Direwolf Pups! romped the field by owning three of the top five players...

Injury:
Overall, eight players got positive injury points — meaning they injured people — and two were the recipients of injury. Tyrion and Hodor were -7 and -14 points on the season for injuries suffered, while The Hound (56), Tormund Giantsbane (42), Jon Snow (21), Oberyn Martell (14), and Styr (14) were tops in positive injury points. I guess this means The Hound isn't so much a killer as he is a maimer?

Killing:
Most of the points action this season was in killing so it’s no surprise that thirteen characters racked up kills. Of those, four were single kills: Brienne, Daario Naharis, Petyr Baelish, and Samwell Tarly. It seems like Bran and Hodor split a kill, and then we move onto the real crew of killers, starting from the top. While it looked like The Hound (50) or Arya (30) would be murdering their way across Westeros early on, it turned out that all that fighting around The Wall brought the major points. Ygritte, Jon Snow, and Tormund Giantsbane all had ten or more kills, while Styr wasn’t far behind with eight. Overall though, it looks like Tormund and Ygritte win “best draft day values” as they were both picked up in the third round and finished #1 and #2 in scoring, respectively. MVP for our season goes to Ygritte though, as she was on the winning Direwolf Pups! team, plus she was so nasty that she didn’t get any injury points, meaning if she hit you, you died!

Sexing:
C’mon, where was all the gratuitous sex! Isn’t Game of Thrones all about that? Seven characters got sexing points, all only once, save for the twincest couple of Cersei and Jaime. It could be argued that Petyr Baelish deserves a double down for his possible hook up with Sansa, but perhaps that was way too off screen to count. The real curiosity is how Theon Greyjoy ended up with -7 for sex! I mean, is that the punishment for castration? (We assume this is a miscore for injury, but it’s funny so we hope it never gets corrected).

Insult:
The most subjective scoring category we used. What is a proper insult? Regardless of how Ryan defined it, eleven characters had positive insult points, while four were basically at the butt end of verbal daggers: Brienne, Ygritte, Theon Greyjoy, and Petyr Baelish. Interestingly, Tywin Lannister hardly put up any points in this category, although it’s hard to track week by week as there’s only a total here, and +2 and -2 insult points could have been moved by the episode. The winner in the duel of the dirty mouth department was Joffrey (20), who left very early on in Season 4 but not before flaming his uncle with a barrage of insults. Tyrion (16) and Cersei (14) got theirs, and The Hound was even a surprising #4 in the category with his ten points. Next year we’re gonna have to figure out how to translate great lines/insults into points!

Drinking:
For a show featuring so much alcohol, only thirteen characters imbided at least once. And of those, only about half drank more than once. Westeros’ resident lush Cersei only got six points here, which was very surprising. The other top drinkers were all Lannisters also: Tyrion and Joffrey with four points each. We’re thinking this category may have to go next season, as it’s probably funner to take real shots while watching the show, versus trying to track who is drinking on-screen.

OVERALL:
Out of 869 points doled out, the breakdown went like this: killing (590 pts), injury (147), insults (68), sexing (38), drinking (26). That’s 85% of points from injury/killing. That’s pretty heavily lopsided obviously and the challenge next season will be to come up with a system that more equally rewards all the other fun parts of watching Game of Thrones. Until then, big thanks to Ryan for starting the league (not the mention all the crazy scoring he had to do), thanks to Fantasizr, and thanks to all the members of So You Think You Can Dance With Dragons for participating!

EP 9,10: Game Time

The penultimate episode for Season 4 featured the incredible attack on Castle Black, which made for exciting viewing and a ton of points scored. Sure, 90% of the other characters were frozen out but Jon Snow and Co. made up for it with their mounds of killing. In the end, Mr. Pouty injured three and killed five, and Tormund Giantsbane, Ygritte, and Styr all racked up more than 50+ points each. Ygritte actually had the most kills from the episode with six, but she lost a few points because, well, you know what happened to her.

Episode 10 featured storylines from all over the continent and scattered points all around. Tyrion Lannister took top honors with his double kill and both Hound and Bran Stark pushed into the double digits. Sidenote: We should revisit whether Bran should get Hodor's kill points. I think it’s sort of a QB-WR question, and right now we are double rewarding! Anyways, a little bit of sexing by the Lannister twins, a brutal (presumed) kill by Brienene, and we end our first season of fantasy Game of Thrones. All in all, it was a fun time for everyone and we’re ready for improvemens and a new season! To the Wall!

An official congrats to Direwolf Pups!, who made quick work of her competitors and led the field after, oh, one episode. After our draft and even during our team previews, nobody was wise to the fact that killers -- physical killers, not verbal ones -- would become the MVPs.

Even with no shows such as Jaqen H’ghar and Lord Blackmont pulling down zero points (not to mention Melisandre’s paltry one point total), the sterling lineup of The Hound, Ygritte, and Styr was more than enough to overwhelm the rest of the league. We’ll cover individual honors later but there was basically no doubt for most of the season who would be winning So You Think You Can Dance With Dragons. So, with Valyrian swords raised high, a heartfelt congratuations to Melinda!

Let’s not overlook the other six teams though. I mean, God of T!t$ and Wine and Valar Morghulis did battle it out for #2 and #3, with Daniel squeaking by on the strength of Tyrion’s last episode surge. Nam was likely feeling great after EP9 as Jon Snow brought him into the top three race, but then Arya refused to finish off The Hound and Tyrion did, well, he did what he had to do. So in the end, a hearty congrats to Daniel and Nam, whose teams also did wonderfully.

As for Imping Ain’t Easy, Whore-Door, Blonde Ambitionz, and Dark Knights, it was mostly a light scoring season all around. Put it this way, Simon’s Imping Ain’t Easy team managed to place fourth despite having four players score zero — leaving only Cersei and Jaime to do the um, lifting. For last place Trieu, it must have been disappointing to see Bronn not kill anyone all season long, and as predicted, owning Theon Greyjoy was a net loss, as Reek recorded -2 points over the season. Better luck next year guys!

EP 7,8: Hulk Smash

Despite this being undoubtedly Game of Thrones’ most exciting season from a viewer’s perspective, the action has been far and few in-between. EP7 had lots of fantastic bits that really moved individual plots forward, but none of that resulted in a lot of fantasy points. Sure, The Hound and Arya both got killing points, but that’s de rigueur by now. What was more exciting was the kill by Little Finger, plus Daenerys finally getting down (even if it was off-screen)! Unfortunately for everyone, Gregor Clegane wasn’t a draftable character, as his one scene mauling defenseless prisoners/peasants would have obviously scored high.

And then we got EP8, the much anticipated Oberyn Martell versus The Mountain showdown. Of course, for our purposes, what was much more interesting was the Wildlings raid on Gilly's village. Tormund Giantsbane, Ygritte, and Styr all racked up huge killing numbers, vaulting high into the scoring ranks. In fact, those three are now all ranked in the individual top five scorers, pushing that bloodthirsty overachiever, Arya, into sixth place.

As for our league standings, what is there to say? Direwolf Pups extends their lead as they own The Hound, Ygritte, and Styr. With 222 points, they almost double second place God of T!t$ and Wine’s 112 points. While there’s a big battle at The Wall coming in EP9, it’s hard to envision any team catching up to the Pups. It’s a little more interesting at the bottom of the standings, as Dark Knights makes a late push to rise out of the cellar. They’re only fifteen points out of fourth place, which could make for an exciting finish. Okay, who am I kidding, this season is oveeeerrr!

EP 4,5,6: Number Driven

Well, it hasn’t really been very exciting these past few weeks, at least fantasy wise. For example, EP4 served up only three drinking points and one insult, with the high scorer being Tyrion Lannister with two points. Last week’s episode, EP6, gave us only +10 for Tyrion’s many insults and then second place was a mere two points from Tywin’s mouth. Bleh.

Thank goodness there was a big battle in EP5, which gave us +50 for Jon Snow, an intriguing +5 each to Bran Stark and Hodor (interesting split there, and likely appropriate), and a smattering of other points, including Petry Baelish’s off-screen sexing. It seems the rhythm of the show is to give us one big fight scene every other episode...but we're running out of episodes!

Overall, the negative points have almost been more interesting as Arya, Hodor, and Theon have all accumulated -7 for being injured, while Cersei has racked up -4 total from insults taken. Could someone actually end the season with negative points?

Scoring tidbit: So far, twenty-one characters haven’t scored yet, three have negative point totals, nine have put up less than ten points, and only eleven characters have totals in the double digits. Ex-king Joffrey is still ranked #6 on the individual leaderboards, despite being dead for over half the episodes.

So what of our standings? Well, Direwolf Pups! is still the runaway leader with 139 points, but at least Valar Morghulis has jumped up to within spitting distance of the lead, trailing by a mere 57 points. That’s just one good fight away from being the top dog!

As for everyone else, aside from God of T!t$ and Wine with a respectable 60+ points, it could be said their seasons are practically almost over, sine they all have under thirty points. Heck, two teams (Imping Ain’t Easy and Dark Nights) have actually lost points over the past three weeks, with Trieu’s Dark Knights dropping from thirteen points after EP3 to a mere seven points now. Ouch.