Welcome to MLS Fantasy Round 13, our first massive double-game round of the 2025 season. If you’re new to MLS Fantasy, this type of round can be challenging in terms of setting up your team. Nobody wants to trap points on their bench, but in a DGW, the likelihood of that happening depends on your willingness to accept a higher level of risk than usual. For example, by now you’re probably used to employing switcheroos to preview points on your bench, which allows you to make a decision to keep or strand those bench points. But this tactic gets seriously complicated once you introduce a second game for each player, because at the point when you need to make the decision to keep or strand, you’ll only be able to preview your bench points from the first game. Not an ideal situation, but also not the end of the world, even if you’re prone to that special brand of panic that comes with making this potentially round-breaking decision before your scrub candidate’s match starts in three minutes (been there).
So, to minimize the chaos and reduce the panic, we set our teams up a bit differently during DGWs. There are three schools of thought for how to do this, and wars have been fought on Discord over which one is better. I’ll just lay them all out for you, and you can decide which one you prefer. And please don’t @ me about this because I still have PTSD from those wars. Here they are:
Normal Autoroo w/ 2 Safe Scrubs – This is probably the option of last resort. We choose this one if the other two won’t work due to impossible timing, poor matchup strength, high rotation risk or other factors. You will be stranding one non-GK player’s points on your bench if you go this route, but that isn’t always a bad thing if you have two players you’re not sure about or you’re running a couple of boom/bust players or differentials.
Switcheroo w/ SGW Fallback Players – In this setup, we treat the midweek slate the same way we treat a normal SGW slate, using the timing of these first games to guide our switcheroo decisions as if they are the only games in the round. We can do this relatively safely in the knowledge that players rarely perform at their full capacity in the second game of a DGW, therefore we usually just view the second game as a bonus game. If they hit in the second game, great. If not, it’s no big deal. The exception to this would be if you are picking a player specifically because they have a great matchup in their second game. But generally speaking, all of your bench players should play early in the midweek slate, and have a strong first matchup (preferably a home game). If you are picking players for their second games, they should go on your pitch. You would then pick up to three SGW scrub candidates who only play on the weekend, preferably kicking off after your bench players have played both games (this is rare). Scrub accordingly.
Switcheroo w/ DGW Fallback Players – In this setup, all your players are DGW players. Again, we treat the midweek slate the same way we treat a normal SGW slate, with the same bench tactic, but the difference is we abandon our bench players for DGW fallbacks if they blank in their first game. But be warned, even though the probability math says this tactic maximizes your potential points, the likelihood that you’ll be stranding a decent number of points on your bench is almost guaranteed when your late picks aren’t as strong as your early picks across both games. So you need to be rather cold-blooded in your decision making when you use this setup, knowing those decisions are only going to be as good as the fallback players you choose. When using this tactic, it’s best to pick solid field players first, as if you only have 11 slots, and treat your bench players as bonus slots. Also, you’ll need to be fully engaged in the round if you choose to go this route.
Honestly, it’s difficult to get an accurate read on these DGW rounds where you’re 100% confident that you’ve selected the right setup. And running each of these setups has incremental degrees of difficulty, so don’t be discouraged if you pick the most complicated one and mess it up. It took me a few times to get it right, and I still make mistakes.
Anyway, you’re probably reading this article for the player rankings, so without further ado …
Teams on a DGW:
Home + Home: ATX, MTL, NSH, SDFC
Home+ Away: DCU, LAFC, ORL, PHI, RSL, SJE, STL, TOR
Note:(?) means the player might not start due to injury, lack of fitness, availability status or loss of starting spot. (OOP) means the player is expected to play out of position.
MLS Fantasy Boss A Fantasy MLS Community
