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I always thought fantasy sports leagues were careful about allocating budgets so that if you bought any one of the top 3-5 available players, you'd have trouble making the rest of your team well-balanced.

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Depends! Generally to win a typical redraft 12 team league you need to hit on your first two draft picks, and then a couple more late round picks that outperform, and then have the rest of your team be at least okay. The top two picks are mostly luck, so the skill is finding those two high-value-low-cost late rounders. For daily fantasy you’re really hunting out guys that have the potential to have a one game fluke but are cheap (ex. a backup player that has 2 touchdowns in a game for the first time ever). When that happens pretty much all the top teams will have one or more of those players.

Someone had already talked about the draft-based variants, so I was considering the non-draft case, mostly because sports teams where I live don't have a draft system.

I have read up on draft systems, and while I basically get the mechanics of how they work, I don't have a good feel for how getting (or missing) your pick at a particular stage of the draft plays out.

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