1. About this guide

Fantasy Anime League is a fantasy sport game played twice a year at MyAnimeList.net. Instead of sport teams, it tracks the performance of seasonal anime titles among the audience of MAL.

This guide explains how to get the most out of your FAL performance. The ultimate goal is to provide information necessary to improve competition at every level and increase awareness of the game’s rich strategic and tactical potential. It’s intended to be useful to everyone looking to understand how to do better in FAL and willing to commit their time and resources to victory. The guide is divided into thematic sections:

• The introduction section is intended to familiarize new and prospective players with the concepts and rules of the game; experienced players can safely skip it entirely.
• The preparation section describes various actions a player can undertake prior to the start of the season to increase their chances at a good placement.
• The mid-season section discusses changes in plans and strategies that emerge during the season depending on how it pans out.
• Case studies are mathematical experiments and analyses of selected players’ seasonal strategies; this section will be continuously updated with new exhibits.

This roughly represents the most efficient operational order for the first time one goes through everything the guide encompasses. The sections are further divided into steps:

• Basic steps represent actions and principles highly recommended to follow; failing to do so can severely compromise your performance.
• Intermediate steps are a relatively low-effort way to significantly increase your chances of placing in the top 0.1% or so.
• Finally, advanced steps are something you should really only consider if you’re highly competitive and prepared to put in significantly more effort to secure your victory.

Feel free to skip everything you’re already familiar with or what you feel is too involved for your available resources or capability.

And I sure hope you like bullet lists.

(Back to table of contents)

2. Useful links and tools

Some things you might need depending on your involvement with FAL and the guide in particular. Feel free to skip ahead if you’re new or simply browsing.

• This guide’s discussion thread: Post your feedback there.

• Livechart.me broadcast tracker: A way to monitor broadcast times with a handy countdown feature. Set the time zone to EET (UTC+2, e.g. Kaliningrad) to see when the episodes air in the FAL time zone, and you can also set the ongoing series filter to “hide all” to reduce visual clutter.

• Samii’s point tracker spreadsheets.

  • Links to seasonal sheets

  A powerful solution for those who just need to track useful data without much hassle. Samii has also provided a customizable template to make your own tracker similar to that, in case you want to change the appearance, add or remove data, or build in some extra tools like automated graphs. The template takes a bit to set up, then does everything automatically; usage instructions are inside.