Many cheese compositions have risen and fallen since the release of Overwatch back in 2016. While the combination of role-lock and hero-lock is much more limiting than the old “Five Symmetras and a Mercy on Hanamura defense” days, there are still a ton of silly and surprisingly effective strategies that you can deploy in Overwatch.

While not all of these 2021 Overwatch meme strategies will be viable in your sweaty comp games, they are pretty fun to whip out with some friends in Quickplay or in Arcade modes!

The Northwood Statue Bastion on King Row

Have you ever wanted to have a massive high ground advantage and the element of surprise, at the same time? The Northwood boosted Bastion strategy is an offensive strategy that works on Kingsrow that will give you just that. This composition features Bastion and Symetra for DPS, a Sigma and/or a Reinhardt for tanks, and reliable single-target healers like Ana, Mercy, or Baptiste. 

At the start of the round, Symmetra places her teleporter exit on top of the Kings Row statue head, so the team can quickly move past the choke point. Bastion and your shield tank should immediately teleport themselves onto the head of the statue, a position that overlooks essentially the entire A point. From here, when properly shielded and supported with healing, Bastion can reign down hellfire on the enemy team huddled helplessly on the point below.

Should Bastion run into issues, or if the tank accidentally falls off the statue, you can always teleport back to safety, reset, and try again.

This is a specific strategy utilized by Northwood University while competing in the NA Contenders Trials circuit. While they are a Tier 2 team, Northwood Esports is a legitimately talented team. They recently attended the grand finals of the Collegiate overwatch Championships, where they lost to fellow Contenders Trials competitors Maryville University. If you try this out with your friends, I think you will find that it is much more effective than you anticipated.

Team Ireland’s Dive Rein 

The Dive Rein strategy was developed and popularized by Team Ireland. The existence of this strategy was revealed to me by Inven Global’s new social media manager Samantha Nye! The goal of Dive Rein is to turn your Reinhardt into a dive tank, which sounds weird (because it is).

The basic logic of Team Ireland's Dive Reign strategy is to have Reinhard and Winston or D.Va dive into the backline of the enemy from an unexpected angle, feed their brains out, and just hope it all works out. This composition relies heavily on Symmetra and/or Mei to get your Reinhardt into the most unexpected elevations to charge from. By getting Reinhard up in the air, you can make him a dive tank, sort of. 

This strategy more often than not leads to game losses, but the point of memes isn’t to win, it’s to have fun. If you want to have a laugh by charging enemy players from surprise locations, then try out the Dive Rein. This is definitely one of the funniest meme strategies to deploy in 2021.

Boop Troop + Reddit Lucio

The boop troop is an Overwatch cheese strategy that features only characters with crowd control abilities. On maps with deadly environmental features like the Well on Ilios or the bridges on Lingjang Tower, you can get some serious work done by investing your entire composition into boopy characters.

A common boop troop composition is Hammond, D.Va, Pharah, Doomfist, Lucio, and Brigitte, though technically the strategy only demands you play a hero with a boop ability, even if it’s an ultimate boop like with Winston. So long as the character is good at pushing people around, they qualify for the troop. A full team of people looking to defenestrate you is surprisingly disconcerting to play against, so this strategy is actually pretty viable if your team is skilled enough.

For extra cheesiness, consider running a "Reddit Lucio," which is a Lucio that spends the entire game going for highlight clips and harassing the enemy, instead of doing his job of supporting the team. Jarrod "Frogger" Meredith made a career out of playing Lucio in the least helpful, funniest way possible while competing with Mindfreak in Austrailia Contenders. The team even managed to win AU Contenders 2020: Season 1 using almost exclusively meme strategies, including the Boop Troop.

Treehouse strategy Widowmaker 

The treehouse strategy is a meme strategy designed to counter rush compositions at the height of the GOATs meta. The strategy was prominently utilized by Seoul Dynasty in 2018 as an answer to Widow goats against Dallas Fuel. The basic idea is to build a bunker composition on top of a very hard-to-reach piece of high ground like the sniper tower on Anubis point A.

For this strategy to work, you are going to need a cracked sniper on Widowmaker who can hit her shots consistently. Your goal is to use barrier tanks like Orisa and Sigma to keep your teammates alive, while a Mercy damage boosts your Widow, and Zenyatta places discord orbs on her targets. You can include a flanker like Genji or Tracer for your other DPS and a mobile tank like D.Va to fill out the composition.

This strategy can work on any map where the defense has access to a piece of high ground that the attackers will have trouble approaching. This includes maps like Dorado, Anubis, or Numbani. If you know a really good Widow, consider trying out the Treehouse meme yourself.

Get to the Control point first with Symmetra/Lucio speed strategy

This final meme is actually a genuinely useful hero interaction. But since it happens so rarely in quickplay games, it feels like a meme when it finally does occur, so I put it on the list!

If you are playing with a well-coordinated team, you can use Symmetra and Lucio to always reach the control point first on any control point map. This strategy is actually surprisingly simple and easy to execute, so long as you talk to your team about it to make sure everyone is on board. It is even commonly used in the Overwatch League.

As soon as a round starts, the Symmetra should put down her teleporter at the door of the spawn to get her team as close to the point as possible. As soon as the entire team teleports, Lucio should speed boost the team the rest of the way to the point. Not only will this strategy get you to the point first, but it will also get you there without your team having to burn their movement cooldowns going into the opening fight, with the exception of Lucio of course.

The Symmetra can stay on Symmetra for extra memes, or you can switch off to someone like Reaper, Tracer, or Genji, or any other hero that can quickly catch back up with the team. If you are playing with a full squad, doing this strategy consistently can give you the upper hand in your matches.