Take, for instance, Houston vs New York, a match that, from a purely numerical standpoint, seems to be a one-sided blowout at 4-0 in New York’s favor. The Outlaws came into the match on uncertain footing after snatching defeat from the jaws of victory against the Philadelphia Fusion earlier in the week (and silencing chants that they were the new Best Team In OWL in the process). However, once things got rolling, Houston quickly showed that they could hang with NYXL. Problem was, NYXL knew exactly what they needed to do to sweep the legs right out from under Houston.

This was especially apparent on first map Volskaya, where New York repeatedly deviated from their usual playbook to keep Houston on the back foot. They knew that Houston tank Austin “Muma” Wilmot, who’s widely considered to be among the best in the league, would be responsible for holding things together, so they consistently took him out of action. When Muma, as Winston, dove in to wreak havoc on New York’s supports, those supports took advantage of Muma’s aggression, baiting him and then KO-ing him with Ana’s sleep darts so that they could make an easy escape. As a result, New York rarely had to emergency-pop all-important support ults, because their supports kept wriggling out of dicey situations. This allowed NYXL to establish an ironclad first point defense. Houston, the self-proclaimed “Green Wall,” slammed face-first into New York’s impregnable fortress.

Meanwhile, New York’s star DPS player, Jong-yeol “Saebyeolbe” Park, changed his style entirely just for the occasion, targeting supports and tanks instead of other DPS players like he usually does. This further served to remove Houston’s normally reliable base, leaving them off-balance and uncomfortable for most of the match.

Houston, however, went down swinging, showing a strong counter to NYXL’s brand of hyper-specific game-planning in the process: idiosyncratic strategies. On third map King’s Row, Houston ran a tank-heavy formation centered around Muma’s Reinhardt, flanked by Jake “Jake” Lyon and Alexandre “Spree” Vanhomwegen on Roadhog and Zarya, for good measure. This made the team insanely survivable, but almost as importantly, it threw a wrench in New York’s plan, because hardly anybody else in OWL plays King’s Row this way. That, of course, makes it damn hard to prepare for. While New York still prevailed in the end, it was easily their shakiest map of the series, with Houston pulling off some wild plays like this now-famous galaxy brain Reinhardt charge:

The weekend also saw Philadelphia Fusion, fresh off a come-from-behind victory against Houston earlier in the week that earned them the crown of Maybe The Best Team In The League, Who Really Knows Anymore, get utterly shut down by London Spitfire in a match that was supposed to be far more competitive. Again, though, London knew what to expect, and they capitalized, making mincemeat of Philly’s dive composition by methodically hacking away at their supports and, in the process, neutering their trademark aggression. A frustrated Philadelphia repeatedly failed to take even a single point.

In a post-match interview, London tank Jae-hee “Gesture” Hong explained that “there is such a thing as kind of a rock paper scissors to the teams, and we’re kind of the rock to their scissors.” With Overwatch League teams figuring each other out on increasingly granular levels, though, nothing is set in stone. Rock today might be scissors tomorrow.