Reasons to Trade in Dynasty

Some thoughts on the "market" and trading in an aspirationally liquid world

Hey Folks,

I know the usual schedule for my posts is the Sunday Drive on Tuesday AM followed by a rankings update every two weeks, and intermittent long form posts later in the week. We’re gonna do something a touch out of order this week for a couple reasons:

• The Sunday Drive would frankly be very boring this week. Outside of a couple backfields the usage was mostly as expected, and there were no major injuries to discuss

• There were a couple major stories this week I want to hit on in more detail but one of them was from tonight’s game (Gibbs!!!!) and I don’t want to rush writing about his game

• It’s rankings update week and we have a rankings-based episode of the Full Tilt show tomorrow (LIVE at 9ET) so I needed to get that done a little earlier than usual this week

• I had my long-form piece 80% done as of today so figured why not just release that one for you now and then write up some RB stuff later in the week

Anyhow, if you’re waiting on the Sunday Drive this week you’re going to … kind of… get it. I’m going to discuss Leonard Fournette to the Bills, Jahmyr Gibbs’ big game, and endeavour to answer the question of whether Tony Pollard is bad now. If there is any other backfield you’d like me to touch on let me know in the comments and I’ll definitely add some thoughts on it.

One quick exception is Seattle: I thought Zach Charbonnet looked absolutely fantastic in this game (and has all year), but it’s hard to parse how much of his enhanced role was due to his ‘hot hand’ vs. Walker’s calf injury. I’d rather give it another week and offer takes at that time.

Regardless, my stance is that Walker’s been over-valued (basically my stance for the entirety of his career) so probably not changing my advice much directionally speaking.

Ok so let’s get into my strategy post for this week: Reasons to Trade in Dynasty

---

Introduction

When people ask me why I love dynasty, one of the first questions I ask them is if they like Settlers of Catan. Then I ask if they like sports. If they happen to like both, it’s the greatest game in the world.

Settlers of Catan is a far superior game to Monopoly because it’s less zero sum, which makes trading far more common. If you haven’t played before, there are five core resources that you have to use for everything you build or buy in the game: wood, sheep, brick, wheat and ore. All five are balanced enough that there is no clearcut, repeatable hierarchy in which a person would never be willing to trade a sheep for a brick in the same way you’d never trade someone Boardwalk for Oriental Ave. Because each game board is set up uniquely, the ‘power’ of the resources changes from game to game with whichever is more scarce in a given game gaining buying power in the market of the given game.

The key to any game environment that involves co-operation between players relies on how much incentive there is to co-operate vs. compete. That incentive comes from several different ‘levels.’

A two-player game with one winner is a 1-level game. There is no incentive to co-operate because any possible means of co-operation either helps one person more than the other, in which it’s a net negative for one of the participants, or helps both players equal which has no net effect. There is as much incentive for co-operation in a two-player game of Monopoly as there is in a tennis match.

Simply adding two players creates a 2-level game. Let’s take the boardwalk trade for example. If you have Park Place + Oriental Avenue, and I have Boardwalk, Vermont Avenue and Connecticut Avenue we have a mutual incentive to do some form of deal. What I have is worth more to you than me, and what you have is worth more to me than you. While overall I’m giving you a far more valuable set of properties (the most valuable) than you’re giving me (the least valuable), I’m at least gaining something on the other two players we’re competing against.

If we’re both playing optimally we’ll recognize that (A) “co-operating” / trading is a better eventual decision than “competing” / not trading so we both gain relative to the other players, and (B) you should offer me something extra to even out how much this trade will benefit us relative to each other. If either of us put this trade in jeopardy by refusing to seek out a reasonable middle ground we’re both to blame. And I would argue that if one player is set on being stubborn, the other party is still better off slightly “losing” that trade to the stubborn player in order to gain more relative to the other players.

The issue Monopoly runs into is that there is effectively one path to victory. You buy / trade for properties, you put buildings on your properties, and you hope people roll on your spaces more than anyone else’s. To that end, it reaches a zero-sum environment fairly quickly in which a subset of players begin to dominate the board and very few properties remain legitimately up for trade.

Settlers of Catan is a more dynamic game because of the multiple paths to victory. The TLDR of Catan is that there are four ways to gain “victory points” and you need 10 in total to win. Those are:

1. Building Settlements

2. Building Cities

3. Winning the “Longest Road” (by building roads)

4. Winning the “Largest Army” (by buying development cards, and playing the Knight Card)

   • Other development cards include straight-up victory points and other helpful advantages

Building settlements and roads both rely on wood and brick, while cities and development cards both rely on wheat and ore, leading to a clear delineation between which resources each player will prioritize. Therefore, a player choosing to focus on a Cities and Knights focused strategy and one focused on settlements and roads make for natural trading partners as they work toward parallel goals despite eventually competing for first place.

I call this a 3-level game. 1) winning the game 2) multiple players to defeat 3) multiple paths to victory

Fantasy football in any form is a 3-level game, because the allotment of positions supplies the third level. You need RBs? I need WRs? We have a means of pursuing a mutually beneficial trade that makes us both better relative to the other competitors.

What makes dynasty special is that it is effectively a 4-level game. 1) winning the game 2) multiple players to defeat 3) multiple paths to victory 4) multiple victory timelines

Not only can trading make our lineups mutually better vs. our league-mates in a current year, but we can create mutually beneficial agreements that help one league-mate in the current year and another in a future year.

To go back to our Catan example, imagine you were playing a best-of-five series, with continuously-held cards and you already knew the maps for all five games. You are in last place in game one, and can see that in the next game Wheat will be the most scarce resource, while in the current one it’s brick. You could start trading brick away now to stockpile wheat in order to have the advantage in game two.

The opportunity available to that hypothetical Catan player is available to about a third of your dynasty league by this point of the season.