Posted by Jtpsops on 5/14/2024 8:33:00 AM (view original):
It's always odd to me when people say they aren't playing because of the themes. The whole point of the WIS Championship has always been to force people out of their comfort zones and find a way to win with different caps, players, parameters, etc.
For the Box theme, I get the frustration over the years (I was hoping to snag Walsh's or Alexander's stud low-inning seasons, or one of Walter Johnson's good years), but that still doesn't make the theme bad. There are plenty of options and iterations available with the players provided.
Well, I will say this year's themes are harder as a group than they have been in past years, and year restrictions on deadballers/cookies did the rest. I think the increased difficulty and the inability to roster the players owners are used to rostering made them decide not to play.
I almost always hit the ground running in terms of building teams - often times I could have 3 or 4 out of 6 teams done within a week. Usually all 6 teams will be done within 3 weeks.
This year, I had exactly one done within a week - the easy one (the $80M). I think I got the clone one done not too long afterwards, and then I got stuck for at least two weeks.
Then I finally found the team I was looking for in the $70M (most of the other ones I had been looking at were either incomplete teams or were in salary cap hell), and around the same time I finalized my 13th warrior roster after endless tinkering. Sometime afterwards, I finished the roster for the $70M (It wasn't exactly as easy as I thought to finalize the roster once I had the team, but I did not look for other possibilities as I knew there was no way I was finding a better seed team).
The Pick 5 proved to be very difficult, as most of my attempts were coming in under the salary cap, and not by a little either. Then I realized what I had been doing wrong - as usual, I had been emphasizing cost effective players as I usually do for non-high caps. I think the key to this theme is to see it as a high cap league, but with significant roster restrictions.
Despite starting on it early, the box theme was by far the worst. My other 5 teams had been done for like 2+ weeks before I was able to even get a roster together for this one, and I decided I'm going to settle for whatever this roster does simply because it shouldn't block most of the valuable players from my potential R2 roster. I haven't even built that one yet because this theme is so vexing.
EDIT: The two main reasons the box theme is so vexing is the year restrictions (as others have pointed out, many players in the boxes have seasons, maybe even career seasons outside of the restrictions) and the teammates cannot be a player in any of the boxes rule (e.g. if you roster Gaylord Perry, you cannot pick Juan Marichal or Willie McCovey as a teammate - they will have to be separate choice(s)).
5/14/2024 12:28 PM (edited)