About DenyPick

An independent tool for one question: you are playing this hero against these six, so what should you actually do?

Why it exists

Deadlock already has good statistics sites and good build browsers. What none of them do is take your hero and the whole enemy team together. Counter tables show a win rate and stop; build sites give you a build that does not know who you are facing. The interesting question sits between them — six heroes create a shape, and that shape is what should change how you play and what you buy.

There is also a timing problem. Deadlock's pre-game window shows both teams' picks and lets each player swap once, which is exactly when this question gets asked. Worth being honest about a limit there: you see opening picks, not final ones, so the advice here aims at what holds up across the likely enemy lineups rather than pretending to be a guaranteed counter-pick.

How the advice is produced

Four layers, each labelled with its own confidence so you can tell them apart:

• Measured results — real hero-versus-hero win rates with sample sizes, compared against each hero's own baseline.
• Authored hero facts — each of the 44 heroes has a researched record: kit, threats, counterplay, bait order, punish windows.
• A mechanics rule base — rules that fire on the specific combination of your kit and theirs, encoding things like which crowd control Debuff Resist actually shortens, or that no item in the game reveals invisibility.
• Hand-written notes where a pairing deserves them, layered on top.

The alternative — hand-writing all 1892 matchups once — produces better prose and then rots. Deadlock renamed five items and reworked several heroes during 2026 alone. Composing from structured data means a patch update is a data edit, and the most respected community guide author refuses to publish static counter-item lists for exactly this reason.

What it deliberately does not do

• No full builds. There is no measured build-win-rate data behind this site and inventing some would be worse than useless. The in-game build browser covers popular builds; this tells you what to change because of the enemy team.
• No tier list. Six tools already publish one.
• No accounts, no tracking of you. Nothing to sign into and nothing stored about you.
• No invented numbers. Where a value could not be verified, the page says “not sourced” instead of quoting a guess.

The artwork

Hero portraits, item icons and ability icons on this site are artwork from Deadlock and are the property of Valve Corporation. They are used here to identify the hero, item or ability a page is about. DenyPick serves its own copies rather than linking to someone else's server, so no load is placed on the community wiki that catalogues them.

Where an image is missing, the page falls back to an original generated glyph — a monogram on a colour derived from the name, in a frame whose shape indicates role. That fallback is not a placeholder for a broken image; it is a complete second rendering path, and the entire site can be returned to it with a single command if Valve ever asks.

No text from the community wiki is reproduced anywhere on this site. Its written content is licensed CC-BY-NC-SA, and rather than work within that we simply don't use it: every description here is written for DenyPick. The numbers are a different matter — a value like Titanic Magazine's +100% Max Ammo is a fact about the game, not an authored sentence, and facts carry no copyright. Those come from the game's own extracted data, with the game's own stat labels.

Accuracy and corrections

Data covers patch 10-30-2026, researched 2026-10-30: 44 heroes and 156 items. Some of it will be wrong — that is unavoidable for a game that patches this often, and the confidence labels exist so you can see which parts are load-bearing. If you find an error, report it to [email protected] — corrections go into the data files and ship on the next build. Full method and every source is on the sources page.

What it does

The enemy team, read as a team

Six burst heroes is a different game from six tanks. DenyPick detects the composition's shape and tells you who to avoid, who to pressure, and where the cheapest kill is.

Build changes, not a generic build

It won't hand you a full item list it can't back up. It tells you what to change because of these six heroes, and names which of them justifies each purchase.

Honest about certainty

Measured matchup results sit behind the threat ratings. Where there's no data, it says so and shows the kit-based reasoning instead of inventing a number.

Built for a second monitor

No sign-in and nothing to install. The whole lineup lives in the page address, so you can bookmark a matchup you keep hitting and come straight back to it.

Quick reference, mid-game

Every matchup opens with the one rule that matters, then a before-lane / in-lane / mid-game / teamfight cheat sheet you can read in a death timer.

Patch-aware by design

Everything is versioned against patch 10-30-2026, and every earlier patch we have notes for keeps its own page under patch notes, so a change can always be traced to the patch that made it. Item renames and reworks that still break older guides — Blood Tribute losing anti-heal, Victor's Jumpstart no longer purging — are handled here.

When to use it

Deadlock's pre-game window shows both teams' opening picks and lets each player swap once. That is the moment this tool is built for — but be aware you are seeing opening picks, not final ones, so treat the advice as what holds up across likely enemy lineups rather than a guaranteed counter. It works just as well mid-match with the scoreboard open.

Contact

Corrections, questions, partnership or press requests: [email protected].

Support DenyPick

DenyPick is free and stays free. It is built and updated every patch by one developer. If it has won you a lane, you can leave a tip on Ko-fi — it pays for the research time after each patch, alongside the ads. Entirely optional; the tool works the same either way.

Also by the same developer: SiteRep, picture-first Rainbow Six Siege attack plans and defender site setups.

Not affiliated with Valve

DenyPick is a fan-made community reference. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or approved by Valve Corporation. Deadlock and related marks belong to Valve.