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 38 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 1406 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

Every hero image on this site is an original generated glyph — a monogram on a colour derived from the hero's name, in a frame whose shape indicates role. Valve's hero art is not used. Redistributing extracted game assets is the thing Valve has historically acted on, and it would not be fair use. Hero names are used descriptively to identify who the page is about, which is ordinary nominative use.

Accuracy and corrections

Data covers patch 09-16-2026, researched 2026-09-21: 38 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, it is worth reporting; corrections go into the data files and ship on the next build. Full method and every source is on the sources page.

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.