hackra wrote:Silly question, but can you swap back and forth between cards at this cap to optimize use depending on your opponent?
Definitely not a silly question. That is an option in ANY league. And it is technically legal to do the swapping, as long as the SOM roster rules are met. It's just only really feasible in the super high cap leagues where you have all the extra cash to use.
We had a big debate a few years ago about whether it was ethical to swap injured players for their uninjured cards (e.g. expensive Brett gets injured, so you use the cheaper, but useful, Brett for the injured games) in the no-cap live draft leagues. (The link to that discussion is buried somewhere in the message board archives, I'm sure.) But that also can extend to whether it is ethical to platoon a player with himself.
It seems to me, that the side you argue from depends on whether you think we're playing with players (so you choose one Wagner RP and live with it) or cards (so you use both Wagner RP cards interchangeably). I do think that the card-based argument is a bit tougher because of how we do the FA-drops now, compared with a couple of years ago. In the past, there was a brief moment when another manager could swoop in and steal Wagner from you while you were trying to get the replacement Wagner. So there was a little bit of risk in the swap. Now you can interchange Wagner with himself, and you are the only manager with an opportunity to pick up Wagner -- until you actually release him as a FA and pick up a different player.
This can also be extended to SP's. A year or so ago, I was in a $200M 12 team league where each manager (6 of us) had two teams. We had lots of full, or almost full, team trades going on within managers, based on the matchups. One result was that there were some "impossible" numbers of starts for SP*s: Pedro ended up starting 48 games (across the three versions of Pedro), Pete Alexander started 52 games, and Christy Mathewson started 50 games, and there were others starting 45+ games. The "normal" SP* routine will only give a max of 41 starts. It was a bit of a crazy league, but I believe that swapping an SP for a different version of himself to increase the number of potential starts can be done with ANY league -- you just need the extra cash available.
For me, I won't be swapping 1999 Wagner with 2004 Wagner -- I'll pick one and live with the damage for the duration of the league. I was just curious about whether anyone has actually used the 2004 Wagner, other than in a Phillies franchise team.