Dynasty Startup Draft Strategy: 10 Tips to Win in 2026

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**Thomas Tipple** (0:30)
The most important thing when doing a startup is getting it right, right off the bat. We have 10 tips for you to execute a near perfect startup draft. Lock in with us. It's Dynasty Points, and it starts right now.
Hello, everybody, welcome back. Thanks for joining us on Dynasty Points. Thomas Tipple here with Jakob Sanderson and Ryan Heath. Again, little bit different video today. We have 10 tips from us to you for having a better dynasty startup draft. The last thing you wanna do is go into a startup draft cold, especially if you're new to the game, and learn things the hard way. We've done it. We're gonna help you avoid it here with this episode. I wanna kick things off right away, but before we go, leave a comment below when you're done watching this video, and let us know what you've learned when doing startups, and what tips we might have missed for the next time. We record a tips video, and of course, liking and subscribing helps us in more ways than we can count.
I wanna send this right away over to Jakob with your first tip for everybody. We have three categories. We're kicking this off with preparing for the draft.

**Jakob Sanderson** (2:04)
Yeah, this is a key one for me, and it's mapping out the tiers, and the tiers are going to be different depending on your settings, which we're gonna get into a little bit later, depending on how many teams are in it and all of that. But I go through, I look at my rankings, and I try to note where the big cutoffs are in overall value and in each position. This is especially important if you're doing any sort of derby. There's a lot of startups that allow you to have a say in what your draft position is, and so trying to figure out what you think are the spots you wanna be in or the spots you wanna avoid is very important. And regardless, I think being proactive about where you expect the hotspots to be and where you expect the drop-offs to be at given positions, even in the third, fourth, fifth, sixth round, is hugely important because when that teardrop is about to hit, everyone can feel it. And it's really, really hard to make value trades. If there's a run on quarterback or wide receiver or running back or any position, you can start to sense in these startups that everyone is trying to trade up and nobody is trying to trade down.
But if you have a plan beforehand where you know where these teardrops are gonna hit and in the first round, you make a little move up or a little move down and you tack on that move in round four or round five that you think is gonna position you ahead of a big teardrop, you can get that before everyone else is caught on that this is gonna be an important area of the draft. So map out your rankings, take a look at the ADP, figure out the areas that you think you want to be drafting in more or less depending on where you see value, and then try to work trades early in the draft to position you into those areas.

**Thomas Tipple** (3:45)
I think a big part that a lot of fantasy managers are a little stubborn with too, is finding more than one source for your ADP information. Do not find one and just stick to that, broaden your horizon. There are a lot of other tools too that other managers might get a little snarky about. Let's say, Keep Trade Cut, for example, is a great way to use rankings, compare them, and set yourself up with your own base tiers, like Jakob just mentioned. Let's hear from Ryan.

**Ryan Heath** (4:19)
Yeah, so my biggest tip before a startup draft is you want to just consider who invited me to this draft. And based on that information, who am I likely drafting against? And I don't just mean literally the person, if you know them in real life. I'm more mean in terms of, are they likely consuming Dynasty Fantasy Football content? What might that content be? If this is a coworker that invites you and you're playing against a bunch of your coworkers, maybe the likelihood there is lower, or at least that there will be a few people in the league that might listen to a couple different sources of content. Is this like a Fantasy Points listener league? Or is it just a league tied to a specific content site? With that in mind, yeah, it might be okay. The takes of this site or just this universe of people might be more so affecting the ADP, affecting the valuations of different players.