Wacky FFL: Vampire Leagues

Now I want to open with this – these leagues are not for everyone.  If you like your fantasy with standard lineups, rolling waivers, a trade deadline, and your idea of “going wild” is using FAAB instead, you’re probably not my audience.  But, if you like stealing players, using power-ups, having 3 kickers and no QB, putting Marvin Harrison Jr on the same team with Marvin Harrison Sr, or turning your FAAB into Monopoly money, this is the place for you.  Each article I will highlight a real fantasy format that is out there and discuss some of the unusual strategies involved with it.  If you know of a fun and interesting league you’d like me to cover, send me a message and I’ll happily take a look into it. 

For the first article I’m going to cover the league that got me into the whole wacky fantasy thing:  Vampire.  Now, like with a lot of these leagues, the exact rules will likely vary league-to-league, so I’ll be covering either what the “consensus” rules are, or what my own experience has been.

In a Vampire league, when the draft order is set, whomever is assigned the last draft slot will not draft with everyone else.  When doing this online, it will be a chance for someone to be funny and set a draft queue all full of retired players, players with weird names, or whatever else you want as long as they are not players anyone would want to draft.  The rest of the players draft as normal.  When the draft is over, the vampire uses the waiver wire to construct the best team they can.  To make this fair, this league usually uses a short bench, usually 4, no more than 5 slots to prevent hoarding.  Here is where it gets interesting.  Each week, the vampire plays someone.  If they lose, nothing happens.  If they win, though, they get to force a single position-for-position trade amongst players who started for both teams.  This allows the vampire to grow stronger eventually, though often the first few weeks can be rough.  From here, the league plays out like most any other redraft league with standard playoffs at the end.  But there are several other rule(s) you can add to make it more interesting, and I would suggest adding at least one (or more) of these rules to keep it more interesting and/or fair

• When a vampire defeats someone, they turn them into a vampire as well, which then follows the same rules.
  • Additionally, for fairness, you could have that player drop their entire team.  Players who are dropped in this way can not be picked up early and everyone, including the OG Vampire, must acquire them as normal for that week.  I can tell you from experience that getting turned early and NOT having to drop your team can be unfairly beneficial to that person.  The last two leagues I was in like that the person who was turned first ended up winning the league.
• The vampire has early access to the waiver wire.  They can pick up any player at any time after all the games are done up until the player’s game time.  See the exception above.
• If any vampire wins the league, the OG Vampire gets 10% of the total prize pool, taken from the 1st place share.  This is especially important I think for leagues that have harsher rules for the OG Vampire, as generally in those versions it is a massive uphill climb for them to make the playoffs.  It’s never happened in any league I was in.
• Vampires can’t steal from vampires.  This is for leagues where people get turned.  The match happens just like a normal matchup with nothing afterwards.
  • An alternate rule would be to allow a steal, but not force a roster drop – that’s only for the process of turning into a vampire.  I would not suggest allowing this unless the turning process forces a roster drop.
• There are also leagues that use a normal sized bench for the draft, but the non-vampires have no access to the waiver wire at all.  The extra bench slots allow the players to be prepared in advance should there be injuries/thefts.
  • I’m not the biggest fan of this style because it makes it exceptionally hard on the vampire up front.  Makes more sense if you’re running less than 12 teams, but is brutal when there are 12.

Now that we know what a Vampire league is, the question is what strategy comes into play especially for this league?  Obviously this depends on which side of the afterlife you’re on.

For the Vampire, you are likely going to have a really rough first couple of weeks until some players who weren’t drafted break out.  More often than not the vampire isn’t going to win any matchups in the first few weeks of the season.  Assuming they get waiver wire priority, I’d make these recommendations:

• As long as you are the only vampire, unless you can acquire a breakout candidate from the wire, try to set your lineup each week to somewhat mirror your opponent.  Most specifically, try to find players like 2nd or 3rd string WRs on the same team as the QB.  With a lineup that only has 2 WRs and very limited bench slots there should be at least one, maybe two good players out there   This lets you hedge against your opponent’s QB going off by hopefully getting a good piece of that action.   
• This also applies if one of your opponent’s WR/TE has their QB available to grab.   You need to do what you can to try to keep it as close as possible and then hope some of their others have a bad game and you struck gold on a breakout.  If you get too far behind, even if you end up with a great performance from someone out of the blue, you’ll likely not win.
  • This is unless that player is Tua and it’s week 2 of the 2022 season.  In that case you really only need one.  Nope I’m not scarred from my past at all.
• The same principle goes for your kicker if they have any kind of a stack.  While that won’t usually do you a ton of good, at least it gives you some kind of way to tie in to who they have.  
• You really need to gamble early, so for the rest of your players, look for players that have extremely high ceilings and not be so worried about their low floor.  I’m looking at you Taysom Hill.  Consistency isn’t going to win for you when your opponent has better average players.
• Don’t get frustrated if you lose early, because you likely will.  As the vampire, you are trying to get your wins on the back end.  It is not uncommon for a vampire to start with 3, 4, 5, or more losses in a row.  Obviously it’s not optimal, but I have seen vampires go AWOL after that has happened, and that just makes the league not-so-fun for everyone.

If you’re a “regular” player, there isn’t much to do differently.  If the rules have you turn and drop your roster upon losing to a vampire, there isn’t anything different you do.  If the rules don’t have you dropping rosters, though, there are a couple things.

• If it’s early in the season and the Vampire hasn’t really been able to really acquire anyone great, see if you can take your first round pick, and maybe your first and second rounders and bench them.  If you’re still heavily favored to win, doing this lets you protect those players in the case that you don’t.
  • This is a little bit of a Sofie’s Choice, though. If you leave them in they could all but guarantee you get the win. But if the vampire gets really lucky, losing CMC or Tyreek can be obviously brutal.
• If the vampire has already won and stolen a player(s) and/or acquired a season-long breakout, I’d be more inclined to ignore the above rule even for top players.  If you’re a vampire, you’re usually inclined to go for the steal of a player that is the biggest upgrade to them, not necessarily your best player.  So if they won already and stole Travis Kelce, you can likely feel safe leaving Sam LaPorta in.
• If you’re in one of those where you don’t have waiver wire access, then you just have to draft like it is best ball and make sure you have some form of coverage at all positions.

I’m kinda surprised that I am having to add this section, but after a recent interaction I had, I’m finding it is important. As far as base rules go in regards to trades, there are a few things that either are universal rules or optional rules

• Universal Rules:
  • The trade must be position for position. If you’re taking a QB, the Vampire has to give back a QB
  • The trade must be proposed before waivers run, preferably with 6-12 hours beforehand for courtesy. This allows the losing player the opportunity to drop the newly acquired player during waivers should they decide to.
• Optional Rules:
  • The Vampire declares their target and who they are giving up before the games happen so everyone knows what is going on.
    • An alternative on this is that if the player the vampire is targeting gets hurt that week, they can choose another target if done so expediently.
  • The Vampire can not give a player who started the week on IR and is expected to still be on IR after the week is over.
  • If choosing afterwards, the vampire must either choose a starter-for-starter, or bench-for-bench.
    • Alternately, you can say that the Vampire can only target starting players, but I would not recommend this if non-vampires have access to the waiver wire.
  • There should also be a stated “Last Week” rule. If the vampire plays and beats someone in the last week of the regular season, the vampire is out of the playoffs and the defeated player is in, does the vampire take someone.
    • I’m personally against this as I firmly believe all rosters should be locked for players out of the playoffs. Some may claim it is unfair because there are others who had to play the vampire twice and possibly lose players twice, so why shouldn’t the person in the last week. The truth is nearly 1/2 to 2/3 of the players in the league only play the vampire one time, so this is a fairly invalid argument.

I do have one rule that I have actually never seen used before, but I think would actually be a very fair way for the vampire to be played:

• Each week, regardless of head-to-head matchup, if the vampire scores higher than ANYONE, they are allowed to steal a player from the lowest scoring person that week.
  • Once someone has had a player stolen from them, they are immune to having another player stolen again that year.
• A vampire may not steal more players/positions than their roster have over the course of the year. So if you’re 1 QB, they can steal at most 1 QB, etc.
• Because this is a very, VERY challenging format for the vampire, this helps balance the field while allowing it to stay fair on both sides. But, I would only recommend this in a format where players are not turned – it would become a mess otherwise.

That’s a wrap for this format.  Vampire leagues are a ton of fun and I highly recommend checking one out.  I will be covering a lot of other wacky, alternative formats in the future, mostly offseason, so if you like a little spice with your fantasy football, stay tuned!