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EWC these talented men and women make these gamers look presentable for the first time
out of their basements in nine months.
They are here to be on camera and look lovely.
Let's go ahead and check things out.
We've got our own boys here.
Mr. Coach, do you get makeup?
Yes.
Yeah.
Can you tell?
I cannot tell.
You look like you naturally woke up today.
You feeling good?
You looking good, bro.
Thank you.
I don't need makeup.
What's your routine?
You moisturize?
Okay.
So you need to cleanser?
Cleanser.
Then you have to do toner?
And then you have to do moisturizer and then you're supposed to do one more
But I don't know what it is. Are you a mure? Do you mule?
Yeah
You mule guy? No sir. You look lovely. You don't need any makeup. We got more Aurora gaming boys coming in here
Look at this fresh god damn. Can we get a lost shot out of this?
God damn. This is good. Can I shake your hand, man? You did God's work on that one incredible work
She's very busy don't I and hello, sir. Welcome to the makeup chair
How much moisturizer are you looking for here today a lot a lot he says god damn that's the key to beauty right there
You get in there Mira. Thank you so much. Wow incredible job by all of our makeup artists here
They're have to go through so many people all day and go to players gotta be in the top 10 worst
I can say that introduce yourself young man
I am Nikolai BB3px from level up. How old are you? I am 23 years old. There's no way you're 23
I'm 23.
Does anybody tell you you look a lot younger than 23?
Yeah, that's always happening when I'm trying to buy alcohol.
Oh, do you buy a lot of alcohol?
Not a lot. Just for holidays.
Oh, just holidays. How many holidays do you celebrate?
Maybe two or three in a year.
Oh, that's it. Okay, that's not too bad.
How are you guys feeling at this tournament?
It feels really nice. I appreciate that I came here.
That's good. And how long have you been with this team?
I think three months together.
So, you're pretty happy to be here then?
Yeah, I'm so happy.
What is your favorite thing about Dota 2?
You always can do something new.
I've been watching Gota for a long time. Is that true? Yeah, that's true for real. So do something new when I'm casting your team
Okay, okay. I'll try and last question. I've been asking everybody
I don't know why if your team were to break out into a fist fight. Okay, you fight each other physically
Who would be the victor? Do you think I think?
Dr. Will be the winner of this fight because he is crazy. Oh, so it's a more okay. It's the crazy aspect not the strength necessarily
Okay, cool. Appreciate your time and good luck at the tournament. Thank you
Everybody we are here at EWC with team liquid gentlemen. I have captured you for a nice topic today
We will be doing annoying hypotheticals. Are you ready? Woohoo. All right, fantastic zombie apocalypse
Right now in your room at home right in practice room all of team liquid is there including Nisha and blitz
Zombies are at the door
Three of you can go out together
Who are you taking with you?
Am I out as a die?
No, not die.
We're not electing three people to die.
Have you seen William Soot?
He's the bait.
The bait.
Because he cannot run anyway.
Okay, okay.
What do you mean going out?
I'm saying like, who do these two?
Or we don't have enough food and we're...
Why are we going out?
All right, let's make the situation all right.
You have to elect three guys to go get supplies.
The other guys are there holding the four.
How do you split this up?
I'm actually pretty good at interior design if you like.
I can do the gardening.
That's good, alright.
Oh, actually, I think William is staying home no matter what.
Yeah, because he's injured.
Then we need someone to take care of him.
Who's volunteering? Me?
I'm not thinking. I want to go outside and explore the wilds.
Someone has to go out the window.
I want to become one with the zombies.
I think me and Miki, we go out.
We're speedy.
All right, all right, and then well you need one more. We need a wild card. So it's like tofu or boxy
I'm gonna be somebody slow so we can run
You guys are all just trading william
We actually needed at home if they ever break it we need someone to leave there. Yeah
Okay
You still need one person to leave though. Who's the lever but I don't want to like become a zombie like if I have a gun
I mean I can go out and fight Explorer. Oh, okay
You guys go together you need me show if there's like any stuff you need to break. He's the man for it. I think
Okay, Nisha viness go for supplies. Okay, and
Toe full and boxy hold the fork do nothing. Yeah, we're to hold it down. Okay. Yeah
Like we have like
Fancy stuff will have loot
Like our song is warriors. They just like hold it. We're also like
It's time for our next hypothetical now
This is a very interesting one that I personally love asking who here would say that they have the best family ties
Who's got the most like you know people waiting at home and all that stuff?
Does have vibes dark question to us. I'm not that's a dark question
And I'd be like, I have a lot of family.
Like the most people.
And we're like, ah, I have no one.
And I guess, then you're like, oh, shit, you're an investor.
I feel like Midget has a lot, no?
I have a lot, I guess.
All right.
There's a very interesting question I like asking people.
There is a bbillionaire, you know?
Bbillionaire.
There's a bbillionaire, Elon Musk style.
OK.
She comes up to you and she says, Mickey, I'm a huge fan.
In a completely non-weird way, we're not
going to ever do anything.
I would like you to be my trophy husband for a year.
Yes.
Here's the thing, get into my helicopter.
Don't speak to anyone.
You're not allowed to contact your loved ones,
your family, your teammates, your friends.
You are gone for a year.
They all think something happened to you.
You cannot contact her, but when you come back,
I'll give you my entire fortune.
Do you take this deal?
What do you mean, yeah, that was an instant.
That was an instant.
But you can't even be on Discord with the boys.
It's fine, Discord with the boys.
I'm setting up one year sacrifice
like one how much can a billion like a billion a billion that's like a generation of generation
generation generations he sacrificed himself for one year bloodline what they will understand
they will understand what do you mean would you guys understand this guy just you walk out the room
he's gone obviously they're gonna panic in the beginning but like once they see that I come back
with a mabillion we play a lot anyways not that we have so much time with our loved ones and friends
Right. But one year trader for the billion of know you're free forever.
Yes. That sounds pretty good.
But I mean, don't aren't you worried that they won't have you for TI and they'll worry about you and you'll be
trapped with guilt. But it'll be fine.
They will understand. A billion. A billion.
A billion. All right. Very good. Easy answer.
One of our last annoying hypotheticals. Ace, you have to go into a body of an animal
for two years, okay?
If you die, you die.
What are you choosing?
What lifestyle would you like to live as a movie?
I think you have seen too much bad girls.
What are you, what?
This is not a bad girls question.
This intelligence question.
There was actually a movie or no,
and like a little beaver.
Yeah, this is the big story.
I believe that movie is poppers,
and it's not like that.
No, they're not trying to die.
They're trying to survive.
Anyway, you have to survive as an animal.
What do you pick?
What do you think? What creature do you think?
You can't just talk to me about birds.
Just because it's topical. You can't choose beaver.
What I have to live inside the animal I do, I have to like...
You gotta be that animal.
You are that animal.
I become that animal.
But he still has his conscience.
Yes. But you know, you use your human intelligence to survive two years.
What creature would you choose?
Brother, he would be the smartest animal of any animal.
He could like create his own kingdom.
What? Depending on the animal.
They start the war of the apes.
The apes?
They take the world back.
Why would you choose monkey, dude?
You guys are so badass.
They're closer to humans.
They're like 99 percent.
I am not asking you these questions on purpose.
Please stop interrupting this man's important item.
You're going to take slacks now.
I am not asking you.
I will take like a deep sea, like angle fish or some shit.
Why?
Because like nobody has explored like the fucking depths of the ocean.
I'm not asking you about the humanity's growth.
I'm telling you, survive two years as an animal.
Why would you choose a deep sea angler fish?
That's what they live in.
You don't even know the struggles of the creature.
That's my choice.
That's my choice.
Some turtles, they live like hundreds of years.
Maybe they're just...
I've asked you to do two years.
Boxing, I'm not asking you any higher questions.
But do you understand if an animal lives for hundreds of years,
the chance that you die during those two years is lower?
So what was your interest in would be down there?
Would you take that?
It's something like a house cat or something. It's such an easy question that's boring. That makes sense instead of
The goal is not to survive the goal is to like have an experience like
Okay, let's check out the water. It's cool. All right, fair enough back with the whole ocean map
But you mean like one that has like the fucking angle
It's a little bit of a joke.
All right, fair enough.
Tofu hypothetical for you.
Okay.
I'm a fever.
Everyone.
What?
Beaver.
You don't get fever.
It's a different question.
All right.
Tofu, you have to trade consciousnesses with someone on your team.
However, if anyone finds out that you have traded consciousnesses, you die.
You both die.
You have to keep up the facade.
Like, um, switching my brain into someone else, and we're just trading each other's
body.
Yep, and you have to be in a boot camp for a month.
Who are you going to switch with?
You both know the stakes.
It's like that movie.
You trust enough.
It's like that horror movie.
I love it.
But no one is allowed to find out.
If they find out you're both done, you're cool.
It's not for fun.
Like, it's actual survival.
You don't get to pick angler fish to explore the depths of the ocean for fun.
This is a serious, you got to trade with one guy on your team.
And if anyone else on your team knows that you guys swapped, you're done.
Who do you pick?
But the other person's going to fuck up also.
No, that's why you have to pick a good partner.
You have to trust other partners.
You have to trust them.
Is this about trust?
I don't know what's the matter.
I feel like the personalities are just so different.
Well, that's what I'm saying. That's why you're specifically you trust that person also on the ability to this like
You have a very
Example well, like I can be small things were like Nisha obviously I'm right-handed. He's left-handed
There might be things about others that I don't know you really switch and suddenly I can't use my hand anymore
Well, you got to pretend it so you got a pick a teammate that you think can emulate tofu
He's left-handed when you play, bro. It's over you can't use niche
The hardest question yet, I mean we're gonna die
I would I would highly suggest box I think I'm gonna go
Who would make me the best?
I mean Ace knows you the best.
But can he handle me?
I don't think I can handle the tofu style.
Give me one tofu impression right now.
I can't.
Okay, great. You're dead dude.
Alright, that was a good hypothetical.
Okay, our last hypothetical.
I already asked Mickey.
What did I ask you?
Oh yeah, the Bobillionaire.
The Bobillionaire, you're the last guy.
Okay, hypothetically, if you had to rename your team,
what would you rename it to?
Team Solid.
The Bobillionaire.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Who like a cool band name?
Band name is good.
Band name?
We would be like,
What was the old, like what were some of the old iceberg teams?
And no tide hunter, no bounty hunter, no techies.
Digital chaos.
No chaos.
I don't know.
We'd pick up slacks as our stand.
I don't know.
It could be like the bros.
The bros.
We're chillin'.
The bros.
The bros.
We're chillin'.
Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for chillin' with me on this fantastic hypothetical podcast.
We hope you guys enjoyed it. We'll see you some more at EWC, which I hypothesize you'll be with us for
See you now. That was a good pocket. Thank you. Thank you
All right, pass the Versailles onto Montmartre and here.
It's supposed to be right here.
Did they feed me the wrong information?
There's no way I'm letting them keep me out.
Tonight's the night of the Esports World Cup opening ceremony, and I still haven't gotten
my invitation yet.
Something about not wanting a repeat of previous events?
But I'm not going to let something as silly as an approved guest list shot me from hitting
that red carpet.
Just finding a way in.
Time to crush some carpet.
This is yours. You speak to me? This is yours.
Please! If I don't speak to at least three people, I get deported.
I was told that in order to come to the red carpet or the orange carpet...
you
you
you
you
you
I have eight screams tomorrow.
I hope I don't wake up.
I cannot sleep.
I need to do something before I have to go to the job again.
It's Yarek.
The director just told me that he cannot sleep
before he knows that he needs to work the whole day with his screams and he's just sitting with the phone
because he wants to use his sleep time to just relax and watch Tamsin and he just doesn't sleep.
Yeah, you just want to save time.
Next day become.
Delay this day as much as you can.
Do you agree with 4-6 games for you the same, Dvoshka?
Yeah, I agree a bit too. I agree about 4 and 6, but I also can agree that sometimes you can at least choose one day and make, for example, 8.
But the main also fit. There should be some break between corners. For example, you can play 4, 1 hour break to eat or chill a bit, and one best of 2 more.
Yeah, but break is very important.
Sometimes we had 9 in a row, or 8 in a row, I think, no?
One day was it for sure.
Maybe 8 in a row without a break.
You just sit, play next, pick, and the opponent just waits us in the next screen
and we need to finish fast and go next.
Last map must be high quality.
None of them actually was high quality.
The point is, in lose or win.
And if you lose like six screens before you go for the eighth screen, you're like,
when is the end?
And then you should talk about the mental thing.
So you just play and then you just do the psychology stuff and then you just go sleep.
The head is about to explode.
And you'll understand tomorrow you'll be the same.
For you it's the same amount of games or you can do more, you'd like to do less?
You can make an agreement that you can play it as a pub.
Maybe even games, some games, it's good if you like,
don't talk like, play with our voice.
You guys have tried this before?
I don't know.
You've never tried this?
No, I haven't.
I have experience here in Bad Boom.
Just play a stream without voice.
So you decided to play a stream and nobody's talking,
like communicating.
Was it good or was it bad?
It was fun.
It was fun.
Yeah.
But I remember some players saying, even though we're not talking in Discord,
but they're trying to talk in real life, so he hopes someone hears him.
So it was hard to stop communicating?
Yeah, but the point is, you can try hard, maybe four games, I think six is harder,
But if you want to play more, you can play like new heroes, for fun, like a pop-up, it should be better.
But you cannot play 8 or 9 or 10 games, like 2 push games.
So, yeah, the problem was before this bootcamp, after winning Major we got a huge break.
And the logic was we want to put everything in short periods, so that's why it was hard to think.
Yeah, we had the choice if we do the short break and we play like, not 8 screens per day.
Like, it's more...
We just play for more time, but...
There's more amount of time on the bootcamp and the short break.
But if we have a long break, we play more games.
It was not the best experience.
When you play that all the time, you lose your mind.
We should have decided that we need a short break, not the long.
You live and you learn.
What about scrims? I think in every team, sometimes not everybody has the same approach to scrims.
Some people like to be very serious, some people like to be more relaxed,
Some people need to get a lot of confidence from the results, some people don't care.
And I guess also it can change for everyone.
How is it with you guys? Who would you say was the most serious about the streams?
It's you? Mr. Tokio? You agree with that?
Maybe. I mean, back then I was the guy who didn't want to lose anything.
Yeah. Like pub, scream, doesn't matter, like football, outside.
You say back then? Back to the days.
You feel like you changed a bit, because you say back then?
Yeah, now I want to be more chill guy, even in tournaments, because I feel like it's easier to live with this.
It's easier to communicate, it's easier for me, because if you put that much effort to win, if you lose it's not easy, so now I'm...
I can tell the difference, by the way.
I already like...
Yeah, because playing this game back then, and now after the break, so I can tell the difference that now he is a special guy.
I feel like it was my first years of the game and first year I was a winner and I was thinking
that I should keep winning always but now I'm a little bit more a brown man because I've
played already 5-6 years and I think with all that experience I can think how to live
better to be a professional and who was on the opposite, who was the most relaxed?
I don't want to say don't care, but you can say don't care also.
I don't care actually, I don't care about scrims at all.
I cannot take it serious.
And I remember the one part with Miposhka, we were playing scrims and I was playing like tiny four
and I was having so much fun and we were winning and at some point I was just tossing him to the fountain
And he was dying and he was like, what the f**k are we gonna lose? No!
What are you doing?
And I was like chill, chill, just playing Scream.
And he was like super mad about me.
And on the other side, trying to hit him hard was too, like not losing.
I remember he just was super mad at me.
Also, I think I can say it because the guys, they were playing one team
and mirrored like, joined through our team like, half of the year.
And I have already three teams in my experience.
So, compared to other teams, I think in spirit,
I cannot say someone was like not trying his heart. Everyone was trying, everyone was disciplined.
And with my experience, I can say not many teams can do that.
Did you adapt to each other's? Or did you, so for instance, when somebody was very serious, do you accept it and you adapt to him?
Or did you try to change him? And same for the one that was more relaxed?
We just confirmed that we need to play like, not to serious, but not the don't care mode.
So we just played like to keep balance.
Yeah, the balance.
Yeah, I would say it was like no problem with that in spirit because everyone was like trying to win.
Yeah, in the first two years it was like that.
Yeah, it was in the same way as today.
Later, later.
Maybe after I leave, the guys was like, oh, now we can buy Midas, now we can buy Midas.
Sometimes this guy bought some Midas.
One thing I wanted to talk about, actually, because I think you're one of the few players
that made so many transitions to other roles, and quite successfully, in my honest opinion,
You played 5, right? After you played mid, then 5, then 3.
So I wanted to ask, did you get...
Like, I wanted you to rate his position 5, and you to rate his position 3.
I'm getting you in trouble now, man.
I didn't feel like nothing.
I can always keep position 4, actually, because like...
Have you played position 4?
I mean, pubs on like a...
Okay, I'm being dangerous, so I can guarantee as well.
What is your opinion on that?
I can say, I can say, to be honest, I can play any hero in pubs on any position.
And sometimes I'm telling my team to, like, take my replay.
Well, your position.
I'm going to check my best master replay.
What he's doing on every role, when we were on the same team,
we were, like, talking.
All we need to do is just farm.
We need to farm on supports.
We need to farm on leads.
It's too far.
We need to scale.
We need to scale.
We need to scale since minute one to minute 40.
We need to scale at once.
You need to run on the free lane and just skip the waves.
Don't care about anyone in this game.
So then he went to pass 5 and he did it and then he went to pass 3.
Yes, yes.
Take your own mentality.
I was telling Yarek, like, can you farm more?
You've been telling him not to farm.
Okay, that's rare from a mid laner.
Because usually mid laners will tell you you need to come check the rune, you need to
place this ward into smoke.
I mean, I still need to do this.
But still trying to farm more.
That's because I was watching Elderly Deer Plays and I watched this guy playing, there
are like sports running around the map and they are farming camps.
On the way.
And then I see Yarek, he was running, he was running like, he doesn't care, even on
like, I don't really remember.
For example, for example, he's in Ranna and he's running around camps and non-sweathing
a hero.
I'm saving for Kill.
Saving for his mid lane.
Sanya, set up. Stand here, I will arrow. So far creeps. Okay, so now I'm in team spirit, now I understand.
Superchargers, Kdea City, powered by play.
It is a wonderful morning here in Paris, but for some of these teams, it will be their
final day in Paris.
Dota 2, day 5 here at EWC is about to start breaking some dreams, crushing those dreams
and crushing some keys alongside of it. The intensity is starting to ramp up and everything
is now on the line for some of these teams with time very much running out. You guys
can crack on with the intensity and all that. I'm going to sit out here and have my cross.
Let's go!
Starting the day with a coffee, a croissant and some of the best Dota to hear at the
Esports World Cup we're live from Paris and we might not have the croissant and coffee that Chris had
But we do have that top tier Dota coming your way today is actually a very special day because it's the final day for
group A and B and that means we got some eliminations and advancements
Some blood some tears and sweat we got it all coming your way here with also the constant said sitting next to me
Look I'll start you doing this morning. I
Don't hear you
Sam, how are you doing?
I mean, I heard him. I can translate or...
You can interview him.
I can interview him. Are you doing pretty good?
Yeah, I'm doing pretty good. I did have fun.
No, that's it. That's over. That was the only question I asked.
I mean, I'm sure we'll fix it pretty soon.
Doing great. I'm doing great. I'm gonna give him...
I'm feeling pretty bad about it, actually. Please, please, especially so.
I did have a croissant as well, I think every single day that I was here,
and they're very buttery, they're nice, and also the salty butter sheer that you did mention.
I took that advice, feels pretty good with it.
The demi-salted butter that the French do is some of the best butter.
I know you were thinking, like, can butter actually be better than normal butter?
Yes, it can. Yes, it can.
We had some buttery smooth Dota games for some teams this way as well.
We had some ones earned on matches.
Let's take a look at what happened yesterday
with our STC rewind as all our series once again
said two and now all across the board.
I mean, the dominating teams are showing up.
I think it's expected.
We know you said it before the tournament started.
It's that time of the year, the money time of the season,
EWC, TI, everybody should be peaking by now.
And I think they're delivering.
So you love to see it.
I think the tournament format though is particularly scary
because we're going to start seeing our first teams getting eliminated
and then everything transitions into single-alien,
which honestly, in Dota, anything can happen,
especially nowadays where the level of competition is so close between everyone.
So no team can really lower their guard.
I feel like even the teams that are dominating the group stage,
all it requires is like a bad matchup, you know, an off-game
and all of a sudden you're out of the tournament.
So yeah, I mean we've seen yesterday Aurora, you know, the certain dominance we've seen Falcons
They're all basically answering the call
Yeah, that is right shiver
We've seen that some really good data yesterday and yeah with this format as well
You definitely needed to step up in every single game and we haven't seen any like major upsets
We've seen some of the underdog stories maybe taking a game, but nothing too crazy that did happen yesterday.
I don't know how you feel said about it, but you're the only team that managed to take the game off of 1W team.
Yeah, it's a rocky bumpy road for OG so far.
I mean, it's keeping me awake at night because you never know what you're getting.
Sometimes we lose in a pretty sad way and we're also a team that's able to contest Yandex and Yandex and 1W.
They only dropped one map and both were against OG, so maybe some hope moving forward.
I do think to me the biggest surprise of this group stage, I have to say,
and maybe it's not entirely a surprise, but you have to talk about it as Nigma.
Yeah, they're sitting up there in terms of standings with all the
The teams that have dominated the Doros in for the last few years
Obviously in Nigma was nowhere to be seen in these events and then tier one and they're back
You know, you have the Falcons. I mean you have to name Falcons. We see them in group a, you know
They drop only one map and it's the first map. So at this point, he doesn't even count
and and and and then yeah, Nigma is actually in contest with these top dogs
It's it's pretty impressive. Yeah, and in group a also keep in mind that today also tiebreakers will be played
It is looking pretty spicy in the middle of the pack there ruin eaters and gamer Legion with the same score of three and five
So a lot is possible there for you guys information though gamer Legion is going up against BB team. So that's a tough one there
Well, I wrote game religion twice. That's the problem. Look at that though. I mean, this is
unheard of as far as I'm concerned like a lot of fans have
have waited a long time to see that kind of scoreboard in a group stage.
And it's finally happening.
Yes, it's been a while, but also, at least to me, doesn't come as a big surprise, considering
that I was covering the road, the TI as well, and they looked super solid, maybe like Team
Liquid slightly underperforming.
It might come down to them losing to Nigma Galaxy, and of course, the fifth and sixth
place for L1 team and level up, they are already out.
P-Time cemented themselves, they are going to go to that survival stage straight away.
And in the group C, P-Vision pretty much everything is set in this group because we have the Connix,
Team Nemesis, they're already out, out, Maus and Vici Gaming in the middle of the pack
and the last series that they're going to be playing is P-Vision against Team Spirit.
Yeah, that might still change things at the top.
Yes, pretty much, whoever kind of wins, even if P-Vision gets a draw in this one or they
they get a win against Spirit, they're going to secure themselves in the first spot.
Yeah, and the same thing goes for the group D. The group of Death has two teams at the
top, 1W and Yandex. They will face each other tomorrow in the final match, so again, a series
that will battle it out for who comes out on top. And if they tie, we'll just have to
play a tiebreaker between them. That's so good. We got tiebreakers potentially coming today.
This is today's schedule. We're starting with a match in group A, Extreme Gaming vs. Falcons
and the Roar Gaming vs Liquid after that, with tiebreakers of Group A followed by tiebreakers
of Group B and for our Sony story of the day. We went for that second series, Aurora, taking
on Team Liquid 7. Yeah, it's a pretty good one. Good choice, good pick, I wasn't part of it, but
I definitely supported it. I see one more part of it, the next day I'm just kicked from the
choice. No, I think it's a good one. Honestly, I think Liquid, this is like a very pivotal moment
for them in the tournament. They started off a little bit shaky. It kind of seemed like
they weren't really sure what their identity should be in the match, in this tournament.
But you know, all of a sudden, they're only one or two points away from topping the group.
So everything is still up in the air. I think now they're getting their true tests. And
with Liquid, you wouldn't be surprised that they go from struggling at the beginning of
the group stage to beating the number one team in the group. That wouldn't surprise
anyone it's just about them finding their form so it's going to be a very interesting series
you mentioned aura being like a Dora exam yeah so liquid has a two you know two-step exam today
they've got quite the tests ahead of them and potentially they did their homework in figuring
out which heroes were very good which heroes are very not good and which heroes they should be
banning but let's take a look first of uh at the heroes that have been most picked at this EWC
so far. I don't think any of these really comes as a surprise. Lacoste, I feel like we saw Earth
Spirit maybe even fall off a little bit yesterday. Yeah, maybe some of the games that we've seen,
but maybe it was like the hero-player combination that we have and has seen that didn't really work
out. But I think we said on day number one that this hero is going to be in the top three picks.
Coming through the TI qualifiers, the hero looked insanely strong. Win Rape definitely shows it.
I think you need to have Earth Spirit specialist coming up from the mid lane and you also need to have the flex potential
So your position 4 also needs to be able to play that hero
Yeah, and I think the odd one out here was the shadow fiend with a 61% win rate because not only is he in the list of most picked
He is also having the list of most banned
Yeah, to me SF is really the standout in the sense that that hero has been tier one for a while now also
So everyone has more than enough time to try to figure out what they want to play against SF and how to counter it
So SF sitting at 61% winner rate despite the amount of bands and also when it's big
It's being first picked every time that because you don't put get I mean the fact that it's also in top bands means that you either pick it
right away or you're not gonna get it and
You know despite that it's still sitting at an impressive winner
So it seems like this year was just hard to counter
Whereas I guess like for heroes like Ursprit, perhaps we'll see the meta develop in a way where people will end up finding
you know, like convincing answers and the hero could fall off or you know, kind of go back to something a little bit more average
Yep, later on. We're gonna focus our attention on extreme gaming and
Falcons now because those two teams will be joining us on the stage very soon an extreme gaming
And that's the squad that we're focusing on.
First, we have seen them fail their exam yesterday.
And I'm very curious how they feel after their losses yesterday
and how they feel coming into today.
And for that, we are going to check in with Aumei.
Hello, I'm here with Aumei of Extreme Gaming.
You played Morphling in one of your matches earlier.
I was curious what you thought about the hero
because I haven't seen anybody else play it yet.
But the other players haven't used this hero yet.
How do you feel about this version of you?
It's okay. It might be a bit weak in the front.
It's okay in the middle.
end of the group stage, or do you wish it was different?
I don't think it makes much of a difference because we have to face them sooner or later anyway, so we'll face them as they come.
Okay, in terms of practice against European teams, obviously it's difficult to scream against European players from where you live.
Did you get much of a chance before the tournament or were you restricted towards your region?
Did you practice or did you not have a lot of time to start the game?
We practiced for more than two weeks.
I think the training was pretty good.
But maybe we didn't practice well during the game.
We came here about two weeks in advance,
so we had about two or four weeks of practice against some of the European teams here.
But, and honestly speaking, I think that the results of the practice was pretty good.
I was actually pretty happy with our performance, but when it came to a tournament, somehow,
for some reason, we're just not performing as expected.
And I think we were just not performing as well as what we did during our scrims and
our trainings.
I see.
Well, thank you for joining me and good luck in your upcoming matches.
Hopefully, they can change that today and they can perform to the level that they want
to.
Yesterday wasn't a great example of extremes gaming performance for sure, Lacoste,
how do you think they should change going in for today?
I want to see some speech here.
I feel like this team, like with the hero picks that they did have,
especially for Mame with two games and terrible late on more fling kills.
I talked about it in an interview saying that this is a good hero in the mid and late game.
Problem is, how do you get there?
They were unable to get there yesterday when they played against BB team,
where they were kind of lacking that punch that they needed to have in the early stages of the game.
So slightly more focus on the early stage of the game.
Well, they are 4-4 right now,
and they are going up to the behemoths of Falcons.
That is 7-1 right now,
only dropping that one game at the very start
of the tournament, as Seb already mentioned.
To find out if they're still in great spirits
of going into today,
we're going to purchase talk at the snaking.
Hey, I'm here with snaking of Team Falcons.
You guys have had a great start to the group so far.
You're on top, you got XG coming up.
How do you think you're going to fair against them?
I think we probably have a pretty good shot.
I think we can't really underestimate them.
I think they have flaunt a little bit in the group stage,
but they can still be a very tough opponent.
So we're just going to keep our focus up.
So I talked to Ami earlier.
He said that they arrived two weeks earlier
that got to play a bunch of scrims against European teams.
Did you guys scrim against them before you got here?
I think we did play them a little bit.
And then we realized they were in our group side.
I think we stopped scrimming them.
So I think we played them early on in our bootcamp.
So we haven't really played them recently.
So it'll be interesting to see if they have changed a lot.
What's it like getting exposure to teams ahead of time?
Well, like do people's,
and I'm sure this happens for you guys too.
You probably scrim against a team a bunch of times
and then you switch it up based on other stuff you learned.
Do people's patterns change?
Does your guys' patterns change a lot between scrims
and once you get to the tournament?
I think for the very known teams
who have the same type of players,
They don't really change that much.
Maybe they'll add a few heroes to their arsenal,
and so to speak.
But I think the most dangerous teams to kind of prepare for
are the ones that you don't really know much about,
or like some of the qualifier teams,
like you don't really know what they play,
you don't really know what their strategies are.
It's a lot harder to prepare for an unknown team
than teams that you've seen around the block for a long time.
That makes a lot of sense.
Okay, you guys have been picking a lot of Undyne so far.
You're picking it early in the draft like it's a flex pick,
but then you just keep playing it.
At some point, they're just going to,
oh, that's their pause five.
Are you worried about losing that flex potential?
Are you going to make a more plate today, maybe?
I mean, we'll see.
Cause it's obviously a very strong flex.
A lot of people play in the off lane and,
and you know, you have to make the enemies guess.
So they will have to find out.
Nobody's guessing.
It's been like four times counting.
The trick is gone.
It's still good here though.
The cat is not out of the bag yet.
Okay. Maybe, maybe one time today.
Okay. That's all I have for questions for you.
Thank you for joining me for the interview
and good luck in your match.
We'll find out if Falcons has any surprises
in store for us today.
I feel like they're definitely considered
the winner here already a little bit in this group.
What do you hope to see from them today, Seb?
I mean, I just want to highlight,
like Maestro is making, you know,
like keeping us guessing on whether or not
we'll come dying.
I think we'll have the answer to that one,
but it's an fair try.
I mean, what to expect today.
I think it's important.
Falcons can still lose the number one spot
the group to to BB team so this game matters a lot because again if you if you stay top
one you go straight else you have there's a whole single alien bracket you have to play
it's no joke. As for Xtreme they really need to secure the win because they can still get
knocked out. If Gamer Region won their series and they lose theirs they are gonna get knocked
out of the group. Yeah this is a very scary group so a lot of pressure here for this opening
series in group A, the last series that these two teams will play.
Barring time breakers to get it started.
We're heading over to the stage.
Good morning, EWC.
Good morning, go to two and good morning, go to fans.
We are here today for a fantastic group stage.
How y'all doing out there?
You live, you will?
Hello?
Gentlemen, ladies, yes?
Oh, come on, I see you in the car.
You give me one yell, right there, white shirt.
Give me one, ah, give me one.
There it is, all right, we got one.
Thank you very much, everybody.
Yes, we have an incredible day of Dota here today for you.
In fact, we're starting things off pretty hype,
ladies and gentlemen.
We have the grand finals of TI last year
coming your way.
Extreme gaming versus Falcons.
I have been waiting quite some time
for such a grand stage, have such grand teams.
And this time, for a long time, neither one of them suck.
So that's really cool to see yet again.
We're gonna have one heck of a first game for ya.
Hope you guys are ready as we announce
and bring to the stage our first team of the day,
Extreme Gaming!
Extreme Gaming.
And I am extremely excited to see these guys get their revenge on Falcons today.
Now this is a pretty high pressure game.
Oh, there we go!
They won't cop for me!
They'll cop for Rami!
Oh hell yeah!
The fans are out good to see them out there today and we are going to see you guys do
extremely well.
I do hope it should be a heck of a match and we'll see if you guys can get your strength
for the groups and beat that juggernaut that's standing on that top spot.
But who could that juggernaut be?
you have horrible memory? Let me go ahead and remind you, ladies and gentlemen, put your
claws together, spread those wings and get ready to cac-cac for Team Falcons! They absolutely
love it when you make bird noises for them. It fuels them. It makes them fiery. And today,
we will see them come to the stage with the full formation, the lion formation. There
Here we go!
All right, ladies and gentlemen, Falcons has arrived to make their nest.
I've not thought of many other bird jokes today, but I can tell that they are looking
quite locked in.
In fact, none of them are moving.
They're like statues.
Incredible discipline this team has.
I've never seen anything like it.
Are they even here?
Absolutely they are.
Are you ready to get started, gentlemen?
Are you ready?
No, all right, we got one!
All right, please put your keys on the location.
Get your keys out there, my friends.
Good those keys!
For one of those keys will be crushed one day.
Not today though.
Today it ain't about crushing key.
It is about honor.
It is about respect.
It is about victory.
As they get into their positions looking so high,
it's a that way!
You shake those hands!
Oh my god!
A moment for the ages.
Please, gentlemen, to your seats.
You guys don't go anywhere.
Don't get up from your seats.
And we will see more of these teams soon.
But before the action gets started,
let's head back to the battle, baby.
Sure is on with this TI finals rematch, I have to ask, we like to hide these storylines,
you know, that's our job.
But as a player, if you play against a team that you face in the grand finals, is there
any special magic or memories that are part of the matchup for you?
Of course, I think especially for X-Trim, like for the losing team, like the team that
lost the TI finals, they're never going to let go.
They would like playing Falcons is always going to mean something special to them and
they're always going to try to you know like the pain never goes away and that's your medicine
in a way like that's going to be like a little bit of a relief is like I don't feel the pain
for a little bit and then it comes back until they actually settle it at you know in another
grand finals but and Falcons should know there are no strangers that feeling these players
obviously know they're on top of the game but they have you know lost before in their
careers and that's how they also improved and got where they are today.
So they know that Extreme is not going to play around in this series.
They're coming to it.
Does it also maybe change the way we're going to see them play?
Do you feel like Lacoste, since obviously the meta changed, but did the playstyle, like
the overall macro playstyle, these two teams since the Grand Finals, change a lot their
identity?
I don't think so.
I think for Falcons, maybe for Extreme Gaming it did.
This is a bit of a slower team.
they always needed to adjust.
Like if you go back here and a half ago, for example,
this is the team that lost the laning stage
pretty much every single time.
They were down 5,000 gold and then they made a comeback.
I think this is slightly outdated.
They did speed things up, but also they're not on pair
with some more like faster teams
like Team Liquid, Falcons and the BB team.
For Falcons, it seems like they're just playing
the standard stuff.
You know, this is how they came into the scene
with the three tanky cores playing meta did shift.
but also, I feel like this type of a team also has very strong identity.
We are seeing some of the heroes that they are bringing back, I think Enchantress so far is a very good example
because they are playing it from position 5, they're playing it from position 4 as well, Crit.
Part of this tournament didn't play it for like two and a half years and this is the only team have in mind
that has won the games on Enchantress. Enchantress has been played 12 times and only Team Falkas managed to get three victories with this hero.
The hero feels very good, I gotta say, we slightly kind of patched upon it the other day.
It feels very good against certain meta-heroes like Karyvind Ranger, Necrophos having that
the spell available and also Falcons, they've been using this hero as a counter to undying
in the lane.
Yeah, keep in mind that there is one change that might make the difference here for Extreme
Gaming because we have a different coach for Extreme Gaming compared to what they had at
TI, of course, with maps joining in, so they get a little bit of fresh air there and a
fresh take on how to take team Falcons down. And I know, as Lac said, there won't be any
key crushing today. If things can play out really unfortunate for extreme gaming, if
they are not on their A game here today, then we might be talking about crushing keys.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I believe they're seeing at four points and game religions seeing
at three. So if game religion were to win their series and extreme to lose to all, then
Now, we're talking about them getting knocked out of the group stage, so...
And that would be a huge blunder. I think that team is really the Chinese first hope, I would say.
The Chinese team is the first hope, and TI being in China, everybody expects that team to deliver results.
And it starts with this tournament, surely.
With that being said, I don't feel like what is causing the losses to Xtreme is necessarily them not being on par with the best teams in the world.
I think it's more about strategy and the approach to the meta and how the game is being played
right now. I do feel like they're quite far behind, I must say, the top teams in that regard.
But you know, this tournament, the beauty of the format is that every team gets to play one series
a day, so they have a lot of time to actually recollect, like, check the replays, dissect what
has happened, also maybe take a look at what other teams are doing. So we can see a new version of
these teams, like from one day to the other, it's absolutely not impossible. This is not your typical
group stage where teams have to play four series or three series a day and they're just like
completely exhausted and the downtime is only for us. Like downtime here is to build and to
you know get ready for the next day. So I wouldn't be surprised that extreme drew the right inclusions
from yesterday and come in today with a completely new outlook on the game and with that team I think
would get all of a sudden a very significant increase in the level of play.
Yeah, what gives me hope is what Amé said in an interview that they've been, you know,
spending two weeks screaming against European teams as well and that they had good results.
So maybe, you know, something sometimes they don't click straight away, like ideas coming
into the tournament, we're working out sometimes like meta shifts in between like the first two,
two, three days, you see the things that you've been picking.
You're like other teams have a slightly better idea.
Their ideas are working and yours are not.
So you have some time to prepare for it.
And this has been the team that,
maybe under a different coach, I would say,
especially under Jiao A to this team,
like you would see them lose a game,
they would pick five different heroes,
they would lose a game or even win the game
and then pick five different heroes again.
This is something that always has been strength
between the coach and the player combination.
The players are still there under a different coach, but still feel like they have this
mentality that a lot of things need to shift and they've been in this situation many times
where they need to completely shift what they've been picking.
So in that regard, I feel like extreme gaming definitely has something, but so far their
ideas that we have seen haven't really been working out and maybe extra bit of a mental
damage as well.
Yesterday when they played against EDT is when they picked Bay Marana, they didn't look
good, then they get Bayon Marana on the other team and they get completely stomped by it
in 20 minutes.
So I want to see, you know, maybe some adjustments, maybe what the take away is going to be from
some of these games and what you're going to be able to learn.
To me, the biggest change I'd like to see is the position 2 and 4 picks for X-Teen.
I think these have been the most problematic in a sense.
It always, there's always like a good reasoning for why they select the heroes.
It's never, I'm not saying it's bad or anything like that, it's always easy to understand
why they would go for that, but I don't think they cover certain angles that you just have
to factor them in modern Dota.
You need to worry a little bit about your ability to contest runes, your ability to
protect your wisdom, maybe pressure theirs, like the first basically 10 to 12 minutes
of the game is very crucial in Dota right now.
who gets to defend their safe lane tower, you know, take the enemy off lane tower, sometimes
even contest the mid, you know, like apply pressure with the seed creeps, fight for the
power runes, fight for the early wisdom runes.
If you're like support duo and your mid lane hero do not allow you to do that in any capacity,
I think the game is literally unplayable and you can go back to what Ami is playing, whether
he's playing more clean or something faster or same for the off laners.
At the end of the day, I do think it relies much more on both the supports, but mainly
the position for.
We've seen Fy play pick early Rubix because he's thinking about the stealing Bane spells,
early Mirana, and then the lane goes really rough, and the mid matchup has not really
been protected.
It gets counterpicked, and all of a sudden they just don't get to play the game at all.
So this really needs to change, I think, for today in order for them to secure a stable
game so that we can see what they're really good at.
This team is really good at this, how they team fight, how they play the map, how they scale into the late game, how they buy their items, how you know the synergy they can build, going in the later stages of the game.
I'm very curious in regards to the approach that the opponent of Extreme is going to take, I want to compare BB team to Falcons, because yesterday we said we know BB team is a fast team.
they are known for that and they have been known for that for a very long time.
That's not necessarily the case for Falcons. No, I think there's similarity in a way where they
play very strong in the lanes. This team is not going to get stomped in the first 10-15 minutes,
but sometimes they don't take many risks. They're going to be going for that third
Roshan, fourth Roshan if needed. This is pretty much the team, or at least part of the team,
during the tundra era which did invent this type of a playstyle which chokes you out of the map.
They don't want to rush anything and especially in this current meta where like one high ground
push while you have let's say only then k gold lead 15 k gold lead with one bad team fight it
can turn the whole fight around so falcons they they're kind of masters of their craft when it
comes down to closing out the games maybe that's one of the reasons why it takes a slightly longer
might not be the most interactive gameplay to watch sometimes when it goes to like 45-50 minutes
but it gets the job done and it's all about winning so I can't really blame them.
Yeah I think it's like a better matchup though for X-Treme in a sense because you know that
they're going to get a little bit more breathing room against Falktons than they would against a
team like VV Team. So in that sense I think if they do the proper adjustments coming into today
And it's a better fit maybe for them this series.
We could see a closer match than what we've seen yesterday from Extreme.
But at the same time, I think if you expose yourself early on in the game, like Falcons,
of course they're great at playing the long game and they're amazing in the later stages,
but they can also dominate the early game.
You're just not allowed to e-week basically against that team at any stage really.
They'll have to cover every single angle. That's just how it goes when you go versus the best in the world.
Alright, so if we...
If there's one hero in particular that we don't want to see from X-Rain...
That we don't want to see from X-Rain.
Yeah.
Mirana.
Mirana!
Yeah, I love your hesitation.
You know, I was watching our team play yesterday. We first picked Mirana. I almost, like, I almost failed.
Little bomb, yeah.
We lost horribly in 20 minutes and well deserved. No Murano, please.
And I'm a big fan of the hero. Murano is like the Dota hero.
He's been there forever. It's always been flashy, you know.
Aero accuracy, you name it. But no Murano, please.
Yeah, I mean, we've seen some mean heroes win.
Like there was a Bloodseeker attempt from Crystalis.
The other day we saw BB team dominate with Bloodseeker yesterday.
Kirit, which had the great performance.
but it seems like teams are getting ideas from Reddit where they're like,
oh, they said that Bloodseeker is a bad hero. Let's try to win with it.
And now there's a new thread yesterday about CK being like the most dog hero in the game.
Maybe someone's going to pick it up and play us wrong.
I think he played during the last slam.
It's a thing. I don't think CK is that bad actually.
Like we could take the conversation. I don't think CK is that bad.
Like it's one of the heroes that's like
I'm a CK
I'm not gonna go as far as saying I'm a CK fan and like I'm definitely not a fan, but I'm not a hater either
The chaos is fun. Yes, it's fun. I think the hero has some arguments like
To be if I haven't seen it so what have you done?
He lost he lost that game like when the patch dropped I'm like, okay these numbers
Maybe maybe they're not too bad only they had to do for me is one game to realize. Yeah, this is not it chief
It's it's not working out the illusions. They just died so quickly
You know what one hero is that I think we saw banned on day one and I'm like, oh my gosh, it's happening
It's a hero. I really enjoy watching especially in the hands of xxs. I think that's one of the heroes that
When he started as far as really good at Legion commander and we saw
Potential yeah, I did mention it. I think during one of the drafts
Both of these teams like both offlaners they do enjoy it from time to time
This is how X-XS came into the scene, playing his Batrider,
playing his Legion Commander from the off-flame.
But Amar, from time to time, if it's a good game for it,
he's going to pick it.
I got him on LC, it's amazing.
I think it's a great item.
We haven't seen it yet, enough.
I personally think it's...
I'm a big Legion fan, actually.
I think the Laming Presence is really there.
You can itemize a little bit more differently, I guess,
like creatively these days.
And again, the aggs, we're not seeing it in the meta, but it's gonna come eventually.
I think it's a very interesting hero.
What else do we see, like as a surprise on these teams?
Like, I know for a fact that Marine has been practicing a lot IO mid.
I saw it in pubs many times.
I think he was doing pretty fine on the hero, but he's yet to showcase it.
Maybe not good enough to his, you know.
But not a fault.
He's not level 25 yet.
Not exactly, yeah, it probably doesn't have the right to pick it, the Marge is just holding it back, but you know, if he does all-nighters after these group stage games gets back to the game.
Like of time, yeah, with the format he can grind in, I'd say like good 10, maybe 12 games of IO per day.
If they get out of the groups and top spots, then yeah, they get two extra days off basically.
Well, I'd say off, but we all know that these players are gonna die.
By the way, you are aware that at the moment we are having a little bit of tech issue.
We'll get that solved as soon as possible, but that is why you're still without a draft.
But it's the casters. It's the SCG. He's always holding us hostage.
That's true. What does that mean? Is it possible? And don't say it if it's not good.
It's good.
It's good.
So I participated in a French TV show that I happened to win, actually.
Hey, congrats!
What was it about?
Representing eSports.
It's a game called Werewolves.
So I don't know if you've heard of it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's basically like Mafia.
Yeah, one-night werewolves.
Exactly.
So they built like an actual real village, like in the woods.
And the game goes on for two weeks where every night is a real night anyway.
You know, I think I came in as a video game champion or something, so I think nobody really
expected that this guy has to be a hero.
But you're good at games!
They didn't know about Dota, right?
There were only a couple of candidates that knew about Dota, so they were very suspicious
of me.
They were like, well, this guy is a menace.
But then the others were like, it's probably just probably an urge, no big deal.
And then when the strategies started happening, it was already too late for them.
Were you a wolf?
And they lost.
No, I wasn't.
And the dimension was to one of the strategies that I set up there, that he appreciated I
guess, so thank you for that.
But either way, this isn't about that, this isn't about Dota, lots of strategies there
too.
I mean, there's a lot of strums that we can figure out here too.
Yeah, we talked about the Werewolves, there's one hero that's like a threat that I think
has been slightly underpicked as well.
I feel like this hero gives you pretty much everything, the Q lane push with your summon,
the helm with the shard once you pick it up straight at 15 minutes.
I just want to see more of this here.
I think this hero is going to be punishing most of the position 5 supports in the game
and a hero that you can always play the lane because it allows your position 4 to trade
with position 5 or just manipulate the creep wave, get the wave under your tower, drag
the creep wave with the wolves and everything.
So it feels like a very natural offlaner.
I think Nigma Galaxy, they played it too, maybe even three times out of the reasons
they are so successful is a lot of the times people have been saying that you
can't really lane like the lie said it in an interview that a lot of the time
from the off lane you need to have different mental getter right now this
is pretty much what it was back in the days when I was playing where you really
couldn't like every CS that you get it's like a small victory or like alright
let's bang out some fireworks because this feels really nice and then maybe if
you get a kill you're gonna be getting a couple of extra CS it's a because this
This is not an offlane meta. We had offlane meta like in the previous patches, the same pitch chief.
Yeah, I remember being coached at some point and the goal was 15 last hits at 5 minutes.
It's rough. It's been rough for offlaners, I think. Desperation, you know, we need therapy at this point.
Even the jungle camps are not so easy to beat. When everybody else is playing the game and you're struggling with your jungle camp,
you're like, should I get tangles? I'm going to get a salva, I think.
Is it worth it? Is it so much money? I could just walk back?
Walk back? Oh, I stack this at bad stack.
You know, it's like offlaners are playing a game of their own right now.
They don't want to tell about it. It's a bit shameful when you hear everybody talk about casting spells and outplaying your opponents
and you're just sitting there in the quiet jungle.
But it is what it is. You just have to go with what the game imposes against.
And it shapes the offline hero pool for sure as well, because we see a lot of heroes that rely on levels a lot, or at least are able to clear sacks later on as well.
Everything has an effect on everything.
I have to say that the one weakness that I could see talking about heroes on the fucking side is, I don't think Amar is necessarily playing the meta heroes.
Like, you know, we're talking about, like, and, you know, we've seen a lot of Dark Seers this tournament.
We see a decent amount of Largo.
These are not our heroes.
Like, I don't know.
He probably can play some of them, but it's definitely not his top picks.
At the same time, he's been known for being so good on what he does that it's always viable.
Kind of like his timber is will always be met up.
We're probably going to start seeing some Mars too, because I think Mars is like one of the best
Answer to Largo, Darkseer kind of teamfights.
Again, it's not meta heroes, but when you're on Mars, it's always meta.
So interesting to see if you can force these heroes in the meta this time around.
Yeah, Mars on paper kind of looks good because we are in the range turret meta
and like you can soak up quite a lot of that damage.
This is our draft by the way.
Our draft?
Yeah.
Okay.
So we had a Laspec Windranger and Centaur.
First pick, Nastra, we clock into Snaps.
Luna, sorry. I have to decide for all these sets a little bit.
They have double no, they actually have triple noa on the side of extreme gaming.
They have X noa, they have noa from Luna, and Supernova.
Well, this is a very cool approach from Xtreme in a sense.
I think they have much more solid lanes and early game presence with this draft.
You know, Luna Phoenix, very strong lane.
Hootwing Centaur, Absolute Classics, Sapphire Mid, nothing can go wrong.
We've seen the snap versus EarthBit, which was devastating for EarthBit.
I think the same might apply against Ember. I mean, Marine actually seemed to have picked
Ember into snap, but I don't think that lane is that easy for Ember.
And definitely not. I want to see more of Luna. I believe Luna currently is 0-2 when I was checking
the stats, some teams did pick it. On paper it kind of looks good against Nekro because it's a mixed
damage hero, you can try to burst him down with your Eclipse. Problem is you can't really get
that early axe anymore because now the 15th talent, well now like a couple months ago has been changed
to level 20 talent, so like the cooldown reduction the 42nd doesn't feel as good, so I want to see
what kind of approach Ami is going to have on this Luna. There's like a trend in you know high
I'm a more pubs on Luna where people actually play off the glaives and they buy blink rather early
Like I haven't seen Manta into blink or you know, you can go Manta BKB
Into I eventually the blink comes and it's a gameplay where Luna just blinks in with the glaives
It's really hard to turn on her because she has the eclipse going and damage reduction
You know, it's just too much damage. You kind of have to run away. It's an interesting approach
I think it's something we could see especially versus heroes like
or, you know, squishy heroes, you get on top of them, and all of a sudden the nature of
Teamfight just changes completely.
What do we feel about the two support combinations?
I believe it was our Hootlink Phoenix versus a Clockwork Ringmaster, has anything to say
about that?
I'm a big fan of Clockwork Ringmaster, I think these two heroes kind of naturally played
the map, it gives you save, it gives you teamfight, we saw a great performance yesterday from
save when he kind of, I'm not gonna say solo dominated the game because everybody was
dominant, but there was this 2-2 push attempt from extreme gaming and with the one good
wheel of wonder he completely stopped that fight and the game completely flipped.
You know, I mentioned a lot that the trio, which what I refer to when I say trio is like
position 5, position 4 and position 2.
And I think you really need to think of how the 3 versus 3 game is going to unfold nowadays
in Dora because these heroes are the ones that connect the most in the early game.
They fight for runes, they kick smokes to connect to side lanes to either defend towers
or attack towers.
Think about the difference here again, which I think is a little worrisome for Xtreme.
On one side you have Ember, Clock and Ringmaster.
They play together really well.
You have damage, you have control, you have Ember staying in the front, setting up for
the spells.
And on the other side you have the Hoodwink, Snap and Phoenix is like, what are these three
heroes supposed to do when they run into an enemy hero?
Who starts the fight?
None of them really want the front line. They don't want to get jumped on either like anyway
They need center for that. They need center
But center is not gonna look to connect early like not sure they can connect to him
But center yeah center is not gonna come to the rune center is not gonna defend ours
Like he's gonna be doing what centers or have been doing these days like by him of the Dome
You know stack replay stack for yourself farm the heart and the same with Luna like you don't want to X
You don't expect sure Luna can connect sometimes when it makes sense
but you can't rely on Luna for this kind of play.
So again, I'm a little bit skeptical on how they select like supports for the mid heroes,
even though, I mean, for instance, we've seen talking to Spirit to Snap mid, right?
And they had two mid support every time.
They had Triant, then they had Talkers.
And then, of course, Cookie is amazing because you have somebody in front of you to use it.
They're tanking damage and, you know, kind of eating the stuns for you so you get a full ulti on.
ulti on. Now the snap is just gonna get attacked because it has a hoodwink and a Phoenix, so
they also want some. Yeah, it doesn't really have protection and it doesn't have that plus
one combo that snapfire likes to have. Anybody that runs in, some clockwork, some test type
of a hero that just initiates the fight for her, so we're not gonna be seeing that. Not
gonna be that easy of a time for the mid snapfire. Look at that! We have ourselves a game on
the screen and we're gonna head over to Cap and SG to talk more about all of this.
There's quite a history between Extreme Gaming and Falcons, that's playing out on the screen
as the going into this game immediately Falcons, both Maureen and Amar, because of course,
them being the duo that they are, they are quite the schemers, they started off just immediately
tipping their opponent in lane.
Is that bad?
I don't know.
I'll have to do that?
I don't know.
I think it's just interesting.
They're just good natured boys.
Yeah, just trying to get in the heads of Extreme Gaming a little bit.
We be trying to get in their hearts Austin
The bonds of friendship are formed and about that on the battlefield of Dota as they say
Nothing, yeah, there's no game that pretty much you make over the course of your career with
I made you as a friend. Okay. I didn't never play against you in a competitive tree
That was all formed outside of the game. Yeah, maybe there's just something to say about that
We're not friends in the game. We'll tell your friends with said now with said. Yeah
Well, yeah, you took a pause on that one. It's doing it too. You know, everybody's friendly.
It's friendliest game in the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very friendly. Very
room for Falcons here. Nice little start for them. I think both these drafts are pretty
well rounded. I get what the panel is talking about in terms of the triangle, the three on
three between the supports in the mids going against each other skirmish wise. I think
I think it's generally hard to have a favorable trio against Ember,
because Ember just sets up any support in the game.
You can literally play anything with this hero and it's pretty reliable as long as he doesn't get cheesed on the lane.
So in that sense, I think it always just looks a little nicer.
But I think Snap can kind of play on the frontline on her own if she wins the lane.
I think that can bring ranged supports into the game.
I don't mind this trio from Extreme Gaming, as long as NTS has a good time.
Because I don't think you can kind of run in, sometimes you can just blast Cookie yourself,
or you can just start kills with kisses going in, and if there's a bush wax someone dies.
Amar, it's in trouble already, almost gets burned down, Fairy Fire will keep him alive
for now, but this high magic damage duo is causing some issues now, like Snowbaugh might
be the one to die instead, he's got another Fairy Fire coming up, but unfortunately the
the cooldown just lasts too long between consumables.
So it ends up being, he's the one to die.
And this is what we saw yesterday from XG,
just a lot of weird deaths,
not a lot of synergy in the first 10 minutes.
They just seemed off.
That's another death I just don't think should happen,
level one, unless you really get caught out of position.
You have a Luna lane.
These dual lanes are generally really strong.
Luna can contribute the beams early.
Fire spirits is very strong, level one.
Necro is not that great level one.
If this is a hero, you should win the first two waves against and try to get damage to that.
So, in fact, you fit a kill down here, not helping your cause, especially against a boot's first clockwork.
The Luna pick's very interesting. We do not see this hero almost at all.
Can be a strong hero against Necrophos, though.
He hijacked the madstone.
Got a value right there. Mega value.
I kind of like seeing Luna come out a little bit more.
See if it works here for Almey, what kind of build he opts for after this.
It is a good Mask of Madness, Hero Mask of Madness is pretty strong right now.
And it's a good Ancient Clear from the carry roll, which I feel
is always pretty valuable to have as you go into that mid-game.
It don't have it on any other roll, so...
Good mid-game killer for certain heroes that can be abused by magic damage like Necrofoscan.
Sure, right, you're gonna go to the Mask of Madness, you're gonna go Manta, then you're go...
Aggin and Sumter.
Nice, that's been the Stanford build for a bit.
That's where I'm not sure if you want the Ags this game.
You're playing into the Escape Act, which is pretty debilitating for the spell.
There's some mobility here with Ember and Windranger being able to get out of an AoE.
I kind of prefer the physical Luna, just as a concept here.
I also think their lineup is very magic damage heavy on the other four heroes.
So you need some physical to bounce it out.
If he goes Ags, then you're just kind of hauling.
The itemization becomes too easy for Falcons. You're just gonna buy pipes, you're gonna buy glimmer tapes, and what do any of these heroes do against it?
So, I'm not sure I want to see the agg built here. I think you just play this luna traditional.
You get some hybrid damage off the eclipse, that's good enough.
Man, Mar is doing some work in this lane.
Considering how low he got...
Almost dying and giving up first blood has now turned into potentially getting two kills as X-Nilba has to pop another fairy fire.
Amé is pushed out of position again and again by the Cogs.
Amar's gonna get close enough for another round of deathpulse with the blood grenade chasing him down.
Another kill in lane.
This duo just cannot be defeated, it seems.
Crit and Amar just taking the offlane by storm.
And a meta where we've talked about how the offlane is struggling, not for Falcons.
There you get both.
That's how it just lingers around.
And this is all Seta stacks for Amar, so he just gets all his resources refilled instantly.
It was like the easiest double kill of his life.
Just death pulse 10 times, got about 1,000 gold out of it, already level 4, gets to pull
some of this wave.
Lunalane not working out and again how much of that goes back to the early level 1 misstep.
You feed that kill, they get some lane equilibrium, they're able to double wave you into the tower
and just abuse death pulse, you can't shove it out fast enough.
Really compounded there in terms of these small errors adding up for XG, not what they
wanted to see on this safe lane.
Man, they were just about to hit level 3 on the Phoenix, where I feel like level 3, Loonon, Phoenix, is where you really start getting very strong, and, well, maybe you've already given up too much net worth to Falcons, but that to be the case anymore.
How's our other off-lane doing 20 and 0, so the Centaur's not doing much better than our Loonon when it comes to CS?
He's chilling though. R.E.S. Hell won't divide any more regen, so his net worth should go up from here pretty considerably.
And the mid lane matchup, NTS and Maureen are neck and neck.
Network.
Pretty nice for Maureen.
I think this lane mainly comes down if you can dodge some of the scatter blasts.
You dodge even one or two.
Kind of a street farm here.
Pretty much half the land.
Everything is a snapfire to potentially look for that kill before level 6, even then it's
pretty difficult.
I'm extremely already thinking about, okay, how are we going to shut this Necrophos down?
Because Amar is jacked, man.
He's the level 5 highest net worth in the game.
He's 500 up on Skeeter right now on Network.
Mid lane rotation, plug your name, it's going to land, hit it with the cogs.
Nothing to say, another round of cogs lands.
He's got a Scanner Blast coming up in a second, but that will not be up in time to stop Maureen.
Just rolls on through.
Is this going to be another situation where Ex-Nova just dies alongside his core?
No, Maureen forced out, but still, extreme gaming continue to suffer,
and the Sapphire is going to be late for the Power Rune,
so that kind of sets Maureen up for even more success.
It's going to heal, come back, he's going to be full resources for this fight,
including Ward Plus Sentry, or some extra vision control.
Should go his way.
Maybe a shield during top.
I don't think Fy's going to be able to deny it here.
Kissing is ready to get on Amar, Amar trying to get close enough that kisses that minimum range, but
can't really close that gap fast enough. So nothing to say makes the most of his death with a good rotation.
For sure.
To try and slow down Amar, who is...
I mean, he almost has boots of travels already.
Somebody had to kill this hero.
He was out of control.
And that's a big kill to find in this early game, salvage is a bit, FYI gets a bunch of experience mid.
Maul ring, does a smart play, pulls the waves, forces creeps onto the tower before NTS
could back their hand he officially farms little stacks so super nice little mechanics
from him.
X-XS not too happy about that as he's still a little ways away from the dominator.
Don't be careful about your wisdom shrine here this is a shield or an ember very strong
just sitting there with that.
Ah yeah how do you fight this?
I feel like you have to teleport in Luna or something.
Some cores need to be here otherwise they just have to give this up.
They make the call to give it up.
Hey, maybe get the kill on xxs2. Oh, okay, this is getting way out of control
Now the power shot it looks like Skeeter may not have enough mana for it
Snake King is gonna be dove and killed so all right extreme do get something out of it
I don't think the trade-off is that great, but especially if they lose all my bottom. Oh, yeah, he's being run down
Looks like that was the cause that already hit him so
Amé is a bit lucky, he spared a bit of damage, but where does he go from here?
Skeeter's already teleporting onto the tower. Amé is gonna get sandwiched
somewhere in here. Spot him with off of the rocket flare, and he's just not fast enough.
Reaper Scythe will get the kill, and that's a stack for Amar. Not only did he waste a lot of time,
there he ends up dying to the Reaper anyway. Rage is just gonna instantly come in so you
You can just focus by this tower. Easy tier 1 rotation for Skeeter.
Things looking solid for Falcons. Maybe he was snaking again.
Yeah, Falcons just trying to, yeah, get the ingredient.
Take too much off the map.
Not keeping Ember up here.
Oh, he almost got him with another double edge. Okay, man.
They got him now, but Maureen shows up, kills Courier, and probably kills Ex-Nova, too, with no dive.
He has no outs here. He stole the level.
Well, 4 and a half without getting that wisdom shrine.
and you're in big trouble here.
This is a poor, old team pool of mine for Falcons.
They have a huge advantage in these early fights.
Yeah, the other way to recover level says support
if you don't get the wisdom shrine stacks.
But Maumreen already took some of the medium stacks.
Now, the Sapphire's gonna clear out the others
without the Phoenix being there.
They got a deep work on that triangle, ever.
So even if you go and stack it,
it's actually, it's very contestable here
from Falcons Embers, a very good stack.
Which travels on, and the creep stays alive long enough
from Remar to show up.
And now, nothing to say, it's just going to be run down underneath the tower.
Now, Omi's going to cut in here.
He does have the eclipse.
He goes after Amar, but none of the Lucent Beams really went to Amar at all.
They still have the kisses, though, and maybe that's enough magic damage.
The final couple of hits to land.
Crit, nice dive there for Ex-Nova, trying to get in front of Crit.
And with the Fire Spirit's burning him out, he has a chance here.
That final one, too many resources.
Crit has double Lotus.
Hasn't had to use any of it off the lane.
Instead, it's Ex-Nova to die.
Yet again, a bushwhack goes out, holding back Maureen for a second.
A bit wise in trouble though, a big whip to bring him down.
Crick threatens, oh the cookie actually plays against Aume as he gets bounced into the cogs.
Falcons are low, but Extreme Gaining do not have the power to stop the retreat.
Can't get Maureen there. If he'd saved Cookie, he might have just been able to kill him.
It's very low on resources.
He skirts out of there. I do like the rotations from Extreme Gaming.
I think this is how you want to abuse Luna in these batches, be able to tip her into dives and just eclipse people down.
Kind of unfortunate with the beams there.
Kisses are killing this Necrol.
Oh, helmet dominated, that's why.
He's got his helmet died, so I double deny it.
I found it in your room, so I was like, what's this happening?
He's stacking the wave top, so...
This Sunfire will start to pick up the farm rate, but just a rough early game for all of me.
And I feel like this has been the trend leaning against Necrols.
No one's really been able to...
Have a good time against this hero.
And it's part of the strength of the necrophos in these early games
I don't feel like you should you should start up with a little bit more like
tri-lane action that used to be the case that is so momentum dependent Maureen
jumping in fearlessly is that vision still there by the way yeah that falcon
just gonna keep playing around it and he thought he was a high ground war they
missed it scouting the station stack Maureen doesn't want to let NTS start to
It's pretty low right now too.
This is up in 10.
It's a hard fight to take.
Maybe better just to pressure this mid tower some more.
Snake King keeps coming back.
I mean, they gotta know about it at this point, this is getting ridiculous.
Weird vacuum around this mid tier one.
Again, the supports are actually just so low level. You don't really want to run up and interact with this ember at all. You're just food
So you're just kind of watching Maureen have his way around this mid lane
Yeah, I think you said ex nobo was level four and a half like two minutes ago, and he's still he's still
Yeah, he's not got a lot done an early rod of eight toes trying to sneak a kill onto the ember spirit saved by the box
So kind of in the bush whack though jumps away to the red net
This is the final glade to do the trick, nothing to say now with the kids to train down on Skeeter.
Double core kills for Extreme Battle, bring him back into the game in a big way.
That is just a confusing sequence, because if you're Falcons, you're in a dangle, you're Ember like that.
Why does he not just have the remnants to get out?
Another Radovatos kill, okay, the whip pushes him back, but they have the cookies, still the land, stops the unicycle, followed up with the bushwhack.
This early Radovatos has paid already.
I was gonna question if it was gonna do anything here, but giving a little extra stun power
It's a nice setup stuff. They don't really have the lead-off initiation
Like who starts these chain stuns and apply with a very clutch push whack. There's a remnant out
But that's his last remnant. So where did all the other ones go?
He was just dancing with the arcane earlier. I guess
Even loose gear on top of it pretty much if this has to her for Falcons
Yeah, it's such a nice lead going in
2000 plus lead now cut down to pretty much nothing and I do enjoy seeing XG play a little
more together and with some decisive moves in this game than we saw yesterday they just
looked very lethargic yesterday especially that game too I felt like they just tilt it
out of that one completely here they're at least you know make it some moves joining
up bringing Aume into the action I think they always look best when Aume is not zero zero
zero at 30 minutes but that's his signature that's not a good signature smoke
bush whack a little kill here on crit perhaps no actually the sharpshooter
thanks he's quite a new enough damage crit he's got uh i guess urn is enough combined
that with the neutral item the polywog charm he actually chose the hp regen brought of eight
toes on the ember spirit could he get the ember spirit again another box save trying to wheel to
Stop it. What a beautiful hit. Catch it three. That is beautiful. Could they fight off this one?
Especially Necropo is coming through the back. They kill like Stova. Now run down xxs as well.
Just like that. Balkans is back in control. That's what I bought that first fight around
Mitchell. Looks like when the Ember has remnants, he can get out. He's just baiting you to try and
all in him. If you mess that up, you're going to pay a massive price.
He just decided to commit here.
If you get supernova off this fight might look a little different, but I think Ember
gets out no matter what.
This is the power of Ringmaster in this game.
He can always just fail his heroes out.
He's smelled bad.
He just definitely didn't even see the Necropos gun.
No.
Beautiful position from Snakey.
He knows where to be, who he's supposed to play behind and just bails that entire situation
out.
Bring us or so strong in these early game fights when you full commit into him.
Especially if he's got multiple saves available, right now he's got a strong Mantronic ready
to go.
So, what do you think's in that thing?
Probably like the same Gojuice or whatever that's in Fortnite.
Is EWC sponsored by any energy drink?
Cause that's what's in it, if we are, I'll play that much.
7 to 11 Falcons
Gotta be feeling pretty good about this game. The scale though is not super clear to me just because
Extreme have sapphire if that hero is just goddamn ridiculous
When you go ATO's first your scale those become worse
It's kind of a dead item scale wise gives you a lot more early game potential
Sure does fit NTS style within this team, but it is not the hard scale build up either in the magic or the physical
The Crocker stop into Crocker stomp very nicely played from xxs
But once again lacking in the damage critches has just enough HP to survive. It's clockwork
It's just a beat
It's not the guy you want to throw big ults on and why he is gonna die as well
No levels of scurry already is the sharpshooter. So
Very fast reaction from the Falcons. They got all five down here. Quick.
That's the power of the boots to travel. Necrophos Radiance already up, gets another Reaper site stack.
He is vibing in this game right here.
It's going to pose a big scale issue for XG. If the Necrophos can get through a fast BKB, your lineup does nothing against him.
Yeah, all the more reason for Luna not to go the aggs in this game.
I wonder if I'm hiding from this.
It's no good.
Everything for XG points towards him wanting to fight earlier.
We still haven't seen a good supernova. You have a lot of early game new damage.
You went blink on the centaur, not the hard build.
You went eight toes on the snap, not an early boots travel or something.
So you want to put these items to use.
You need to be finding some kills, getting some sort of chain kill sequence going
into getting on Falcon's side of the map.
This would be the dream.
And then Luna can choose to join some of those fights if they look advantageous or just maybe take a free Tier 1 on his own if things are going your way.
Instead, you're kind of bleeding power runes to Maureen.
These gank attempts aren't working, they're getting turned around by the Ringmaster.
They're gonna feel a little bad farming the map right now.
Especially when, you know, Falcons is doing it probably more efficiently.
Two man smoke up Maureen, pushes through the mid lane.
And Crit smokes him after the way it pushes in.
Snake King will join them.
Very strong power.
Nine on both supports.
This connects.
Kills anybody here.
And they know just where to go.
Ooh, I thought they'd pinged it.
I thought they were going to go and catch Ames Luna.
But instead, they're going to set up in the triangle,
see if maybe somebody walks into them.
And that is going to be Ames walking into them.
There goes the wheel.
The wind lands the hit and ties.
He's dead
Read him like a book they know that luna faring pattern it has to be around this ancient camp
Nowhere else he can be in this game
It's too easy
And what what's the counter on the map in terms of map pressure rate you have heroes basically hiding bottom
for XG trying to just
Pick somebody off who shows on this wave going in a little bit. Yeah, it's like fire spirits from a distance and then the
uh... how the dumb creep
grabbing waves and pushing them in or whatever but
xxs does uses on the dump three pretty well f y's gonna die again again
still level seven so still no levels of scurry still cannot get away
all the repersite stack
star nata bear a little bit
they didn't find anything on that bottom play falcons
not showing anybody down here again on less thinking is behind you
You want to push this dangerous lane out?
Just sit the ringmaster there, and then even if they go on you, you get a good turn around fight.
Playing this map really smart right now.
Giving XG no openings.
At some point, I think you just have to smoke in deep and get some good wards out or force a fight
on top of a tower.
If you're that confident in early game spell powers, doable here with a good supernova placement.
Yeah, this is maybe your one chance here.
Tormeter's going to spawn in a minute, so if you don't get something going here,
Power shot goes off, scatter blasts, so both sides kind of know there's some enemies lurking in the area.
The difference is, falcons feel very comfortable.
Ember Spirit's ready to go for a TP to that bottom tier 1 tower, and Necrophos has the boots of travel,
so they can play the map more efficiently right now while having this kind of a bit of a standoff.
Yeah, Worth is slowly going their way, able to show on more waves with more heroes.
That'll do it here.
Mars level 16.
He's a beast.
But it's not okay.
It's what the hero does.
He just runs around the map, farms everything, vacuums it up, he gets kills on top of it,
he's gonna be mega high level.
And his BKB is gonna be done, it seems like before the next fight because Extreme Gaming
just can't seem to find that fight.
Make it happen again dealing with a lot of deep vision. I at this point if your moves
He's seemingly being read all the time might be the time to take a cue out of some of the other teams and buy that early
Jam, you know
Could be an option here especially for the Phoenix not a hero that needs super early items early smoke from Falcons
Clear out this bottom area.
If you don't get anything, you can probably still feel confident enough to take Tormentor.
Oh yeah, follow me on your unskier, you're just going to go in there folks, fire it.
Easy objective take.
Again, I like this kind of smoke, even when it doesn't land you're getting something for
your trouble.
You're going to a good part of the map right now.
There's a croaker scouting something down here, I don't think it's going to stir falcons.
But you're gold and...
Oh, where's Skeeter going?
They are deterred.
Interesting, they didn't just pull the trigger on that.
They really thought that a smoke plate was coming their way.
That's the only reason you hesitate there.
Yes, I mean they do have very deep vision and somehow they're not seeing any heroes
so I can kind of see how they come to that conclusion.
Sure.
It's actually just because Extreme Gaming are all playing the other side of the map.
They also just finished the Mars BKB. Any TV's down here.
So maybe they just said, hey, give me 20 more seconds all BKB.
If they do contest, we're happy to take that fight.
That'll be a spotlight for the Ringmaster.
Not bad here in Saluna.
Sure.
It's a pretty good illusion of use here.
Well, not against the spotlight.
Speaking of Luda, we can see Aume's plan for the build-up this game. BKB, Blink Dagger, MKB.
Why, just Blink start hitting Mineranger?
I mean, Luda does always kind of have a bit of like, she's fast, but it always feels like it's...
You want to be on top of heroes a little bit faster than she usually can.
Oh, I agree. Swift Blink is super good on some of these split-shot heroes. Dusa, Gyro, Luna, I think
are all natural Swift Blink fires as the game progresses. In the games where you don't have it,
I think you just feel a little impotent. Like, how do you get in there and start getting hits all
fast enough when the control lands? So, I wouldn't mind the Blink Dagger here. I just wonder if he's
going to do enough physical DPS to be able to force fights into this BKB timing.
I was always thinking, yeah, is it going to be any good to make that kind of commitment?
Because I don't think you're ever going to start a fight on an important hero with a
stun.
Right?
Like all their stuns are pretty well telegraphed.
You can add DKB on this necrophos.
Well, one option that gives them is if you're sending the Centaur into initiate fights and
stun, the Lunar can kind of blink past that and look for the Ringmaster who's naturally
They're gonna go in and try and save this first point of contact.
I'm sure.
You can jump past the guy, pop BKB Eclipse.
You might just kill Snaking as he's trying to throw out an escape act.
Then you can take the fight off of that.
Just supernova on top of the Luna, wherever he goes in.
I kind of like that idea here.
If it all comes together, it could be nice.
If Falcons just get to farm to triple BKB, this game is gonna become very difficult.
Smoke through to Triangle, Extreme Gaming, and back down, they're going to make a smoke of their own, it's going to break on the mid lane.
Aame, not going to be hypnotized, but he's going to be slowed down, he needs some heals here.
He doesn't want to pop the BKB too early.
Quite the waste, but still the whole team is really building up, he's going to have to BKB, BKB to stay feed.
And there goes the fighting. Street gaming can no longer take it. It's just about trying to get as many heroes out as soon as possible.
And why? We'll die yet again.
That's so annoying if you're on it.
You know, he's taking the front of this point of attack, and there's just no counterplay.
Like you landed some soft stuns on this Ember, but you can't full commit to him, especially with the skate back behind.
Ringmaster is really causing their lineup a lot of issues.
And some of that is nothing to say, but he had to, ooh,
Rotovato, Sand Stomp, both do not land.
And that is a wasted kisses.
So no PKB on Luda, no kisses.
That is a green light to take Roshan.
You're super in a way to fight the bet.
He's still a clips.
Is that really good at the NFL?
Y'all some don't have on me.
He's not coming back.
Just conceding his objective.
I think he's frustrated.
It's like, I just got a farm.
Die as bottom top, is under attack.
Scary to get away this objective though.
The basic guarantees Falcons can decide when the next fight happens
and if they want to wait for more BKBs to come out, they can absolutely do that.
As more and more magic resists, enters the playing field here for Falcons,
the fight should become more and more difficult.
I don't disagree, but at the same time, doesn't it already feel like Falcons
are leading that tempo?
Yeah, they are.
Those decisions, you know?
It feels like in many ways extreme gaming the failures of the early game have just left them with no other choice
But okay, we have to dodge rat
Play for you know the game extending. So why is why same wise way to put it mr. Wall
What
Nice stuff nice bush whack nothing to follow it up with
Mm-hmm
Hey, these gozers kind of sad. Yeah, they're very sad. I have no words of advice in this game
You got back-to-back stuns on two different cores and you could do nothing with it
There wasn't even the idea of something
Oh, man, we'll take the off-lane tower at least do a little gold in their pocket
But here comes Falcon, saying,
Chris has that combo, Jetpack plus Blink Dagger, they have to fight.
There's no way out of this one, they pop the eclipse, they can kill Snake King maybe,
actually does die, and a BKB teleport away from Amé, a supernova is going to be used,
trying to protect nothing to say, who also BKB can also TP away, and it'll be X-Novo left behind.
Honestly, that might be about as good as it gets for Extreme.
That was really weird. Crit had hookshot. I think he could have just hookshot the Luna.
But they get everybody out, okay? Not a bad sequence for extreme gaming.
I mean, considering the fact that they are unlikely to be taking teamfights anyway, it doesn't really matter if the DKBs are down.
Probably not.
And in this storm, I'm saying that Luna can play this zone game against the Ring. Like, you come in and box sky flat, I'll just kill you.
killed you. Seriously? Yeah, I think you just hook shot him there.
It's good to him. And then he hook shots the guy who hasn't TP'd yet. So I don't know what
he was looking at, or because I was watching him, I'm like, all right, there's no way
I'm going to be able to TP out of here. Because Chris is going to sit on the edge of the fight
and wait for you to do something. I think I actually should have lost more there.
Yeah, missed opportunity for sure. Maybe some mercy show, you know. It's like, we'd be
you in the TI Grand Final, so I'm gonna...
I don't want to humiliate you.
I can't. Oh, shut up. I like him too much, you know?
He's a legend.
He's my idol.
My mouse was slippery, guys. I don't know what happened.
He plays Clinkz just like me.
That's true.
No, they're stellar.
I also have never understood that.
How did Critt's favorite hero become Clinkz?
You know him from way back.
Where did that start?
Maybe when he was playing Ploves and he had to play Core, he had a very small pool of heroes that he would like to play Core on.
And I think he's kind of that hipster Core player where he doesn't like to play the super meta stuff.
So it's this weird pool of clink, troll, and something else I forget, the third hero.
Hero attack fast?
Yes.
He likes to swing.
Try to get back to base. Stomp comes through. They go straight for the Wind Ranger, but again, the box is there and it stalls up a lot of things.
Skeeter's still stuck though, and he is going to lose the Aegis.
Okay.
Now, the Street Minion and just reset.
Oh, they got the Centaur, and they hypnotized the Wheel Clipsim.
They will lose at least one.
Couldn't find Maury, even though he runs out of Remnants.
That fight didn't look too bad though.
It did.
The Luna actually looked pretty good there.
With the Serrated Shift, getting some extra attack speed as well.
Like, he did some solid damage, just being in the middle of everybody.
If he had an MKB, he might kill two more heroes.
I think in many ways they're doing a good job of like,
Trying to dodge and Falcons are so you know if they want to be able to take the fight to them
They're like okay these guys don't want to fight us and they're punishing the positioning that comes out of Falcons extending so far
Hold I agree
I think that she's read of what's going to happen in the file 5's is spot on like you recognize that this back line
It's gonna come forward when you go in initially with the centaur and you're kind of not trying to over commit on that first target
But kill the supports that come in or that necrophosive over extends
You just don't have enough staying power right now, but I still liked our atomization
They went back for the bots on the snap. It was pretty necessary in this game
You have Lotus Orb on Centaur. You have Grease on Hoodwink, and you have Pipe on Phoenix
So they actually have a decent amount of 5-man utility, making these fights a lot easier even though they're behind
And that is something I think we should see more against Necro. Like Pipe is really good against this hero
The glimmers are really good. The late game win-win goes right. Utility generally ruins this hero.
Offensive utility too in Nullifier. That's one of the ways. Yeah, Necro is always gonna be super farm super fat
But if you buy the right items against him his net worth doesn't count for as much as a lot of other heroes because he's so one-dimensional
Centaur cart could be begin this game too if they eventually get there
Oh, yeah, yeah, that's actually so safe. I think there, you know, this is a Necro ringmaster lineup
You will need a nullifier here at some point. I don't know who buys it
Yeah, you're gonna get the centaur nullifier. I don't know. What's the plan here? Honestly, could win nullifier?
Yeah, that might be your best option
Well, there's another quick pick off snaking doing to work with this ring master in yeah, really is ballerina has this egg
An acceptor by the way
I mean of the the heroes from what we've cast it anyway
I feel like these are the two bids of the tournament staff fire and ember spirit both have some insane
Timings that we've seen ember spirit for sure eggs just
Devastate more than like usual. I can't figure out why that is the case, but it feels like ember spirit is doing so much more with eggs
in this tournament than some previous metas.
There are a lot of ranged supports
to get later now.
And we're just easy squishy heroes. Yeah, you like being able to just
dunk on some of these good wings and stuff. Yeah.
Retired heroes are also a little susceptible to, right?
They can be sometimes a bit squishy, especially if they can't hit anything.
Sure. They're often times dependent on life steal for HP.
HP.
Wonderful see some more mixed assassins at some point.
Has an answer to some of these mobility mids.
Sure. I mean it's good versus both of them, right?
Both snap in.
Yeah, Amber.
It is a hero that's good against Necropos too, in some ways.
You're sure?
I'd like to see that hero a little bit more.
The Skullfield mix or something.
But neither of these teams really play.
I guess FY does play that hero.
was playing it kind of the first half this year and then it just disappeared
but these chinese games historically do like nix's ass and it's a hero that
cannot can give them some nice map play against the european games like there's a reason we saw
jinn q be really successful with that hero and some and some big games later on in lands so
maybe going back to some of those ideas to help pick some of these heroes off and give you some
nice map play could be interesting i'm gonna see a quick smoke from extreme gaming they did get
get that gem on the phoenix giving them a little more
vision confidence here
oh you you don't want this fight
that you don't want this it's fighting streak
i don't know that mkb on the luna it's a nice timing it's an amp damage them
all regions picked up okay but he is
septic is no bkb right if you all in him and you catch the ringmaster in a
stop the same time
it's doable
that he gets bursted
not easy they see the couriers floating in
they're gonna run in skidder but skidder is gonna be on the high ground he got off the bkb
You mentioned a decent amount of damage right away with the blink forward from the extreme, but it's not good enough
And now they've used their stampede and now they're deep on enemy territory and Maureen goes straight for the throat
He's got that amp damage. He goes right to the middle hits a slide here James
It's not a knackereful, it's in the box. You managed to get the box though. The box coming out
Here comes the kisses though and he's being slowed down the magic damage Maureen jumps back in once again
It's that change though. He has to be aware of the glaze glaze a lot of damage
He's got him inside the bushwack, now a mark.
He came back in and tried to help out the Emberspear,
but he might just die as well.
Got a river site that's not enough.
Mame goes down, and now the heals start kicking in,
and look at it.
He's outhealing every bit of damage.
They all have to retreat.
There is nothing more extreme gaming can do here.
Every man for himself.
They're going to lose Jim, too.
They have no TPs left.
It is going to be three dead on the side.
Oh, that was so close.
There's a lot of things that might
We've been able to push that fight over the edge for XG with this beautiful MKB timing.
It did so much work there, but some beautiful kiting from Valken's, a very clutch escape
act that bought so much time in that fight and that Reaper kill landed.
It must have been without 5% margin or less.
Yeah, that was pretty close.
So, big confirmation, they're all together.
There's what you want to see, good egg timing.
You're able to fight around it.
If that box doesn't come through this fight, looks way more one-sided because I think ATF
goes down for sure.
That's why you need a nullifier in this game.
If you can nullifier them, you win this fight convincingly.
Instead, he's going to get the regen up a lot.
He gets to split the damage.
Great re-initiation from Crit.
This bookshot cogs does a lot here
to buy time for Amar to find the opening.
And then once that happens, the fight's over.
You cannot win these fights without doing it on the battlefield.
It's just impossible.
We also saw at the beginning of this clip
the kiting they were talking about from Falcons.
They used pipe really early on the center.
Sorry, I think it was pretty ineffective.
I think it just got almost entirely kited,
combined with the fact that they actually used BKBs
towards the end of the timing.
I do wonder if that's one of those things
that could have changed that fight
to the favor of Extreme.
But instead, Falcons take it,
and they, of course, in Falcons' way,
are just going to grow that net worth advantage.
They're up to 19k, have it, ages.
Now it feels like a lead that Extreme Gaming,
even with these specific items
that they'd grabs, it's not enough.
It's gonna be rough without nullifier
to all in single target for somebody.
It's still causing them a lot of issues.
Ex-excess, and again.
I mean, he's got that ag at himself there.
That stops the Reaper's sight.
That's hard though.
That's hard to play for.
Yeah.
I think the,
it's just not easy to get the cart on the guy
right when the reaper's about to connect.
You have to be really close to him.
There's an animation.
And there's a whole bunch of weird stuns and slows going on.
There's the cobs, which are really annoying.
Like, we go back to that fight.
Even if you had axe, what have you been able to cart on, eh?
After the reaper went out, no.
You could have carted him before that
and kind of prevent you targeting him for five seconds,
right?
Yeah.
So there is.
You could be more proactive with it this game, maybe?
And then he can hold this BKB for longer.
I kind of like that. It is a good item here.
Which just means Falcons shouldn't take this high ground push for granted.
No. This push can still go wrong.
Here comes the fast damage on the windranger.
Almost got the Aegis Duke at the Aegis.
Okay, that's the box down too.
I don't think it can take advantage of this.
More is going to go in creature space.
More is going to go in the hold shot.
Actually, but they put him inside the cart at the same time.
That was a wild one.
Aume, they could sense the targeting from Falcons.
Now this is a bit weird because now it's Extreme Gaming who are lacking in some tools.
No BKB man to no cart.
Gotta play through Supernova if you're gonna take this fight.
That's your best chance, but no BKB on Ame.
Super scary for him to go in against the Reaper site.
Constant spam of Amear on the front lines.
The death pulse as he said.
They just don't really have the single target focus without the nullifier.
It's gonna let the lane go.
Yeah.
I think I'll make me the call. I'm not fighting without PKB.
That's fair. That's fair.
Sheva's done...
for nothing to say.
And he's got the cookie charges.
Big talent. A lot of damage coming out from that.
And they actually go for the Necronos. See if they can all in with the Supernova.
The box save does go out, but Amar doesn't go very far here.
He's still burning, but they actually didn't try and keep it going. They
Felt like it wasn't man. They got him down to half health and said no
That is an insanely disciplined
said not see that necrophos get low and
Actually make the call the back. Maybe it was the right call
But either way insanely disciplined very hard to know I could see a world over if anything there goes really wrong without
He gave you an army like I'll see a world. You should have just sent it. Maybe that's an opportunity. You won't get back in this game
If they can connect the stun on the ringmaster when they go in that's what they're looking for every time
They've been very close to accomplishing that. That's another instance where they almost had it
Again, the idea is about the fights having good fear from extreme gaming
They're just really difficult to execute and honestly snaking has been on point. I mean, I should give this ringmaster some credit
It's not easy to position the ringmaster in any game like this with the low
cast range escape act when there are multiple AOE stuns that can go in. So
the prop stand, it's often played really well around this hero.
He doesn't have an ether lens or anything, right? He's just a blink dagger, so he's got a blink in,
but make sure he doesn't get caught in the stomp, doesn't get caught in the bush whack.
You get caught in one of these stuns before the box, because out that fight is going to look
very one-sided. So, and this will help him. Definitely a big item for him here. He recognizes
the power of escape back to this game without a nullifier on the field which
again who's gonna build one here I nobody's even eyeing it they're just gonna
try and power through it which is an interesting idea double plungers cat
catalyst definitely helps
the supernovas are gonna be a big deal in this game as we go later later
because there's no one who's gonna kill it on side of falcons he should be
guaranteed for Exnova and as a Phoenix player when you feel that's the situation you want to get really aggressive with them
Right, and then if they do try and turn around that's a dream opportunity for Luna, right?
So actually with Luna or orbit
Smoke does get broken all the hoodshot gets blocked. That just gets blinked in and actually hit the hoodshot kind of awkward for him there
We precise gets used low to start bounce. I was I didn't do any doctor the centaur that is not good at all for
Valkans, Maureen still opts to go in. He tries to stop him, he pops BKB, Sunray trying to heal up X-XS,
can he keep alive? Maureen's trying to get away with the cart, but just leave. Maureen is full committed to get this kill on the Centaur.
He's going to get himself killed, and he didn't even get his mark.
And why did he go back in there, right?
Why? Why?
Yeah, I don't understand, because the best-case scenario, even if you somehow kill Centaur and get out,
how is that risk-roared ratio in your favor?
Oh yeah.
You're not gaining objectives out that because the win ranger was so low
You're gonna have to back up there anyways Falcons that just felt like a weird misstep
In terms of that Falcon consistency and discipline were used to seem and it's it starts with actually catching them off guard
They're walking to this base probably setting some play up and they just get jumped a mark throws out a reaper on the center
I was getting folks fired, but he's tanking up to survive. It actually got loads back on to him, too
And now you just have to bail and while you're bailing
I think he felt he was going to be able to clean him up faster in the BKB TV out.
And I think that is a reasonable play if you execute it.
But damn, that's Centaur tanky.
And again, is the risk-reward ratio in your favor on that play?
Even if you get him out, probably not.
It's a 17,000 net worth of Centaur and you're a 22,000 net worth.
Exactly.
It's just not that big a deal.
sudden that small mistake is going to compound here, Swift blink done for Aame, he hit level 25
so he gets the extra Lunar Blessing damage. So, lest he rolled the Flare's Bota, his DPS is pretty
insane here. I think you have to Reaper him now. Maybe Skeeter kills him if he can land a good Shackle.
That was the other part, they use Kirk as Fire and Reaper's Scythe on Centaur. Which just cannot
be the play. Yeah. Alright, there's no way you can commit both of those ults to the Centaur. This
So this game is about Luna, and you need to respect that.
I'm sure Falcons, I mean, they see all those mistakes, they're not gonna do it again in
the next fight.
No.
It'll definitely change here.
They might also just try and slow this game down and farm into some more saves, some more
sustainability, make the teamfights a little easier for their cores to play sitting up
there to get some of the Luna burst damage.
lot of item slots to fill here they want to slow this game down get another
shard why not this will be the nobody's cuz they have them all okay just some
two people will give wisdom shrine over to the Sapphire nothing to say is a bit
low level they would love to have nothing to say to finish up both
refresher and be 25
After the Tormentor, Falcon, smoke up, and sweep across the whole map and look at Exnova,
drawn the line perfectly.
Very good rearing out.
They got out some deep vision.
They're going to dodge the smoke tank.
Do you want that kind of deep vision?
I feel like there's deep here.
Yeah, I feel like there's a very good chance that that vision does nothing for you from
here on out.
The one thing it could do is scout the setup from Falcons going into a, like, radiant side
Roshan that could have spawned here in these two minutes.
It's going to be a late-row spawn, so it'll actually spawn pretty much, yeah, it'll spawn
bottom, completely, so these warts will not be that effective.
Could have been nice if it had spawned faster.
While they're going to try and play two there, they're very deep ward.
Sex Nova has the smoke ready to go.
The issue is when there's these gems on the map, you can't really just ward it anywhere
casual.
Sure.
You have to ward in some weird spot that's going to pay off for that one kill or one
fight that they don't expect.
Like maybe a Mars farming this camp back here with bots and he's planning to join the team.
I don't think that's an unreasonable assumption.
And they are going to smoke that vision as you said, so try to take advantage of it.
And now it's this time it's snaking stern to read it perfectly.
The bold teams are not going to be caught by surprise these late game shenanigans though.
Maybe extreme gaming.
Oh, they're going to go up the scale.
That's going to break immediately.
Try and go for the blind stop.
Ex-success.
Doesn't really hit anything.
DKB goes out from all-raining.
He hits the back line.
The kids is raining in.
Balkans just trying to juke this as much as possible.
There goes the supernova.
So Balkans reset now.
He's a lot of ults.
Now, wait to go back in with the hookshot landed on the Phoenix.
Very nice run, Crick.
They should get at least one kill off of this, actually just bailing.
They used Supernova, they used the cart, they used Stampede, they used Kisses, they used Eclipsa.
What did they not use, right? Only they all made EKB.
They blew everything on that attempt to go high ground, basically connected with nothing.
And now if I could turn it into a very awkward spot because they're like, okay, Roshan, is it up yet?
Is it up yet? Still not up yet.
Late Roshan, you know a bunch of things are down, there is no Phoenix, but you kind of have to just wait.
Her Roche because the last thing you want to do is try and hit high ground throw that and give extreme gaming an opportunity for an extra life on Luna
You already
Need to reaper Scyther if she gets an extra life
That'll be really awkward on the AC's opportunity to a swift blink again box box box
He does have five back available. So you can play a little aggressive here
Maybe a few spot acts going into a Roche fight and just power through some of these big
Focus fire Reaper kills. Yeah, that is an option. Yeah, outside of Reaper's Scythe being used kind of early
They don't really have any ways to control this this Luna for too long, right? It's kind of very likely you get the DKB Satanic
Well the problem for Aame has been
actually being able to hit heroes
during that Satanic
with the hookshot put him inside the cart and is did the cogs
Yeah, what happened there?
Yeah, does the cog push somehow fill the workhorse?
There's no way.
That looks very odd.
I don't know. What else would it be?
The Will of Gabe Newell. I don't know.
Something bugged it out.
Agents 4 Skeeter.
Jeez, refresher, both on crit.
Holding it for some others.
Uh, level 25 is still not, uh, acquired for Skeeter. He will have it soon, though.
Same for the Sapphire. So some big 25 talents to get in this game.
They do have a refresher on NTS, so that high ground defense is pretty damn strong.
Just what a world of difference it would be if he had two more levels under his belt there.
And there's the nullifier. It's coming.
Who? Who? Who got it?
Ex-Ex-S.
Hey, I knew it, no fire Centaur, let's go.
We'll buy out for it, so he will not have buyback in a high ground push scenario.
Definitely worth it though, you can land some big no fires and burst these targets down, particularly for Aume here.
He just can't hit people, so he needs more control in this game.
Vandergid's dropped and the, uh, protecting the siege creeps, so he's still being a tier 3 down.
Not really much they can do about it unless they hit his kill skeeter and kill him again
Yeah, I mean you can swing on those as much as you want they won't die
Now once the tier three is dead they
Looks like the banner runs out shortly headed to seeds creeps
So they won't be able to get a free assaults on the barracks or anything off of this
You got a minute, a minute and a half here.
Look at the wrong banner, brother, you got Jabaitin.
What?
You think they dropped the creep wave banner?
No, the banners to the right.
I know, but I'm saying you think he dropped his clan banner.
Oh, like...
Trying to debate that it was a banner.
It's like, oh, I ran up to it to hit it, and he's like, wait a minute.
That's a fake banner.
There's no way I thought that was the real one, right?
I feel like you could get someone once with that.
Maybe you can.
I actually didn't know that banner had a duration to it.
Yeah, it doesn't last forever.
That'd be insanely broken.
What?
I've never seen it expire naturally, have you?
Tier 3 does go down.
Maureen just jumps to hit the Phoenix,
trying to force out the supernova early,
but Exnova holds the trigger.
Too much damage from the Luna.
Breton's Maureen's life, he's forced to jump away before the supernova goes out, so Ex-Nova still holds on to that very important tool.
Very hard to go higher on here for Falcons. Could turn into one of their patented 60,000 net worth league games.
Also, have you ever seen the banner inspire natural?
I think so, a couple times.
What?! There's no way!
If you don't like the last question, you don't like the answer also, I don't know what to
tell you.
I think you're lying to me.
That's the first time I've ever seen that happen.
Which makes me think that you saying it would be broken if it was indefinite, kind of, it's
like, what?
Rocket Flare True Sight.
What a talent.
is trying to get a wind waker I can't believe this he's actually put his boots in his backpack
is he wants the opportunity to pass over cheese and greater healing lotus in a clutch scenario
honestly not a hero that really needs the boots at this point in the game yeah sure cool idea
you gotta make the most out of those item slots as you go into the ultralight game
It's definitely something they could bait the Necropos a bit.
Speaking of him, Amar does have a lot of gold in the bank.
6300, he's looking an S&Y next.
So, replace his consecrated ramps, I guess?
No, he's not gonna go S&Y.
You don't remember this guy just debates you with the quick buy?
What would be the best item?
More armor, right?
Get an AC on top of your Sheeva's or what?
I'll make Lincoln on Skeeter.
Maureen, same thing as last time. Go for Ex Nova.
See if you can force the Super Nova out of him.
Ex Nova, once again, able to hold off,
but this time the Rage Barracks does die.
You know what I would like to see for more?
I think what would be cool in this game is a refresher.
Double Reconcyte on Luna.
I don't think it's a very common item on this hero
because you're usually looking to just tank up existing the fight
the fight and went it that way but I think having double reaper in this game could be
pretty nasty for xg to deal with they have very limited stuns and it's such a single carry lineup
maybe you're worried about snapfire really later but if it wasn't for a cart I would agree with that
well he can reaper and he gets carting you reaper when he comes out of the cart yeah but then he's
like he's got satanic and stuff like he's gonna come out of that cart probably perfectly healthy
You can double Reaper people straight up. It's pretty badass right and that's where the cart is the problem
I think the ignoring the car ignore the car. Okay, it doesn't exist
So here's what you go in great idea. No, no, you go in you Reaper Luna insta refresh Reaper centaur
Shit double play the double pump shotgun. What are they gonna do counter the counter? Just think about we'll put in our back pocket for now
Okay, that sounds sick. I'm all for it
They got a block of cheese.
If a bar pulls that off, I will confidently say that will be the greatest play in Dota 2 history.
That's just not true.
It's true even if he does do it.
Double smoke and crit with this jetpack.
Drake can break it. Oh, who got away with the hookshot?
The kisses are too far out.
He ate the block of cheese though.
He did eat the block of cheese though.
They forced it out of him.
I don't think you're too sad about that.
Oh, nothing to say. You can't afford to die here. He has to BKB TP away instantly.
Because he is so close to 25-2. Hit the swamp on the Amberspirit.
There's that little fire! There's that little fire! The supernova over the top!
Maureen has to jump away to his remnant. He does get out. The four-staff Kitsum are away as well.
Super dangerous. Close call. Close call.
You are forcing that because you know the snap went to base.
a little freedom there with some of those chainstones missing. But man, you gotta respect
the Luna burst damage here. It'll be interesting to see if I'll make man's up for, like, Daedalus
or Devine, slotting out likely the Manta here, maybe?
Also, a Marzi dot beta.
More burst damage.
Actually, I bought an SNY. There's consecrated drafts. Yeah. That's weird to me, heck. Is
that even that much of an upgrade? I mean, it feels like every bit of status resistance
This is worth its weight in gold, I guess.
It's also more of a restoration.
Sure, I do like Saundra's hero, exceptionally.
We just don't see a side of the lot on the right clickers, I guess.
It's important for this hero to move fast.
It's important for this hero to be able to reach in.
I think it kind of works.
Raps is move speed though, don't forget that.
Yeah, but you didn't really gain anything there.
If I had to guess, I don't know for sure, but I feel like SNY is probably one of the
movement speed. I think refresher was the item then. I'm telling you. This is the game for it.
The double pump. Like, you gotta go for it. Look, he's eyeing it up now.
Okay. He's like, man, I bought this useless SNY. If he sells the S.Y. and buys refresher,
you owe me lunch or something like that. That's fine because it's gonna be a refresher. He's gonna
put in his backpack. This is seventh item refresher. Well, then he still should have bought it first.
first. What? No. You want your sixth item before your seventh item? That sounds so gross.
I don't know what's going on anymore.
Aghanim Scepter is almost done for snaking. So now we will have double box.
Very strong Ags in the Ultra League. It's so obnoxious to deal with the multiple boxes
coming out.
Blink in box Emberspear box himself. They do have a nolifier though, so you can't really stack them in a sense
And they did get the 25 on snap so he has the conjures catalyst by an 25 refresher they have refresher on the Phoenix
Well, you came as kind of here for XG. I think they would want one more nolifier hex
So locked up, but it that this is pretty much as good as it gets there's the hex for the hoodwing actually they did get there
so
Yeah, you have a network leave here if you're falcons, but it does not look that easy to win the fight
It is one of those games where it's honestly pretty even in the five-on-five
Just the strength of the XG spell power is insane if they can make it all work now level of execution
Definitely a lot more difficult version gaming to make it all come together here Mars all over the place
He's broken apart assassin white for a mantis style now. Hmm. Also, it's shabery. Yes
The Refresher on Necrophos, right? Yes. You're saying it's the counter to the counter?
Essentially. I'm gonna offer you the counter to the counter to the counter.
Well, there's always a counter to the counter. There is a counter to the counter, which is...
Snapfire at us. Reaper Scythe, you cart him. Reaper Scythe again?
Wait, Scythe device initiation there is a whole shot goes in and he only gets met by a big blast of damage, critical size, not quite though.
Meanwhile, all he's fighting up against two cores perfectly fine.
Now Falcons are just trying to get something out of them, Refresh got the Supernova, they're gonna commit for it!
Supernova is gonna go down and they had damage on Ame, so Ame couldn't blink in at that time.
Shackle Shot gonna be bounced back there, Slut try and turn.
To nothing to say, playing into Cookies. There's the box going out though, they don't have the double fire to protect them now.
Will, oh did he hit the Luda? They didn't hit the Luda. God they hit the Taisa on him, he's in trouble, they give him the cookie.
The poke's here.
They've got a refresher and never even got to use it.
They know how to engage without full committing force out spells and reset.
In the stun, Amar needs some help. There's that old fire. He's dead.
Okay, that's an opening.
The liveaxe gets something. They need more though. Stampede chasing after him.
Falcons are so damn fast though. They're chasing after a wind ranger and an ember spirit.
Even with Stampede, you're not going to get him.
Ward spotted the clockwork and now Cookie Cookie looks like maybe Crit Dice.
Puzzle Hold Shot, can't see to get away, Witt goes out, Witt shot, lands on the two of them, giving them a bit of distance, he got pulled away, even the supports get out!
They lost so many buildings too, only one more barracks standing, they used all their core buybacks.
Didn't even buy the Necro, maybe there could have been some pressure there for Amar to come back in the game with the Pots too, but he says nah, I'm chillin', don't need to do anything here, even with Rosh up, I think you have to go pressure this Rosh now if you're XG.
And again, the poke game is so good. You get this awkward supernova that you can kill and all of a sudden the formation collapses, you don't have the BKB on Ami to bail you out.
I mean, you know it's bad when Clockwork hookshots in, he gets instant sight of ice and they couldn't blow him up immediately, you know?
His gamebacks are just debilitating in this game. Nobody is on top of this ringmaster, and that is going to be your recipe for success here on the side of Falcons as...
They are playing for that Roshan in XHS and they went divine on all make so they're all in full send it with this divine
Luna give you the extra DPS
He took out the butterfly
Hard to find these initiations though Falcons are so good at getting vision with this this clockwork
Jetpack blink dagger tough to get the jump on him
Shiba is just going to spot him though. Get some finishing. Aame jumping in. Going straight for the wind ranger. Couldn't really get on top of them.
Skidded with a BKB. Windruns back. Hit the shackle shot. He will. The supernova is out and that is going to be defended.
It's twice 2K on it for us here right now.
On Omar. Got the null fire on him as well. The hook shot. Stopping Aame. Aame doesn't get a chance to swing on him. Once again he's being kited around.
He can't hit anything.
He can't hit something but the supernovas, they're going off. They're exploding on nothing. They've expended so much and now Falcons back into play once again.
Phoenix he's down first who's next you have to fight here if you're actually
you can only retreat so much in this game they jump back to the losing
base Amar nullifier on him all they actually get to swing on him a little
bit but the nullifier it expands and now they turn around Reaper site the game
is done they went from the all in with the divide rape here they had no more
lives left no more ultimates left no more BKB's refreshers not that extreme
game gaming use every bit they had and none of it was enough.
Beautiful late game team fighting for Falcons. I mean this is what they are the best in the world at.
It's the in and out of the late game team fights. Who's going in, how are you resetting, how are you bailing each other out and picking your moments.
They're not pressured, they're not forced to use their ults earlier, they're a BKB Zoe, they're getting so much out of you.
You feel so pressured to drop a spell and the second you miss use that one BKB or that one spell.
Like sharks in the water. They're just instantly sending it. They know that advantage
It's really difficult to outplay them in this scenario
And he's what this is why these guys are key I change if they can get to a point in the game
Or they're comfortable taking those styles of fight
They're gonna win it 99 out of a hundred times like there is no other team better out of them
So you have to find ways to force them to fight you on your terms like you do Roshan and they have to go into you
Right, I would have rather seen XG do the roach there not because they necessarily need an ages
I mean it changes the game or something
But just to make the team fighting more streamlined make the supernova actually come exactly either they fight into the supernova or you get
Roshan and of course the counterplay stockings can just say yeah, whatever it have rose
We're not gonna take a bad fight state rose. It's probably the right call. We honest play you might get something out of it
Yeah, I think that's the type of position you have to put this team in you have to find ways to force Roshan force high ground force them
Into a bad map state do tormentor like these types of things where they have to
Play the fight on your terms because you let them take these fights on their terms
They're miserable. You have no shot. It just feels demoralized.
Falcon is certainly showing why they are top of the group and showing why they are TI winners.
I mean, this was just a fantastic display of late-game team-fighting from there.
Especially the supports, man. Shout out to Snake King and Curt in this game.
They were owning this game on the initiations to save. The boxes were all on point.
This is the ringmaster that will haunt your dreams with that stupid clown face.
Yeah, making ringmaster look pretty good.
This hero has been kind of cropping up more and more strong hero if you know how to play well
I think I think this year actually needs a hero specialist
I don't mean to throw anybody on this hero. You need a snake. You need to save but then it looks really good
Well, a painter of the game one Falcons to walk away the victors. Let's head back to the pen
And I was wondering if we were still gonna have some of that Ti Grand finals magic
Even though obviously we're a lot later in the season and things changed in the meta change
But I think said we saw some of that magic here because what started up as a seemingly one-sided game turned into quite the game
Yeah, I think it's kind of meant to happen in this matchup in the sense that Falcons they like to take it slow
They they really patients with the mid game and in the late game and I think that that is like we've seen this game to like extreme
They're off to a rocky start and and the game seems pretty dire
But Falcons at some point they tend to like slow down a little bit
Which I think benefit Xtreme, this is probably the reason why they actually ended up, it kind of makes you also wonder like what what happens if the game is more stable from the get go if they're able to you know like challenge Falcons this way.
So to me it's always like a little bit sad that Xtreme don't set themselves up well enough for success with the laning phase into the early the early to mid game.
Yeah, the first 10-15 minutes of the game kind of sets you up for a good mid-game.
And a lot of the times, I find this has been the identity for the team where they always play with a bit of a deficit,
showing that, you know, very resilient team.
And we kind of expected this game to go quite late because of the play styles they didn't have.
Because this is a very resilient team.
We talk about teams for it, you know, once they're in their prime to be one of the most resilient teams.
I think extreme gaming kind of falls into that category as well,
Unless they pull off Ame like 20 minutes in, this is a team that their teamfighting is super strong in the mid and late game.
It is very strong, the question is, maybe getting ahead of myself, but as you say, Seb, they don't want to be in that situation.
No, surely they don't.
Surely.
To me, it really comes down to playability.
I think we've got to see it in the early game.
Like, at some point, this Ember is just unstoppable.
Like, he's just running around with Dream Master and Tog.
I think snaking played
He played so well in the early game like every single box that he used was
But again, I think like sure fuckers is being amazing
But I don't think extreme have the tools to to stop it
I really like the ATOS pickup from us nothing to say
I think it really gave them a way to play the game because without that if you went for like the regular snap items
I think it was literally on playable
But it did catch them a little bit of guard
But again, it's an ember spirit that's running around with max shield and with the help of the ringmaster
It's just too much to handle and not playable, I think, drafting-wise.
I think the draft really makes it really hard for Xtreme,
and I'm really hoping to see them change something,
because they're risking their tournament lives at this point.
Yeah, and if the draft was indeed already a little bit iffy from the get-go,
it's quite impressive what Kostas think.
We're able to make this an hour-long game.
Yeah, that's just how they play.
I like probably the team that has the longest games and tournaments apart from a 20 minute loss that they had against BB team
which maybe you know, maybe someone's gonna take over but I
Just want to see something different
I just want to see them like winning the laning stage and then transition that into this type of a mid game this type of a late game
Because this is a team that will also risk it like a lot of the times you will see I may pick up divine rapier great
atomization in a sense where they understand we need this nullifier who's
gonna pick it up center not the hero that wants to get it he gets it anyway
because they definitely need it against the box against the macro still fell
short but also showing you know how they're thinking outside of the box not
the box that they've been put into by ringmaster but also just a crucial
thinking that in these certain situations you need to change things up
yeah there was also I want to point out one of the first picks that Falcons went
And for us that clockwork I kind of feel like so this is a hero that crits
Just maybe a little bit too comfortable and especially if you think like okay the games are gonna go late the vision advantage
But he gives I mean it's it's comparable almost to a tree and yeah
I think you can variable maybe even better in my opinion like I really look at clock as being like the almost like a daytime night
Soccer in a way. It's that good cuz well what we don't necessarily see cuz obviously we're catching the action on the stream
But he's constantly firing rockets around the map and getting info and in the hands of good players
All they need to know is has this can be farmed for instance
And then they know exactly what's going on like if all of a sudden Luna
Let's say is getting close to BKV and you're rocketing the ancients all the time and that minute the ancient is not being farmed
Well Luna's in the smoke right like they're making a they're making a play it becomes really easy on top of that
You have the ability to scout the jetpack
So to me for a teams like Falcon that is very methodical around the map and very obsessed with the macro
gameplay. Clockwork is just like a cheat code.
Yeah, I feel like you take it out, take it for yourself. One of
those solutions. I'm
positive, quite positive that he might be also be featured in
some of the clips that Lacoste wants to show us because you
did focus on the Falcons early game because that was the point
where they were very impressive.
Yeah, it looked insanely good, especially like the first
rotations. So we're gonna be seeing the insane dive governor
from Clockwork and Necrophos. Usually you don't get to use the
as an off-lane duo. A lot of the time it is extremely used like in most cases by
your mid laner, but this allows them to dive behind the tower. You can see
already Phoenix is very low, has to pop a fairy fire, has to use the healing cell
and the amount of gold that they're getting from it afterwards, because Ex-Noah
he's still gonna come back. You can see the efficiency where Amar drags the
creep wave into the small camp. That's gonna be extra damage on the tower,
extra kill for Amar and also you are picking up neutral items relatively
early on in the draft so a lot of things happen here basically they are getting
the triple value out of it and then to show another efficiency clip is from
Malry who's dragging the creep wave from the mid lane knowing that there's gonna
be also rune spawning in 30 seconds plus on top of that farming the stack that
they have in the jungle so kind of triple dipping on top of that as well plus
controlling the runes which was secured by double supports again and you have
shield plus you have another shield on top of that which makes it almost
most impossible for them to contest in this area of the map, seeing that Ember Spirit,
he's just way too tanky, while on the other side, there isn't really much pressure happening
as well, and at this stage of the game, like the support duo plus the mid laner, they don't
really have enough damage. I think in a lot of these situations, we would see maybe position
1, keeping 2 tower, this is something that Wiggs did a couple of times, and they're
going to lose another wisdom rune, and also wanted to show Ringmaster, the power of this
I feel like this has been kind of the crucial hero in this trap because so many times we've seen them pop like
Stampede they're trying to use a clip from top of that a lot of these long cooldown altis
And then one box break position and coming up from stake and unfortunately for him a boxy nicknames already taken
So he's gonna need to think of something else because he had an amazing game for me. He has been the MVP so far
seeing all those clips kind of
is a little baffling knowing that the game went as long as it did and I know that extremes
got a lot to work on in the break that they have right now but I also want to talk about
what Falcons should be working on because I'm sure that they also don't go into a game
like let's crush the first 10 minutes and then that's hardly a while.
I think that they have a, well I'm trying to actually think whether or not there's something
they're happy with. I feel like they might be completely okay with it, in a sense, because
they like who they're very confident that the more they get from the map, the easier
it is for them to win, I think. And it is more than like wishful thinking. They've shown
it, you know, you give networks to their core players, like they all just put it to use.
I think to me, you know, they want CI being the team that excelled at itemizing in the
league, like the refreshers, the A on this, the nullifier, like you always were thinking
the team against them. Oh, they actually need Nully. They actually need that.
Falcons, they don't need anything. They're always like one step ahead.
They know exactly how the game is about to play out and they have the right items
for that right moment. They build up for it. So I think they're very
comfortable dragging the game. It's more of a, if we go high ground now,
we have, I don't know, 60% chance to take it. Let's, let's make it 80.
You know, let's make it 90. I mean, why not? At the end of the day, if you're winning,
you're, you're, you know, in one UTI, why change your formula?
Great itemization point because the acute look at MR. He has different things queued up and at one point
It's like safe panic. That's gonna be my item. I just want to be tanky enough
Maybe get couple of right clicks and even though it's not the right-clicking hero
Then he decides to switch the SNY have extra bit of status resistance knowing that he has been focused pretty heavily
So it's a bit of HP that status resistance kicks in extra bit of regeneration
generation amplification on top of that. And then he's like, yeah, I have that for one fight.
But you know what? I'm going to disassemble S&Y, get Manta style instead, and afterwards try to
bait because there was one fight afterwards where he baited Stampede and he also baited
Centaur Blank Jump, which was on the illusion.
Yeah, I think, I think of, especially Amar and Marin, I think Skater is also there. But these two
are really impressed with their item choices, especially in the day game. Because again, this
is like a stage of the game that teams don't get to practice so much. Because when you scrim,
It's very often that you call GG when the game is completely out of control.
I think it's rare for teams to scrim 90-minute games.
Yeah, and they're not the same stakes, so you're not frying as much.
It's not exactly. People are actually more willing to get picked off or make mistakes
because they lose focus and whatever launch time you name it.
But I feel like f*****s, they just have experience in long games,
like much more experience than any other team in the world.
And that must be an edge. So why not use it when you get to these games?
Yeah, you'd also think that maybe because that's also how they want to yeah
I normally teams that win ti they get an extra bullseye on their backs and people are trying to copy their style
But that's what says is something that you can
Really practice too easily so you have to experience it you have to live it and we know Falcons lives it fairly frequently in their games
That's being one of them
We're gonna find out if game number two will be as much a banger as game number one
But before we get there, we are going to check in with Stream Gaming's Pro 2 EWC.
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Extreme Gaming has been a powerhouse of Chinese Dota for many years, and they remain that
way to this day, with their current roster of Ame, nothing to say, XXS, FY, and Xnoba,
which was built in the last few months of 2025.
While Extreme Gaming is an incredibly strong team, it would be considered by most to be
the strongest team in China by a fairly large margin, they do struggle against the top teams
on a global scale.
They have a large amount of top 5 finishes, but you'd have to go back multiple years to
see big tournament wins for the team.
Their road to the eSports World Cup 2026 was more spread out than almost any other qualifying
team, with no tournament wins to speak of, the majority of their points instead came
from getting top 4 in Dream League Season 27, Dream League Season 28, and even ESL One
Birmingham 2026. Will extreme gaming finally manage to break free from their pattern of
getting barely within reach but not quite making it to the end? Tune in and find out here,
the eSports World Cup 2026.
We're back with the TI finals extreme gaming versus Falcons Avery we casted that TI finals
what's going to be different this time around?
We did well not as much at stake in this match right you're not in a game five TI final everything's
on the line but perhaps just as much pride true these two squads well there there have
been uh both teams have looked a little bit worse this season let's start up with that
i think uh... in fact extreme gaming has looked a whole lot worse
there are a lot
and they're struggling they need to find some form this is the series they need
to find some form in
and maybe this is just exactly how they get back in the form right get the
monkey off the back at the back and get the
malrin off the back that's right
We're getting ready for game number two between Extreme Gaming and Team Falcons and while
these two are battling it out, there's also two other series going on in group A at the
same time and there's some positive news for Extreme Gaming who lost game one to Falcons
and therefore they started as a form for score line and they're hoping to stay ahead of another
team that is very much encroaching on their rank, which is Gamer Legion, but Gamer Legion
also lost their first game that they are playing against BB Team.
So, you know, a little bit of light in the darkness.
I do want to talk about what Cap and SPG talked about, because this might be a series that
is good for extreme gaming to find their form.
Do you feel like a game like they just have, could just be enough to kick them into gear?
should have seen his face. I wish I could answer yes to that question because to be honest I'm also
like I'm a big fan of the extreme gaming players first of all. I'm also just a big fan of Chinese
Dora doing well. I think it's generally just for the whole Dora scene. I think it's always more
exciting when the Eastern teams are strong and you know I'll never be tired of this West versus
East you know clashed like the best European team versus the best Chinese team and I think the game
The game is just more interesting when the playstyle from every region can compete at the highest level.
Either way, with that being said, I don't think they're there yet.
It's not because of player qualities or potential of the team to me is really tactical.
I think the arson aspects of the game that they don't seem to value for a reason that is unknown to me.
I'm just hoping for it to be fixed.
It was the issue yesterday, it was the issue the day before.
came into today doing the exact same mistake in my opinion.
Like, you pick the snapfire, you don't pick support heroes
that complement it at all.
No playability in the early game.
You lose double wisdom.
I'm just tired of seeing Malirin play with every single rune.
And I assume they also are tired of that.
And they have Ame, they have X-XS,
which I think are two of the most talented side laners
worldwide.
But these guys don't get to play the game
because I don't think their team is allowing them
to play the game.
So I really want to see some changes.
Like, they first picked the snap, it's amazing, it's honestly a great answer, I think, like, it restricts Malrin, Hero pulled by a decent amount.
Even though you could argue that they banned the airspirit and we've seen snap dominate airspirit, but whatever.
Forget about that, now he's shown that he can play Amber vs. Snap pretty effectively, cause I think he drew the lane.
So maybe that's the band that's required, and then please, you know, select heroes that are gonna play well with Snapfire in the early game, and do your magic.
Yeah, I agree. This clockwork has been a menace. This has been one of the best
pairings with the snapfire unfortunately they're not gonna be on the same team
but the vision aspect that you talked about super annoying hero it kind of
stops the kinks as well with just like having a BKB piercing ability like you've
seen so many times they're trying to TP out he's holding the hook shot he does
have a blink bag or four staff like vision game is through the roof having
essence distiller on top of rockets this hero has pretty much everything
and it also with this type of atomization, it allows you to scale in a different way
where you're getting shard from the tormentors, where you're not investing your gold.
It's not like Festeer shard when you purchase it because it's very expensive,
you don't want to be spending gold on it, but once you get it for free,
like you are getting quite a lot of value out of it and also lane is secured with this hero.
But we're talking about the off-lane Necro that they did pull out this time around,
it's not going to be happening again, but also something to point out that extreme gaming,
and they can be the ones playing the snapfire from two different roles.
Yeah, we saw it very successfully for them from the offline earlier on in the group stages.
Happy to see them ban out the ringmaster and the necrophos, they addressed those two problems
at least as we already talked at length about sneaking's ringmaster.
Yeah, ringmaster obviously was just very good, very good synergy with Clockwork.
We mentioned it in the first draft, like these heroes just play together really well.
Clock is a great setup for ringmaster spells.
That lacks a lot of damage and Ringmaster I think is one of the highest damage supports
like from position 5 if you factor in all the spells in the Wheel of Wonder.
So I like the Necro band too because this is like the lane that Falcons has run the
most so far like Offlane duo like Clock and Necro.
Because at the end of the day Clock is very destructive on the lane like he basically
enables the Offlaner for like getting XP and gold but at some point he just runs out of
steam like the Offlaner still needs to be like a dominant laner in my opinion.
Clock is not a hero that can basically set up kills or anything like that.
He amplifies what's already there.
So great pairing with Necro, we've seen them abuse that lane a bunch now and they're just
blind picking it so they are hurting the clock pick in some sense because he's going to lose
two of his most impactful combos I guess.
And it takes a time for Falcons to bite their one ban they have in this stage of the game.
hard to ban at this point considering snapfire is not really like she's gonna be good regardless
doesn't necessarily mean the pairing or anything like that they end up going for the puck ban coming
out yet to see let's see if snaking was a liar whether they're gonna be playing this undying
potentially from the offer it doesn't strike me in a sense it does but it also doesn't like how
annoying you can be with undying you can be very unkillable i think the necro fits the profile
for the Falcon's Offlane, for ATF in a way where he's the pharmacist.
He can be on top of the network, he can be unkillable, so he checks a lot of the boxes.
Undying, he doesn't flash farm. That's one of the issues with the hero. Sure,
you can go back to stacks, use the tombstone in a triangle, but it's not very, he's not very
efficient at farming. He's more like, I want to keep fighting, but for now they are keeping things
open. I go and see you, Amaris, I'm gonna play Undying. Like, I would be so surprised. Yeah,
Yeah, kind of similar vibes that we were seeing from his Largo, where he played it like once
north and it's just like, okay, this is not it.
It's not his playstyle.
Yeah, I think it's not happening.
Do you think the odds are higher that Skeeter plays it?
Yes.
But then it's like a mistake or something, because the 9 plus 1 doesn't sound appealing
at all.
No.
It's going to be a snagging hero, most likely.
Well, luckily for Xtreme, they have a pretty good answer to Undying in the sense that I
I think Snapfire's little shredder is one of the best answers to Tombstone.
So not a bad pick by Falcons because it's one of the few melee supports that remains and they really enjoy
range carries on Skitter right now.
So it makes a lot of sense.
And at stream they decide to go for the Snapfire mid.
They're going to force it.
And again, like they didn't ban Ember.
Malarine just, he just played an Ember game.
He drew with the snap.
And I think it's a good Ember game again.
like Bane, Rupik, these are supports that are too low damage for Ember to care about,
so we'll see if he decides to go that route again.
I don't think Ember is the best pairing to be fair with Clock and Dying,
and I know Flakken is very obsessed with mid and support heroes' parrying,
so perhaps not ideal, we'll see what route they go for.
I like the Bane pick though, I think this is one of the few heroes
that actually plays well with Snap from what Xtreme has shown so far.
This is the kind of combo I'm talking about,
Because you're running into a snap Phoenix, you're just laughing.
You're running into a bane snap, you're dead.
It's very different.
I mean, if they want to be running this core and dying,
maybe there's a chance, because it's such a good silencer game,
I think it's a bit of a meanie one,
because I don't think they can fit into the draft,
but maybe something like a dawn breaker could work out for them,
seeing that there is bane problems you're playing against Rubik,
so that gets stolen kind of almost immediately once you drop,
but we'll have to see.
The silencer value though, when you see like a...
Bane snap?
You see Bane snap and you're like, oh, please, one game.
Just try it.
Buy radians.
You'll be fine. We won't say anything.
You can scale. Get Echo Saber, radians, whatever.
I mean, if he's allowed to buy radians, he's probably gonna buy.
Like, but if it's a Facebook bling around the map...
Nah, that's not him.
Pass.
But a lot of value in silencer, probably a really good pickup for Falcons.
if they grabbed their hand on it.
They grabbed instead the Ember Spirit.
They go for the Ember, yeah.
Yeah, again, I think it's an, I don't know.
I don't understand why Extreme is stopping with this
and they don't cover the angle.
Like they just played that game
and I'm just afraid that this Ember
is gonna run around uncontested with a lagging truck.
It's three melee heroes, but at the same time,
like it's so good that Ember might almost be fine on his own.
He just needs a little bit more health,
a little bit more supports and the game will be just fine.
Yeah, we're seeing what Extreme Gaming wants to go for as their 18th overall pick ban.
An 18 is always one of the most important picks especially on the side.
But at first pick, this is the one they can protect with two bans afterwards.
Yeah, they have a, so there was a Ruin Ranger pick on Falcon's side, whatever.
So it's going to be an Undying Ruin Ranger lane most likely.
and they will be last picking a Mars hero that will lane with the clock.
As for Xtreme, the mid-matchup is decided.
It's Sapphire versus Ember.
They have a ban on the Rubik's Support, and it's either Ame or X-XS Hero next.
Terrible late coming out.
Yeah, they had a great success in the last few days.
Ame, that one game where he was a 0-2-1 in 30-plus minute game,
and then the other game as well.
I'm just not seeing the synergy between the heroes.
like what what are the timings you did talk a lot about the hero pairings the
two four five pretty much and what they're gonna be doing in the game and
they can do stuff but also I feel like this type of a draft is is lacking
something it's also lacking the front line we have seen in the previous game
where focus they are masters of the craft like going in and out multiple times
I don't think you can allow yourself to do this with extreme gaming like these
heroes once your aim you're kind of in. Yeah keep in mind for extreme gaming they
can still flex the snap to offline I don't know if they want to. I already see
said shaking his head not gonna happen. I don't think so because sure I mean there
are arguments for it but at the same time they really lack like a blink stun
initiative like initiation. Think about their lineup like their TV's are in
hero when he's team fighting snap also wants to play off like from distance
sure snap can blink cookie in but against these kind of heroes like snaps gonna
want to see what winrangers up to you know clock needs to be already also kept
busy you don't just get to enter the fight freely if you want to cast your
spells and maximize your damage same for being rubik like they want position
they want the fight to start and then to pick their targets like steal a spell
position themselves properly so there's like a lot of holes in the draft that
needs to be like fixed by xxs to zero but again he's leading against undying wind ranger like
not gonna be easy there's not a lot of use you can afford to pay on the thing and i feel like
he needs to fix so many issues i would say like two would be some centaur maybe axe as well like
axe because of the creep skipping ability centaur can kind of do the same but also both of them are
like not necessarily blade mail buyers centaur he doesn't really go for that item build anymore but
once you see Windranger you want to be having a hero like this is the Kremsen buyer this is the Lotus or buyer on a
Centaur which retaliate you're not going to get heavily focused and I feel like they need that type of a hero to actually just soak up the damage and
Be able to teamfight well
I can tell you that extreme gaming has been out of timber and the dark seer and the Falcons has been out the
Centaur yeah, and one more that I'm so waiting. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say like it's very unlikely that these heroes make it through the through the fall or
or they actually get their hands on the axe, which I don't think it's a great axe game
in the sense that it's, you know, axe versus undying, you have the tombstone save at some
point, also just the tombstone and lying ulti, it's like you have one jump basically against
the battle.
Yes, you're not getting out.
You're not getting out against the talk undying.
And the tombstone save, I think, is very annoying.
And the lane is, again, not ideal, sure you can start creep skipping, but Windrinder is
actually one of the few carries that will you know close the distance and will chase you even
behind the tarp pretty easy she's so mobile it's it's it's it's decent I think it's exactly what's
required for Xtreme's lineup no idea against Falklands let's put it this way um and Falklands
would end up with a doom a more doom that's like an absolute classic he's the one that actually made
the Rageons build popular it's a very solid pick I don't think the lane is great but they can just
be pulling waves again clock makes it really hard to shut down the offlaner completely so in that
sense I like the pick it's gonna secure them like the wind condition essentially like you do this
tbe and all of a sudden they don't really have much to play with on extreme side yeah they
didn't have the damage I feel like a snap far the combination is there between the off laner and
and the mid laner so they can play together.
It takes a little bit more time, but again,
I feel like they are having the same issue
that they had in the last four or five games that they played.
It's another great Ember game.
I think it might be the repeat of game one
where this Ember is just gonna reign supreme
around the map with the help of the clock and the undying.
I don't really see Bayon, Rubik,
and Snap contesting this Ember.
I don't think it's punishing at all.
But if it's the same as previous game, I mean of course the lanes then would be very rough for extreme gaming.
But they had a decent shot at fighting back towards the later stage of the game.
Do you feel like they have that potential again?
They do, but again, like what does the later stage of the game look like?
Like how much?
There's gonna be 30k gold behind.
Yeah, well then they don't.
It's exactly what I was asking is like how much gold deficit are we talking, what is the map looking like, did you lose sides?
They have clockwork, so yeah, they can't go behind, no.
Clock sees you everywhere, 30k gold behind, you lost two sides, they have a guess.
Do they have any chance in the late game? The answer is no, shever, no chance whatsoever.
So it kind of depends, that's the thing with Dota, is like thinking about the late game and the team fight condition and the win condition,
It's just not enough. You have to factor in every stage of the game.
And it starts... You know, the first objective essentially is the 4-minute water rune.
Let's say, I think before that is somewhat irrelevant.
4-minute water rune, 6-minute water rune, 7-minute wisdom rune, 8-minute water rune.
This is Zodaf for you nowadays. It's like, there are objectives that you need to factor in your drafts
and how you approach your lanes, because if you skip these steps, you don't get to play the game.
So we just want to see extreme gaming, be aware of those timings and fight for them and of course of course come out on top of those fights.
Yeah, easily said we're gonna be seeing if that's actually doable. I don't want to see them lose the X-Tip rune again.
It has been nerfed in the last like four or five months but it's still such a massive objective that you need to contest.
contest and they need to find a way because in the previous one like we
saw Cliff what Ember Spirit has been doing where he's doing basically three
four things at the same time so I want to see NTS kind of try to do the same
thing try to contest this and set up his team for success. Well we're all saying
about what X-Tring getting me to do to win this but let's be real if Falcons
win this they claim top of their group can they do so let's head over to cap and
SVG for the answer. That's right these two teams are fighting for very
different positions, Falcons hoping for the guarantee of top of their group.
Meanwhile, there is a weird scenario where Extreme Gaming could end up in a tie for that
5th elimination slot.
So definitely could use a win here, even still just getting the better seeding going
into the elimination round would do them some wonders.
I would even say just getting a win for Morale's sake would do Extreme Gaming a lot of good
and getting an early kill on snaking will certainly help with that.
First blood is available, who's gonna take it, finally they get it.
As X-XS comes to collect, Exenoba is going to be surrounded by too many Falcons heroes,
tries to off the fairy fire, but he will still go down Maureen.
Takes the bounty for that one.
So, Avery, in that case, you got First Blood, and was...
But it wasn't on your mid laner, while Maureen did get it.
He got the second kill, and he is the mid laner.
But you got three runes and you denied the fourth.
Okay, all right, so zero runes for Falcons. That is a massive win here
I wanted to see actually come out fast play for those objectives as said was mentioning
Well, you're already winning the objective that you are so all to a fast start here
I think this draft looks a little easier to execute than the first one for them
The stuns are way more reliable here. They have more more reliable chain follow up a little better catch with the bane as well
The one concern I have is their initiation is still pretty dependent on this axe
and he has to play in some rough matchups. The clock of dying are really annoying supports for him to go in against.
He only have one good blade mail call target, and it's the win ranger. I don't know if Ex-SS is gonna
maybe go some like Helm Dom pipe crimson build or something in this game.
That doesn't sound that amazing either, but his path towards having solid impact off of this single initiation doesn't look great.
So I think Ex-Shi will have to think about that how they approach fights because that was the biggest issue in the game one.
was how do you start a fight and make it work for you against the Falcon Squad that is super good at kiting you out, picking their moments and turning those initiations around.
You're also playing against the Mardum. He is the best team of all time basically, so...
Well, I guess him in 33.
I was about to say that. I feel like I would get 33 that title.
Well, I think they both say they are the greatest team, so I'll give it to both of them. Depends who I'm talking to.
There's our draft, in case you're interested.
We got to scratch him for a lateback.
It's a pretty nice Doom pick.
You're just going to look to Doom this Terrorblade every time.
Maybe he'll Doom NTS
the situation calls for.
Got to send an anti-carry hero.
XG are kind of all in on the Terrorblade scale here,
because I don't think the Axe can scale.
Too amazing in a game like this.
Okay, but we'd seen the Sapphire scale,
and the Axe can set up the Sapphire.
We had to trade off the top lane,
on a collection kill, on a mar.
That is always the X-Factor. How much MTS can do on this hero he has more...
Do you least have the axe to go in for him?
But man, I think XG just don't like playing with heroes that go in.
They just constantly pick these lineups with four to five heroes that want someone else to do something for them.
I think it just makes their games so much more difficult to execute than they need to be.
I mean, they do think at least that the Ember Spirit on the other side of things who really wants to go in,
go in? I really like this bait pickup to deal with that Ember Spirit. This small reed was
last game he was just jumping in. Right into the middle of all their heroes getting a bunch of
information forcing out supernova to be used early sometimes on Exnova. Now Exnova's like go
ahead jump in see what happens. It's always the easiest solution. It's a battle hunger has
C'mon, it's quite the issue for Snakey.
Fy with a little bit of a mis-micro there, uh...
Snakey's in trouble here.
Yeah, he has...
Oh, Pexix, that's not committing.
Yeah, surely you just...
...commit you a blood grain.
He doesn't want to mislead under tower.
Yes.
It's also kind of nice to just leave on dying low.
Yeah, if he's on low on resources.
So again, your...
...your goal's not to kill him, your goal is to win the lane.
You already have helm online,
and you've won the bounty rune, so you're up to a fast start across the board here.
The lanes are looking really solid for extreme gaming.
First blood, effectively all the runes, you got that extra kill top, you're winning the
CS battle, mid is going a lot better for NTS than the first time around, maybe some of
that extra gold injection.
Doing some work here, and this side lane is going better than I expected.
I think snaking is getting owned pretty hard by this battle hunger on the side.
He didn't really get great trades, you didn't get the tombstone kill.
Sometimes you can just really ruin this Axe's day, but the fact he got to the helm of Iron
little so fast he's got four tangos in the bank there's a thing xxs you know a
double tango he was expecting to be harassed heavily with decayed power
shots and he's just chilling down here it's all vacation look at him driving
any slain oh if he gets his kill a little bit more blood grenade and they
will get it okay that is this is like out of control I did not think I'd see
the day where Falcon's losing on dying lane this hard. Yeah, but it has gone real wrong.
And that shows you the strength of Barun's and Brodo. These little things make a big
difference. You get to level 2 first. You know, Axe had that first blood as well. So
you were saying, yeah, while we're going up the kill mid and first blood went to the
Axe, does that really get good for Axe? Well, if he gets a fast helm and he can do this,
it's going to make a world of difference because he is your one initiator in this game. He
You can bring the line up together here.
We have seen, it was extreme gaming, right?
Struggled before in the solo initiator for XXS.
We've struggled in that situation.
And while I could teleport away, close call,
it makes, that teleport felt real long.
That was me after playing 10 pub games in a row.
Very good.
It's not like they can really punish the axe at all while the rubik is away.
Crit rotates since the mid lane.
He can kind of rotate, but what is an indict?
You're left in a lane you can have zero impact in.
Can you rotate drama toon stone on the other one or just stack?
Just go farm a camp with the K. Not a lot, honestly.
feels real bad right now for snaking on the map. It's always been one of the weaknesses of the hero.
That's why that early portion of the lane is really important for the hero.
Because now you're just watching execs that do this and you're like,
uh, can I do anything to them guys? You're gonna go look for the 6 minute power room?
That is something you can do. Oh, nice TP nerd. In this room we'll be scared.
Amar trying to pressure Aumei, I can't believe Aumei came back to this lane.
He was already hitting Neutrals, him and the Vayne were together and he actually walked
back into this lane without his back.
That's a rough kill to give up.
Alright, well they do have level 6 on nothing to say, Cookie into- oh, missed the Cookie.
Elkin goes for the kisses, which is why Varsha is just going to chrrrrrrr, just chase after the Sapphire trying to do as much damage as she can while they also get the kill.
XXS does give up his killing spree. Things are getting a little weird now for Xtreme. They had a nice lead off this slaying phase. Can't afford to give too much of it away.
Died to level 5 winrangers. There's no focus fired down here. Just got decayed Tombstone Power Shot.
How weird death
Correct success a bad that's for army double wisdom. I there's no way you should be losing double wisdom trying this game, right?
There's no way if you go look at this network chart, and you told me the dire lost both wisdom shrines here. I
tell you
Who you trying to pull you know?
Let's go off. What are you trying to pull?
Who's leg are you trying to pull there's a mixture of a couple things that got much to buy
Sound about as lost, but you get my point like this is not an early game. You should be losing tried it not at all
Top net worth and all three cores you have a self-sufficient axe or should be self-sufficient with his helmet
Dominator nice toss back into the call into the centaur stuff very nicely
They don't play to get the dunk. They're still looking real prettier. You should not let this faze you
The XP is fine. It's not as if you're behind on it
That was just some recovery for Falcons.
And of course you're still dominating lane, so.
Yeah, it just would have been nice to have
the faster level six on the lane.
And of course, have Clockwork just sit there,
not able to be the initiator he wants to be
because he doesn't have a level six yet.
But Double Wisdom try and goes a long ways
to fixing that FY gets shut down in the river
while Aame has made the rotation through the gate
hard to be in that safe lane better to be
in the enemy safe.
I will say I do agree with 7th Point.
I don't know, X-G are just allergic to power runes or something.
Give it all to Maureen.
They can give every rune up.
And then he just uses them to bring the game back and...
He's such a thing, I don't know why.
Surely we can stop him getting some of these, you know?
Yeah, sometimes you get unlucky.
Yeah, it's more difficult against Ember because he can go to one remnant together,
but you have Pain, who can fight that.
You have instant stuns here in this game.
Undying clock are not the scariest heroes to skirmish on the rune.
Or you might go there and lose the room, but you shouldn't die to it.
Instant Doom, put onto the bay because Amar knows he gets nightmare and he's gonna die.
A Thunder Shade.
Suckers accused to save the bay.
A bold move from Amé.
They can't quite get to kill with Amar unless they kiss his land.
Oh, he's dodging, he's dodging, but it's not quite good enough.
Crit attempted to stop it with the Cogs hit.
But I think Exonovo ran in front of the Cogs. Is that what I saw?
Either way, Medic Amé.
Dr. Aume healing the boys.
What a nice guy. Maybe he has a misclicked.
We'll never know. That'll give NTS a fast boot to travel here.
This is where you want the mid-stampire to be.
Owning the lane, getting some extra kills with kisses all cool down.
Very fast boots to travel and then you can kind of control the map. You're also going to be able to pot into that axe to Aum Creek.
Could be a really nice combo of this game.
Let's play a little more aggressive in enemy jungle.
Still looking very solid. This is probably the best early game we've seen from Extreme Gaming.
Can they get this power?
Maureen jumps and it does spawn top, so he gets an Elune.
Flameguard making FY significantly tankier, but Maureen kind of has infinite chase potential right now,
now especially with stinking behind him.
Fy dies. Now Skeeter also rotated into mid lane. No wonder Maureen was being super aggro.
This is one of those, uh, place from Falcons where they just bring everybody to the mid
tower to take it.
Gotta respect the European mid lane.
It quickly turns into a quad lane. We're not careful about it.
As we get focus fire committed, still have fleshgulm available. No tombstone though,
I can definitely fight this if you're XG, though that is not the way you want it to start.
Got the cookie stun on Maureen.
AFL.
XXS shows up at the teleport.
He's going to sit on this remnant.
So if he can actually force Maureen to jump to that remnant, XXS can get the kill, but
Maureen looks like he might just be able to run away.
No, he actually does jump back.
He immediately gets called by XXS and he claims the kill.
Didn't use the calling plate for it.
He used that extra movement speed now and he moves to the next hero.
Hookshot gets popped.
That stopped the kisses who cares staking is already dead and now crit has put himself in the danger zone
X-axis running away with this game
You have a himself a performance here. He is six and two might make it seven and two already getting some culling blade stacks early
Give him another shot. Oh, he missed two different culling blade opportunities here. Well, that's a little disappointing
But his net worth is not disappointing right now. He is
is soaking up the farm in this early game.
This is an axe that got picked into an
entying winranger, right?
Your expectations for how his early game should look
were not this good.
A bass over performance here,
might just power XG to a game to win
if he keeps still balling.
Nowhere from all ring to go.
Straight into the arms of an axe.
Yeah, it's flying, I think he thought he was
gonna get fateful to it.
So that's why I jumped to the remnant but FYI was actually short on mana.
He was seven mana short of a... of a fateful there.
I really just...
The slow-motion watch XXS's failure?
Come on.
Oh look at the mouse turn.
That's a...
Exasperated King.
Yeah, let's turn that back.
That's a good little slow-motion right there.
That's a pro player equivalent of hands up keyboard.
When the mouse comes up...
Things aren't looking good. They're not going well thumbs up and shit's going back
That's the equivalent of a belt in terms of a
Yeah, they're gonna pop the do mom just to make sure and
Exelva who thought he would help well actually wait
Underneath the tier two tower beans from the other can they get something off of this one surely underneath the tier two
Tower with stuns a mar they're trading off the clip finally gets a pop
but it's a bit too late.
X6S coming in from behind.
It's the call of Mars, making a run for it down the river.
He's not going to be able to hit it.
Now, Maureen is chasing him to after nothing to say.
Still underneath the Tier 2, Power Shot
does not land onto the Sapphire.
Cuddle underneath their Tier 2, Falcons.
Managed to win a fight this deep onto the enemy map.
That is concerning.
And they got Aume in the process.
The last year, you weren't going down right now.
He should just be accelerating in the jungle
with all the space being created.
Instead, you're losing your hard carry
to the Doom counter pick, you get nothing in return. You brought everybody up there.
You lost your axe courier as well. And you know why Austin? Because he had another power
rune on Ember. He's just living the life regen, did so much work there for Maureen.
Somebody's gotta stop this. At this point, you bring five heroes to the next rune. Send
message. They'll probably still get it. They'll slight steal it.
They're gonna wisdom try and know. They're baiting in and if it spawns top and he dumps
X-XS, you could've gotten a jump on him, but instead it's a free rune on him. They just
can't get one. It is inevitable.
Well, time to just chill out a little bit, if you're extreme.
Just get that blink dagger underway.
While that early lead is gone now, Falcon's with a net worth of vantage here after how
rough that early game was.
That's a nice trajectory for them.
They can get one more teamfight going into a tower.
They're gonna be sitting pretty.
I'm not as convinced that this Tearblade has a free go at it in the late game here.
They have a lot of spellcasters, a lot of disruption, the Windranger matchup's pretty good, the Doom matchup's pretty good.
You need all of your cores to be scaling here at your extreme.
We need a lot of couriers too. Yeah, solid team gold.
Still, Extreme do have a very slight net worth lead, and the Blink Dagger stun frags the
excess.
The Blink Dagger for the...
I was gonna say the Sapphire, he's gonna build Blink Dagger next, but opted to buy
the Shard early.
That's where setting up on NTS, we got D-Board from Crit.
I don't know if he can make it out of this one.
He backs down then.
He has no cookie to hop over the cliff.
He is surrounded, very easy kill.
Another power rune, another kill for Maul Ring.
Does this feel like there's maybe a bit of a correlation there?
I don't know. It's doing some work.
Still, it's a nice angle. Nice deep ward.
Crit's gonna try and continue to protect this and use it and get another core kill off it.
Even if it dies, it will have paid for itself.
Some more stacks being created by snaking.
It's time to do some decent job making sure these ancients are getting beefed up for somebody.
I don't know who's gonna clear those. Not the most efficient.
Probably them are. That's usually what it comes down to. Get a radiance on Doom. There's your ancient clear.
That's Ward's doing so much work right now.
Yeah.
They do have an Amp damage on X-XS, so he won a power room.
They did it.
I got it. They did it.
Incredibly useless.
But the Ember doesn't have it.
That is true.
And that's a win. It's a moral victory.
That's some pretty good Rubik games. This tournament, and it's an FY Rubik.
He's got some good seal opportunities here. I would love to see him actually get that net worth up.
See if he could just start farming some waves somewhere or something.
Okay, so get some fights going, that's what the hero really wants.
I think HGR are intended to run into this midger one with the undying around there.
It's a tough fight to take aggressively.
Yeah, forcing Falcon to fight you is easier said than done.
They are very good at dodging you when they want to.
We're only giving you just a single hero pick off some support that dies or something.
I like the smoke bottom, it's not going to land here.
Still, getting the vision down here to find the Winter Ranger later on is super nice.
Might should be able to get a Tier 2 off of this.
I think there was a decent chance you found Skeeter down here.
He's just a little too quick for it.
How fast does Almay take this Tier 2?
Pretty damn fast.
And if you can't find kills, skip towers.
Pretty nice early objective to take in this game.
Can open up that outpost. Push this lane in, super deep.
He has to be hunted down.
Team gonna teleport for him, little hop.
Nice teaming.
The vision for both teams is pretty concentrated in these enemy jungles.
So you really have to be aware about going into the dark zones here
and just feeding some bad kill that's gonna break open the stalemate right now.
Oh! Nothing to say he fills his bottle with the power room.
Now that's a win.
Pretty good one too here.
Shilderun, when you're looking to break some of the stalemate for some fight mid or something, they find a Maar.
Maar's very tanky.
Getting to cave, he's getting hit.
He's got the kisses, with the battlehookers slowing him down, it's pretty easy to hit those shots.
Pretty easy to hit those shots.
There we go.
Probably ran back into it and burned.
Next Nova, nightmare, giving the plus one.
Cookie, makes it easy.
Nice.
The X6S actually made the jump there.
They had the opportunity to maybe get even more.
Obviously.
Look at all that go.
Obviously, just chases after Snake King.
All right, one turns to three
Slight misstep by ATF gets punished pretty damn hard as XG they're just they were looking for this fight
They just didn't know how to get it gets gifted to him. That's gonna break this game open considerably now
They're invading enemy ancients. They still have all these deep boards bottom
A lot of map control to play with right now. It's nighttime with the bane. He acts as a big threat
I don't want to jinx it Avery, but
dare I say it I think extreme gaming they could maybe get not just some power
rooms but maybe even a tormenter okay you're pushing it now
got another initiation chain it with the telekinesis sadly ex nova felt like
he walked forward yeah that's kind of awkward Cogs just go out FY steals it
tombstone shard puts him inside of the tombstone really weird well what's
Centaur Stomp. Nice, Centaur Stomp. Actually, the kit snapped fire a little bit of distance away from Amar.
Amar's still going to try and hunt him down here.
Hits him with the blade. Does not commit the Doom though. Not sure if he can get the kill.
Now with the Shackle Shot though, I think they've got it. Doesn't even have to use the Doom.
Solid chase down. That is definitely something this lineup has in spades between their three cores.
You even have the speed aura on the Doom that Amar really likes for some extra.
run at you and you die. And here comes the smoke sweep to the Tormentor side of the map.
Here is this, uh, off lane tier 1 tower is still up, so they can't take like a whole lot of map here.
They make the die past the tower anyway, spotting X Nova, coming in from behind, two man call!
XXS! Plus FY, setting it up with the clock steal. Now, Doom is gonna be put onto XXS,
but he's gonna say, that's worth it, man. I got the kill I was looking for. That's the Wind Ranger
down FY. Ooh, doesn't quite make it out. Couldn't get that doom steal either. Nice cover from Amar.
Is that worth it? Who got more gold? Yeah, it wasn't worth it in the end, that's for sure.
XXS, he did get the 3X streak on Skeeter, but he had a 5X streak that went to Amar. So now all
of a sudden, this doom is the highest. Now we're here on the game as he usually ends up in...
Amé didn't have a TP. Maybe they thought Amé could TP in. Like, that's XXS. He's a two-man
call next to a tower like he's like sure have to take this right
Sapphire not being there for that call hurts them a lot like that's your big
ball of the new fights as the axe ball comes through and Sapphire spells come
on top Rubik Bane can control the doom remember and you get to isolate some of
these heroes that's the dream that has to all be there at the start they do
defend their wisdom shrine once they're still available not the worst a lot of
gold for more that's gonna be the scary part here getting that streak that pushes
him towards a BKB. At least you have some BKB controls game. That was a big issue in
game one. Oh, no doubt. You have the grip, you have the call, you have a tear blade that
can just kind of swing into you. That's good enough.
TV can maybe build a Scotty at some point in the game.
For sure.
I end up in early MKB again. He really likes itemizing just to punish this WinRanger.
I can kind of see because so much of WinRanger's gameplay, these carry WinRangers, they just
Hunked down the enemy carry, right?
It's like every single fight they just went running and focused fire the enemy carry.
That's their juicer.
So, if you actually have a way to hit back, then what is Winter Ranger do then?
He has to run.
Get an earlier safe panic or something.
I don't know how Mauryn got out of that smoke play, but he managed it.
Yeah, completely surrounded by heroes on all sides.
TP's out.
And they get a Torment 3.
Got it.
He did it.
Object is falling for extreme gaming this time around.
You're actually giving extreme gaming paint charts with lead.
What do you give a bro shot for?
Even when you win against Falcons, you still lose.
That is annoying.
I don't think this is that.
Aegis is solid here.
You're going to give it to Maulry and her spirit ages.
For sure, it's annoying.
You could still fight into this though.
See the support's positioning to make sure they block any maybe smoke play, playing these
high grounds.
I think you're just waiting for AMA, MKB, XXS, PKB, then you're gonna take some fights.
That's your next timing.
If you get there and they still have Aegis, you can force that fight anyway if the Falcons give it to you.
I will say another thing that makes me more hopeful for extreme in this game is Snapfire Levels.
Level 15 at 23 minutes, nothing to say is I think making better progression than he did in Game 1.
Not a better early game.
Yeah, it helps that he also didn't go for the Rod of Ato's build.
Right, yeah.
Straight to Boots of Travel, so he was able to play the map a lot better.
It's gonna scale a lot faster, a lot better.
I think the Vatos... I ended up being pretty solid.
It works, there's no doubt about it.
Yeah, it's just a mixed item.
Maybe if the game... maybe if the early game hadn't gone so badly,
maybe he wouldn't have had to go Rod of Vatos, right?
Just to try and salvage things.
That's how I knew that.
Double Power Room Maul Ring, he's arcane with a Shield Rune.
He is... amp the hell up!
Ex-Nilba!
Instead, Fy and Amé quickly retreating back to the base as they know Falcons are gonna be searching for more.
That's fine.
Sacrifice that to the power into the Aegis timing.
Get it to Vower Steel and some extra gold on the map.
Still trying to get to the axe, BKB.
Now that's how you can farm.
Oh yeah, and look at this early axe for Crit.
He usually goes blink on this hero.
Here's another vision mechanism.
Yeah, why do you go early acts on cluckles? What are you looking to achieve for it?
Isn't it about the spamming rocket flares to push out lanes? Is this a map play?
I'm trying to think of why he wanted it this game in particular
So I've not seen him buy this early in any other game. I
Think he's here's my theory extreme gaming dude the way their lineup functions. They have to be as five
So I think splitting the map is more effective here
Could be an idea to improve their catch.
I almost think he just wants a lot of the rocket flares of the fight.
Just be able to spam them out, get vision on these two supports, get vision on the snap.
It's a little extra Hay-O-Weaver this Terrible-Aid.
I think he's pretty close to his base here.
Yeah, you're not.
Austin to use BKB.
Not chasing there.
Aye.
That does not feel like good for Falcons, I mean.
What are you accomplishing up here in terms of objectives and you're watching your other
two lanes get shoved in?
Yeah, especially since it is their age of timing against Helikens.
Turn around, Maureen.
Gonna be beaten in the first life.
Now, Extreme still need a retreat here.
Unless I'll make him get a Sunder on somebody.
Nice call on the Doom, but they stopped the Terribly.
They Terribly did it.
Got the Sunder.
Sunder!
It goes off barely.
They still come into him.
He's still gonna be in trouble.
He's still gonna die to the Doom.
Maybe he can get enough damage to kill him or he dies.
Got that much.
FY with the stolen remnants. He's got one out.
They'll jump to it.
Maureen's gonna chase.
There's Critt on the other side.
Telekinesis running down the river.
Nicely played, but FY, he doesn't really have it out here.
It gives him enough time to buy out his shard, though,
so he won't lose too much gold.
They're always SSS though.
That's rough.
On top of popping that initial nine second BKB,
rough fight for him,
he had to try and do something to buy some time for Hame.
You just only have a little bit of a window there.
Get baited by that agent a little bit.
I'll make pushing in that tier 2 lingered a little too long, you get caught, and I have
to commit to try and salvage this situation, it ends up costing you a lot.
I by recall, he was pretty low on mana too, it's not even like he had that much resources
for his first life.
It was almost like they would get nothing.
If they don't get off that sundry, then Amar doesn't die, they chase down, for sure, maybe
even more heroes, or at least more efficiently.
The clockwork causing them problems again.
The lock and flare slows, the catch, the cause.
You just can't escape from this hero.
It's so hard to disengage against a 10-man battle plan.
Yeah, ew.
Would you agree that it feels like clockwork?
Maybe it's crit.
But I also feel like the clockwork is more effective against extreme.
Why would that be?
Okay, well, this is gonna sound a little mean, but I think clockwork is better against teams that don't have
Like a hundred percent discipline flowing in the teamfights, you know
Okay, if you're mis-stepping the teamfights a little bit like that whole fight starts with all my just being a tier two
Those kind of sequences clockwork takes advantage of crit slow it down by zagging him scepter might just be in range
I success the smoke broke, but they don't see him because it's nighttime. He managed to blink on top of them
Okay, so they do get it a little get stolen cogs too, which is pretty big here and
steal the wisdom
Which pushes the Sapphire up to level 18 pretty nice get some tower damage too. I'm gonna sit in here with this MKB
He takes buildings and heroes very quickly you connect on them
It does feel like extreme gaming their smokes are landing better and they're in better positions to take a pressure gives afterwards
I think it's just more straightforward from them
If they smoke in, X-X has to jump somebody, then you have follow-up stuns.
It's a lot easier than that game one.
We'll see if they can catch the ember, there's the axe from all ring.
Could be equally as elusive this game.
They have some nice tools to potentially catch them, you're gonna have to execute that.
Oh, hello, Snake King!
Goodbye, Snake King.
Thanks for breathing.
You're not keeping out of that.
Huh, well, that makes us so much damage with a rushed MKB.
Got that gunpowder going too.
Hmm, feels good.
It's crazy, he went from level 17 to level 19.
He's quite far now.
Stealing wisdom, or taking wisdom and then killing undying.
He did get a lot of gold for killing Amar in that fight.
Yeah, Amar had a killing spree, right?
Yeah, it was 500 gold.
So honestly, it wasn't the worst exchange for him.
Looking at his position now, he's probably feeling pretty confident in this game.
If you can get to...
He's eyeing up Scotty and we talked about how good Scotty is here for cutting some of these heroes
and just pelting into the doom.
If you can get to that, plus a survival item, I want to say Lincoln's does look pretty juicy this game.
He might just opt for more damage though, some butterfly, Daedalus, whatever.
Yeah, what's the thought process, Lincoln's versus Lotus in this game?
Because XXS, he's gonna go Lotus.
I don't like Lotus as much, I think you'd rather block this doom than reflect it.
I would also argue that Chivas in a way also lets you...
It kind of accomplishes some of what you want, which is like that A we hit.
maybe hits these heroes that maybe want to blink in or slows them down at least,
which helps the TV maintain that distance anyway.
That's where XGD decided how these fights are going to go
and what they're going to try and aim for.
If they want to just send their frontliners in, and that's going to create space for the tearblade,
I'll make an itemize for higher TPS,
and you can just buy zone control items on the side of X6S.
And to say his blink tag is on cooldown right now, this is going to be awkward.
Hit by the hook, shot, bounce back by the cogs.
He has BKB, but it's been chain stunned off and he can't get out.
Too much damage done.
That is so bad, he was just slightly separated from his team, the rest of the extreme gaming were on the other side of the river.
Maybe they get something cheeky here?
Another setup where maybe somebody walks into them for the fiend's group?
There's no Doom available, that is a big opening for Almey.
They're gonna go out to the Wind Raider, see if they can call him, snaking has to get the Tombstone saved!
Oh shanty, got slept.
He got flanked immediately, really well played by Ex-Nova.
He'll go for the kill, Silva Maureen, he's dicing him up, something fierce though.
He quickly kills the fame. Snaking lives for a little while.
Alright, he just underfogged.
Sunder? Oh, of course, that thing goes into it. Not a big Sunder, though.
Still at half HP. Still with no way out. He has to turn around and swing. There's no other way out.
He's not gonna live. He just has to try and do damage. He won't be enough to kill, though.
Another extreme gaming fight.
They choose to take it, and they still end up on the losing side. Two for five.
How'd that go so bad?
They slept the Undying, they killed the Windranger, that fight should be good at that point, there's no Doom available, you aren't missing Snapfire and that's a huge portion of your follow DPS here.
Still, it felt like it should have gone better and it's just, Ember, TV is placing everybody up, Ratchet, it's a magic damage, right? I agree, but that's, this is the game you picked it into, this is what I'm saying, these matchups for TV aren't that great, right?
The number's always been a pretty good matchup, the winranger's a good matchup,
Dooms a good matchup, he in theory doesn't really have any favourable core to core.
So you're worried about a lot, and he doesn't have a defensive item.
There's no Satanic, there's no BKB, he doesn't have that Scotty yet.
He's still pretty fragile.
Flash goal and hit and cogs, that's pretty nice.
It's Amar who gets all those kills at the end too though.
Amar grows bigger and bigger.
Oh yeah.
Sheep us, and he is gonna go the Agathams build.
Let's look for that big A.W. Doom if they don't have ways to disengage with it, which they will. They do have Cookie.
Cookie charges in particular is a really good way to get out of the A.W. Doom.
I think the damage is gonna happen too fast. I think that's the issue.
Don't think you're wrong.
Even if you get out of it, Suck is still just charging your work.
Man, that needs really bad-
That's an axe rush.
He has gotten a lot of farm.
Oh yeah, a lot of player spam.
He is real fat.
Maybe Kurt was just feeling himself after game one.
He said, damn, I'm good.
You know what, I should have more for our farm.
I should have more items to play with.
I'm too good.
He should be.
I think he has looked like the best clockwork in this tournament.
The amount of work he does, and how consistent it is every game, and he doesn't feed.
I think a lot of clocks where you see you have like seven eight nine that's whatever your creating space heat has very low depth count
An extremely high impact in every team play
With the level 15 he's got the battery assault damage to a we off the agatum scepter is pretty good call goes out and
Maureen don't actually with the slight there. Yes. Yeah, this is well, so my tip off to come on some kisses
And kisses on Skeeter instead
Well, that's kisses on cooldown. Is that enough for Falcons to finish up Roshan with confidence?
They're still meta. I'm gonna pop meta here.
Oh yeah, that...
You're not doing anything.
I mean, Falcons are actually pushing the fight.
Oh, that's awkwish.
Look at Maureen! He managed to kill X-Silver right in front of X-Legs.
They got the jump watch and the terror blade.
It's a disaster.
No thunder.
Yeah, this is all bad for extreme gaming.
Hookshot stops the BKB Tiki away.
Hey, Mike, just get wiped here.
Maureen, are you gonna go for that last one?
A blink away from X6S, gets him enough distance, he will not collect on the final kill, but
four for nothing.
Again, it's the same paradigm as Game 1.
You bait him in a little bit, they miss one jump, they misuse one spell, the clock is
ticking on the meta, they're trying to disengage, you find an opening.
There's just no organization in this teamfight for XG as Falcons pick him apart.
They just make it look so easy.
Don't even need to do the roach, they can take the mid lane of Barracks and go back
for it as Extreme Gaming are respawning.
I'll say this acts.
Clockwork is also really nice with Doom.
You get initial vision mechanisms, but if you do somebody and you just start laning
all these rocket flares into them, and you get slowed down, it helps him get another
You just can't escape the Doom basically.
It's obnoxious.
X-X-S playing a dangerous game right now.
He knows...
Tensions definitely come in his way, cuts the way, farms the neutrals, blinks away.
Wastis Lotus already hurriedly catches them.
Steam is spiraling quickly.
They have triple sheevas by the way.
I don't know if I've ever seen that.
Yeah, I did notice that.
There is more value to have being multiple sheevas in previous.
They're a little overlapped now.
And in this game, if it's just the TV, if you just eat armor, sheevas is kind of the
best item for it, right?
On these spellcasters for sure.
Especially if you benefit from the AoE.
Yeah, you don't really have an AC here, so just a good item right now.
Feels good on so many heroes.
Another Aegis into the hands of Falcons.
Give it to Skeeter here who can go straight into the Daedalus and be a massive damage threat.
Too many problems to solve for extreme gaming right now.
Running out of time to solve them.
Once again, the trade off Roshan for Tormenter.
Extreme gaming.
I already have a whole bunch on the weaker side of that.
Don't even get the... this shard, that's kind of sad.
Could have used it.
They are so close to Scotty on Amit. Now, I don't know how much that changes.
Because it kinda seems like they just man up on him and doom him and kill him.
And they don't have a way to stop that? They will never potentially have a way to stop that?
Straight to the doom page.
You can always just find your mark.
You can go on the doom if a mark gives it to you.
Maybe he lads out.
That's the hope.
There goes Smallreen.
Spotted a support.
Look at him go.
Gets the kill.
Gets up pretty deep, but he has a hand-disk here.
Yeah.
He's gonna have a chance to throw that Redman out.
And he is almost level 25 off of that kill.
So all the Redmins he expended, if he got level 25,
they would be back in his pocket pretty quickly.
Well, we've got cut, nice play by X-XS, so I guarantee his Lotus Orb respawns off the
courier, they finished the Scotty for Ami, they did get to their next set of items.
I can look to take a teamfight when the Aegis expires here, still three minutes for Falcons,
however, gives them a decent opportunity to try and find something into some more building
damage.
They're on the right side of the map, extreme gaming, likely to push out somewhere, so they
smoke sweet to the left.
Who shows it's gonna be on me shows on the career? No, it's not like this. It is exactly like this
He can live right?
Cover your eyes every
It's all bad business here for extreme
Quick little TB the other side of the map make sure okay now we take it left side of the map
Let's re-secure the right side. Just don't let extreme gaming get out there
Because there is a possibility, again, it's a Sapphire, if he can get to site the Bice, he's got the Cookie Charges, if they can get the Initiation, a lot of ifs.
But, it is possible for Extreme to win a fight. Not without the Terrablade, though.
So, that's gonna be a free high ground hit. Two Lanes of Varix should be acquired here for Felkings.
It's a nasty combo.
Rocket flares just giving the... not only just canceling blink daggers, giving the information
for the Ember Spirit, he then can go in deep, catch those heroes, before their blink comes
back up, and Xtelva spot it.
Does not get him on the chains.
I think Falcons use this hero better than almost any other chemist in the game.
They have very good conceptual understanding of what the clockwork gives you other than,
you know, cogs are broken.
Like whatever you can say about any spell they use a lot of the utility of this hero
in really smart ways
Rocket players are constantly scouting game targets or threatening heroes on lanes
It gets giving you vision initiation in the fight for your other cores
But it's not necessarily the clock we're going in himself and then I feel when Falcons do play around this hero in the teamfights the
Cogs are always creating some sort of disjoint. It's splitting the fight up. Yeah
where you have like half of XG in this game
or on one side of the cogs hookshot,
the other half on the other half,
and Falcons, they're so good at picking heroes apart,
displacing them with a lot of their lineups,
or bailing someone out.
It's like half your team is dying
and you're caged off from that half,
and you're just watching them die.
It's really obnoxious.
It's also great here to re-initiate.
If you kite out the first half of the fight
and then wanna go back in,
there's almost no better support at guaranteeing that you can
find a catch in that situation than the clockwork so
it actually really fits all the things they look for
unsurprised to see the first pick every game it's available this might be a
hurry up the ban against this team
and just let something else through that is more one-dimensional
because the other issue with
this type of abuse is it's very hard to come up with solutions for it
you can't really aim eyes against clockwork you know
What are you buying to deal with Hookshot Cogs, Rocket Flare, or something like that?
It's not a hero where, well, I'm playing against Viper, I can buy Disbells and Purgeing Plikes and stuff, it's not...
Even Lone Druid, I think, in some ways...
Is a little easier to itemize, is that a weird statement? I guess that statement makes no sense.
You're also kind of preparing apples to oranges.
Yeah, that's why it makes no sense.
They still need to toss up to the high ground, unfortunately the damage over time is still
too much.
Doom is, by the way, ridiculous.
66 damage, level 20 town.
Is that necessary?
Oh yeah, it's juicy.
Always need to make sure this hero is viable.
That's too much.
20k net worth lead.
to actually get to they got to hex for NTS okay and they got the ads on X Nova so
there's your increase in control there are nice control mechanisms if you can
land them a little worried about what December is gonna do with a on this level
25 double slay the fist all those remnants to work with very hard to
Nab Maureen here.
He's just going in.
Look at that. Hello, Ex-Nobah.
What the heck?
He does get hexed.
Gets cookie.
Gets controlled up.
The amp is gonna pop.
They have to follow up. Disables the fiend's grip.
Last turn to this.
Last turn to this.
There's a cookie follow up.
Ex-Nobah's even gonna die.
Okay, he almost died there.
He had to wait a little longer.
Just a little bit longer, or maybe the cookie follows up the fiend's grip a little bit faster.
The status resists.
We got you.
Still, it's not cool that you could smoke here trying to surprise jump falcons, but
look, we're breaking it.
Surprise jump falcons against this great clockwork?
No chance.
You do need to get the telekinesis toss back so maybe they can kill the clock.
So tanky.
Look at it go, man.
So tanky.
He's not dead.
And the jump goddess initiates game.
Oh boy.
Amar finds his mark once again.
25, do him appliance mute. And well, Terriblead's dead for 80 seconds, so you can try and live.
But your base is still free for the taking, you have no damage dealer left to defend all this.
Falcons will get there too, oh, and they will claim top spot in Group B. They are looking like a
force to be reckoned with. They are fighting their form again. Fighting some heroes that work for them
in this patch too, some big threats right, the Embers feels like a must man, the Clocker feels
feels like a must-band. This is a dying-been-working-out-welter in the Necrophos from Game 1. This is a lot of Necroses. It's a problem.
I think if it's that category of these anti-carrier heroes like the Doom Life, the Viper, that just takes style to a T.
Too many problems to solve in the draft, and I think teams are having an issue formalizing how you want a team by goffing right now.
How do you maintain your formation? How do you deal with the frontline collapsing so quickly?
How do you propose something against them that is a threat that they have to deal with?
It feels like they're just kind of shrugging everything off and getting their lives and they know and
Yeah, you beat us, you know, we're not gonna worry about what you're doing. We're gonna make you beat us
I haven't really seen a team challenge them on some of those areas yet
So it'll be interesting to see how they fare against some of the other top dogs in this event draft wise
And if they can continue to adapt but man the gameplay is looking pretty solid if your xg
There's a lot of there's a lot of holes in the ship right now that you have a plug right
It feels way too one-dimensional to me. I think they're just going back to this
Not for protect one, but a lot of the eggs in the omni basket
He's he's not in a game where this carry has good core matches a lot of times makes it harder
And they all it feels like they always have this support girl that just doesn't play with NTS too well
We're joking about losing all the powers and stuff
But I think that as a symptom of they don't feel natural going to this mid NTS here with the support girl
and making something happen around the map.
Oh, but it's Bane Sapphire, like shit, but that's a combo of sorts.
I'm not saying that heroes aren't a show, I'm saying it's their idea of what these
heroes are doing together.
Okay.
You can make it work with anything in Dota, if you understand, I'm gonna, you know, abuse
blood grenades or some angle or whatever.
Yeah, you're just not doing it.
So either that means their idea of it isn't correct or they're not picking heroes where
they understand how to do it, but something has to be adjusted there because, man, when
you lose like 20 power moons and wisdom shrines and all these small things, the game just
It becomes incrementally harder to play.
Your mid-falls behind, theirs gets ahead.
And this game, they won all the runes and first blood.
Hey, what, everything?
2-0 for Falcons.
Thank you so much, our fantastic casters over there,
SVG and Cap.
We are here with ATF, sir.
What an honor it is to see you win that game.
I'm only going to ask this because I feel
like we have a relationship.
We've known each other a long time.
Does it feel good to know that you guys are good again?
Well, first of all, we're still bad.
We'll just stop it. It's nothing.
It's almost, yeah, it's not an achievement.
So we still have to win four more series,
so I don't know how much is left.
Three? No, three. I don't know.
So, but it's good to, you know, like,
first seed, move out fast, not like make stress and, yeah.
Well, you've been doing a lot better than what I've seen from you guys
Over the course of the year don't be offended. It feels like you guys are back in your groove
I you know everything's kind of clicking it doesn't feel that way playing there's still much more to do
Well, I mean last year surely like we didn't win anything and then we got second or first
Yeah, but the thing is luckily last year our heroes were good, but this year I'm playing necrophos
So I'm not sure what's happening
I don't want to talk to you about that this necrophos hero is crazy now in the beginning of the tournament
We saw you get a little bit out of position, you know, picked up sometimes when your teammates weren't.
But now you seem to have a mastery of the hero. It is actually looking broken.
Is that how it feels to you? Do you feel like this hero is 2-OP?
It's a very bad hero, I would say. It loses only games. It's very low on it.
But it's my best hero, that's why. I just play this hero every game. My first picket, I don't care. I never play it again.
My team knows I want to play it for every game.
Is there something appealing about this hero to you?
I mean, I missed the old Mars Day. Snapfire is so big now.
You know, you'd feel like Mars would be good too. Why is it appeal to you?
Uh, I mean, well, Veth just decided like, Mars, Timber, and Razor, my three best heroes are not gonna have facets, you know?
Sure, sure.
You have to buy Agonym or Shardor. Maybe it doesn't even exist.
Ha ha.
So, yeah, I have to like, find new heroes and like, luckily I found some.
Yeah, absolutely. I want to talk to you about your very interesting flag text that we saw on this one.
When you were going up hill in game 1, you had the Roshan banner, but you put your little flag down instead.
Maybe that was to trick him? Was that on purpose?
Uh, I mean, this trick usually works on landsmall. Like, you just put the creep in front of the melee or the range,
and then it actually gets confused. Like, they just see your fucking creep flag, you know, and was like, what's it doing even there?
Now, I just want to ask you about your second flag trick, where at the end of the game, you put the flag in the enemy fountain.
What is the purpose of that maneuver?
We conquer the territory.
Well, there's a lot of different games here at EWC. There you go. We're playing a bit of an RTS here, but thank you so much for an incredible series.
It was an honor and pleasure to watch you guys absolutely nail it. They had a great time.
We loved watching it and we'll see if our panel can break it down and get us to the next one.
Thank you very much, Lax and Amar and Amar not too impressed with that.
He will make it to the playoffs which is rightfully so we expect Falcons to be in the playoffs and Amar is expecting his team
To be in the playoffs. This was just another
Step in the direction that they already knew Lacoste were gonna be in
Yeah, it seems so but not satisfied. It could have been better
There's always room to improve even for the winning teams as we see like Amar is a big troll
But let's
Say that first because this guy a couple of the time you don't know if he's being sarcastic if he's joking
And that's what we love about him, but also like the fact that this guy's trolling always finding a new way to troll enemies that are with
You know, maybe some spicy
All chat maybe with mantles maybe potentially with the flags now
He always finds something that these guys are very creative when it comes down to gameplay
But also very creative when it comes down to this like mental warfare. I mean said you probably know like
What a few things about it. Oh, I enjoy that always I think it actually matters like it's true
some players don't get affected and you feel it but some players I can promise you feel it right away
like their clicks start becoming shaky they get overly aggr- it's so often that you use a voice
line or you spray the ground or something and then like you feel like wait why is he trying to harass
me now what's going on like he should not be doing that then you know that it's just emotions
and this is when the fun starts really so I mean you should use every tool that's available in the
game in my opinion I don't think a lot is overdoing it or doing it in a way that's like disrespectful
I think I think he's doing it in a pretty relaxed way actually even tone it up if I'm honest, but um, it's cool
I always enjoyed to see it. I mean the best way to answer that is just beat him
If you're not good enough, you just have to just just accept it. Yeah, which extreme did not do in this series
This game though this game too. It didn't look hopeless. I feel like the better starts
Yeah, first blood, you know couple of runes here and there and the relatively strong laning stage
But again, we come down to them having this issue.
We've talked about it multiple times where the team just doesn't play that much around NTS,
where he isn't really getting priority.
I feel like a lot of the times you will see these four protect one strategies
that still a lot of that like focus goes onto AME, where I feel like it needs to be NTS,
but like you need to have that pairing.
You need to be controlling the runes because a lot of the time,
Like, you are playing... It's not like you're playing Kunkas, you don't care too much about the runes, you're not playing Nature's Prophet, mid that one game where he dominated, you are playing heroes that you want to be getting off the ring, you want to be getting haste to the gank, so you can gank the side lane, maybe amplify damage, to have that extra bit of a damage that you need to kill certain heroes on the map, but we really haven't seen that from Extreme Gaming.
I'm just I'm just worried for that team to be honest because I don't think they're drawing the right conclusions from the games that they're playing
They just they just keep showing up and they're thought they fought up to the same thing every time and now it happened
Like it's even worse than that like cuz it happened twice in the exact same manner
like they lost a game to an ember spirit that
They could not stop I was getting every single room and I was making all the space on the map
that was required for falcons like this ember is enabling a mill near win ranger on one side and radians hero on the other
side of the map and it did the same in the game one they have necro that is farming the entire map scared doing the same like
When are you going to adjust that like I feel like you
Don't get to play the game and they not only I mean they had a great start
But they also played their lanes awesome this game like extreme they they crossed three lanes essentially and
And even though that happens, they still can't play the game.
Like I'm really looking forward to see that team change that,
because I think if they don't, I don't expect much anymore in the playoffs,
if they don't change that.
At this point, Modern Dota is, this is just part of the game at this point.
You just can't ignore it.
There was a point that SVG made during the cast regarding the clockwork,
and how, of course, Kurt's really good on the clockwork,
But he said the cost that he found Clockwork especially good against teams like Extreme Gaming
and that Clockwork is just really good at beating.
He said it nicer, but less good teams.
Yeah, I can see that.
I mean, this is the hero that I used twice today.
It looked extremely good, completely different itemization as well when we compared game
number one to game number two where he is playing that slightly, but quite a lot greedier compared
what he was building into game number one and kind of opting to go for himself the rocket spam.
It gets pretty annoying. We talked about vision that this hero provides. It gets pretty insane
at the later stages of the game. And the toolkit that this hero has, it has everything like that
stop BKBs like and something that he pointed out like what are you even buying in that situation
because it doesn't feel like you have the clear item that like Rubik he picks up the shard so he
can lift you out of the cogs. But this hero has like multiple rounds of spells that he can like
go in, get out with the four staff if he's buying the protect, to protect himself, protect the
allies and also getting the jetpack on top of that. So very annoying hero, vision hero,
like he checks a lot of the boxes, pretty similar to how I would compare Tuss. Like Tuss doesn't
maybe have the vision aspect, but very well rounded position four slash five hero.
Yeah, it works out great for Falcons. Two games in a row and I'm sure we're going to see him in
Crit's hands more often if they don't ban it time and time again. We can take a look at where this leaves a group a because group a is
Done and better yet group a is completely solved
We have no tiebreakers in this group
It is as you see it with Falcons securing the top spot and because BB team was able to 2-0 their opponents in
Gamer Legion and because Rooneyters was able to 2-0 the Rangers
It is Game Religion and the Rangers that will be eliminated, Seb.
I mean, for poor Rangers, I dare to say it's not a surprise.
I think they're the least experienced team here.
And, you know, I didn't catch all their games, but them being able to take a game off one of the teams
and gathering, you know, a bunch of knowledge on what happens in these tier one tournaments.
I'm sure they're going to walk away feeling grateful that they participated, obviously you feel bad and it's a disappointment, but yeah.
As for game religion, I think the disappointments are a little bit bigger because they really showed that they were on par.
It's like you think of Xtreme and of Rune Eater that made it through and you think of the game religion, it's like, are they really worse?
I'm not even sure. Like if anything, I could make arguments for why I think game religion could challenge some of the top teams more than Xtreme would at this point.
So it's obviously, it's the cruelty of group stage every map matters, which is also at the same time is difficult because you play so many games, but every point matters.
It came down to one this time around.
And I think we sat at this very spot when we watched extreme gaming take on game religions and game religion let Lunder it through.
Two games in a row and they did so well and then later on in the game they still couldn't make it again.
Like it just takes one game.
Yeah, that one game they would be potentially in the tiebreaker scenario.
Dick could have, to be honest, won both of these games considering the mid-game that they had,
maybe some decision-making wasn't really there.
And also, they started pretty strong, like they started with the 2-0 and then still managed to get only one dub,
but the games that they played, they looked pretty good.
Like, I gotta agree, yeah, I have to feel bad about the team because they have so much more to offer,
and maybe it comes down to also Rune Eaters, a team that not many people expect to have this good of a result
because they are slightly over-performing.
Yeah, nobody can really expect what's coming with all these groups
and so many games being played at the same time,
but that's what that is.
It's brutal at times for those two teams.
Of course, it is for some teams.
It's not that brutal for some teams.
It's a joy.
And it was a joy today watching twice Malrin play Ember Spirit.
And that is why he, Seb, gets our MVP.
Yeah, I mean, 100 percent.
well deserved, definitely the best player, but the most impact in the series.
I think he, I dare to say he actually carried them in game two straight up.
I think not only in the early game, but also the team fight game on was a little bit more like even in a sense,
but his performance has been crazy good.
And he mentioned that the one on the interviews that we, you know, he gave here where he didn't get to play last tournament with them.
He feels like he's not sure he's like, you know, warmed up basically for these kinds of events.
So he said that he needs a little bit more time.
I can feel the difference in his play,
like the amount of confidence that he has
in these like later group stage games
compared to the first ones.
So I'm very happy to see him pick up some steam.
As for the teams he's gonna be facing,
yeah, good luck to all of them.
Cause when this guy is on is he's really, really hard to stop.
Yeah. And there's already so many heroes
you don't want to see him playing.
Yeah, he gets his hand on the Ember Spirit
and you're like, that's another one.
maybe should be adding to the list of heroes to ban against Team Falcons, but there's just so many heroes
you want to remove. And that's what him losing is lane by the way, that's what happens when you
win the lane against him, just imagine if he wins the lane, which happens very often. Beyond Godlight.
I think it also comes down to this being a carry meta, so a lot of the times in the first
the bans you really don't see a lot of mid laners, so it opens up the other mid laners as well.
Yeah and that was our series one for the day that was our group A for the day and
that means we are moving forward because we are about to find out what's
happening in group B. We are on this stream going to be watching Aurora
versus Team Liquid. I just also want to give a quick shout out that on the B
stream you'll have Nick my Galaxy taking on playtime that's another brand and
also so important for these standings as well and we'll tell you all about that
in a bit, but first we're going to check in with our commentary duo who also has something to say about the series.
Hybrid workers, artists, and the game of every move.
Group B currently has a tie going on, but that could be Sol dinner upcoming match, Liquid
vs Aurora.
Avery, Liquid hasn't looked in the best form, but they have beaten Aurora in the past.
True.
Could have a good match up here.
I think it's all about Nisha.
Which Nisha shows up today?
Good Nisha, Evil Nisha, Terrible Nisha, Washed Nisha, Garbage Nisha.
what the prime on a bad Nisha's why do great Nisha that's good Nisha there
could be a lot now maybe we'll get multiple Nisha's multiple personality
Nisha well all it takes is one win to be able to ruin Aurora's current standing
in the groups because Nigma Galaxy is also standing there with one loss
meanwhile liquid they can't get eliminated off this series that's the
upside but they also can't really get top of their group either it's looking a
little weird for him yeah I think they would agree with that I think if you
I remember on that team where they stand right now. They'd be like
We don't know so a lot to prove in this series. I think a roar just cooking
I expect them to continue to cook chef nightfall
delivering his master course
He thinks he can come in here and play my game
Either one you're done
The eSports World Cup is basically nerd Mecca, and it's being held here for the first time
in Paris, unlike previous years where it was in Saudi Arabia, near actual Mecca.
But this core pillar of eSports history dates all the way back
to 2024. Okay, fine, it hasn't been around for that long, but since its inception, we've
already had historic upsets, big victories, and of course, moments like this.
I'm 35. Too many people say I'm older. I can't win anymore. But today, I've proved myself.
And outside the shock of someone over the age of 35 accomplishing anything, the emphasis
has and always will be on the winners.
But what about the losers?
Who tells their story?
To learn more about the art of losing, I decided to consult the experts.
The French.
Wait, do you actually want me to say this?
Have you seen the French on social media?
I'm gonna get destroyed on Twitter.
You have me in a break.
But there's a lot that we can learn from losers.
So who exactly are they?
Well, according to my mother, it's everyone in this industry, but when it comes to the tournament,
it's a little bit more nuanced than that. There can only be one EWC champion,
and in order to win that title, they have to accumulate points across a series of 24 different
games, so series contenders are going to want to field a lot of teams. It's like the great
Canadian hockey player Wayne Gretzky once said, I don't even like Poutine. I know it's supposed to
to be our country's thing, but this isn't the right,
can you pull up the right one?
Yeah, thank you.
You miss 100% of the shots that you don't take.
So there you have it.
So you might be asking yourself,
well, why don't these clubs just field
as many teams as possible?
Well, the answer's a little complicated,
but the technical term is that it's expensive.
Hey, anyone got a euro?
I'm trying to buy an eSports team.
I just need a couple million.
Anyways, here's a copyright-free version of WonderFall.
I said, well, maybe I'm gonna buy a Esports team, maybe.
And after that, I'm gonna buy a Laundry mat.
Is that?
But does it actually work?
Let's say that the results are mixed.
For example, in 2024, Twisted Minds qualified 12 teams for EWC,
but seven of them didn't even register a single point.
And not one of those teams found a tournament win,
which if my math is correct, that leads us to,
uh-huh, and the same number of wins my grandma had that year.
Now in 2025, VertusPro registered 18 teams.
And because I'm such a huge supporter of eSports,
I pledged that for every win they got,
I would rescue a cat from an animal shelter.
No meow meows were saved that year.
I would have been better off pledging
to Verstop and SimRacing.
I mean, look at these guys, specialized sniper clubs.
One shot, one kill.
That's gotta be better, right?
Well, sort of.
In 2025, Twisted Minds doubled down on EWC,
bringing 14 teams, but eight of them didn't register
a single point.
However, they were able to move up into the standings
to fourth place.
With millions of people from around the world
tuning into this year's eSports World Cup,
the pressure of winning is at an all-time high.
But the threat of losing?
Even higher.
So who's going to be taking home the World Cup this year?
Do any of us even still have jobs after this?
Have the KC fans already found my hotel?
Find out the answer to all these questions and more
at the eSports World Cup.
We're just probably catching strays a little bit there from off the league that they
They're already doing a little rough here in the Dota 2, and another kitten doesn't get adopted.
That's very sad, but we're going to focus on a different group.
We're here for Dota 2, no words from this group.
We're going to focus on, well, a potential awesome tiebreaker.
I know, we're going to talk about it in here at Lacoste instead, and this group, you would think Lacoste that it's kind of solved, but is it really?
And not really, we have a level up team and L1 team being already eliminated, the P-Time, they sent them to themselves with that third slash fourth spot,
which means that they're gonna have to go to two rounds of Beatrice through the survival mode because stage,
because they will have to, you know, get in there somehow. This is a team that does deserve it.
And today they are gonna be playing against the Nigma Galaxy, which is not gonna be an easy one by any means.
So this is a pretty difficult matchup.
Miima Galaxy gotta be looking for those extra points,
because right now they are sitting at 7 and 1
sharing the first spot with Aurora gaming.
So a lot to decide.
And if Team Liquid, for example, drops only one game,
they are not gonna be contender for that first spot.
I think that if, as we see the points,
if Liquid 2.0 Aurora,
yeah, then both of them are 7 and 3,
And then P-Time, 2-0, Nigma Galaxy, and then Nigma is also 7 and 3.
We've got ourselves a three-way tie,
and we could be infinitely watching Nigma Galaxy
in a real-world anti-mode that play up against each other.
That sounds wonderful, Seth.
So, yeah, I stopped listening at the fourth if...
What?
The chance of this happening,
probably with the current strength of the teams
that we are going to be seeing, very low, in my opinion.
I mean, yeah, also to answer your question is like, it would be a lot of fun to see these three teams battle it out at the same time, quite unlikely, I would say, I feel like Nigma...
Maybe, maybe I feel like calling them the most convincing team of that group. I mean, definitely there's a, you know, an argument with Aurora, and maybe it's not, maybe I'm biased.
But if I had to pick the strongest team so far in that group, I would maybe pick Nigma.
And these are the two teams that are trying to challenge them, or are way more stable,
way more clear on their identity than Team Liquid.
But we didn't catch the Team Liquid game yesterday on this stream, but they looked much more
solid in the sense that they had their strategies figured out, I feel.
I think they're picking up some steam and better understanding on what they should be playing in this patch and in this meta.
So I'm pretty hopeful that they can bring a real challenge to Aurora today.
Aurora looked much more stable, like with the picks, with the execution of their drafts.
We talked about how strong they are in the laning stage.
Like they were having some of the issues, like coming into this tournament,
You know, maybe not the team that you would like expect to be the top contender straight away
This is the team that does tend to power up and yes, he's like blitz has been carrying them pretty heavily
And and now they have to take care of him boxy
does the 360
That's gonna be 360 flip like it'd be much better
You know just for the camera, but I feel like there's gonna be
Maybe they're gonna be solving some issues from the offline that they didn't have in the last couple of games
but that's yet to be seen.
There's also, of course, a bit of history.
Team Liquid, TI winning team, you know when they won TI?
When they had an extra coach added to the mix
and that extra coach was the coach of now Aurora.
So focusing in on Aurora,
we are going to hear something from said coach, KP,
who's talking to Purge.
Hey, I'm here with KP Timorora's coach now your players have been dodging my interviews a lot. What's going on with that?
They're shy boys. Yeah, and I'm not that shy so but it's their job
They get paid the same whether they do this or not so they just choose not to so I got a pressure them more effectively is where you're saying
All right, that makes sense. You guys have been slapping late. You've been doing really well
What what's been the big difference? It's you probably right?
Yeah, of course guys saw me like what else but now it's like seriously. I think after our roster change. I think
I'm not sure what it was, but like maybe
we have like this honeymoon period and we're kind of still
riding off of it and I think my players are just really talented like nothing too special I
Draft like okay, like just make them play the heroes and they just play the game and you know, well, it's working
That's really good for you guys. You've got Liquid coming up the scores decent, but they're like on that edge of being like
Maybe topping the group if they beat you guys and
Nigma falls down or something. Do you ever like look at moments like this in a tournament where you're like here's a great team?
I could break their morale and do like try harder in hopes that like you're gonna be the one that like crushes them and like
They go into lower bracket and then they like flame out before they see you guys again
not really that's too elaborate yes to aberra I think not really but there is
one thing though since we're playing liquid I'm gonna try extra hard because
okay just because because they're my ex and you have to try hard to be your ex
every time you see your ex you're like I'm gonna make sure I do my hair that day
exactly you have to like listen jealous you have to like you know show them the
best version of yourself while they're sad that night when they lost they're
gonna be like maybe KP was a good fit yeah you know like but yeah
jokes aside nothing really like too special I'd say like every team we're
gonna try hard as hell like we're gonna go all out every team every day you know
liquid maybe I spend like an extra like 10 more minutes 10 minutes oh yeah how
much of that is daydreaming about your nice times with them though maybe like
eight minutes understandable yeah we all do that right what player on your
team are you most proud to have who's like really impressing you lately lately I
think lately I think the code has been playing really well yes yeah it's my my
topic for now your new girlfriend yeah my new girlfriend but I can always change
girlfriend like next week maybe it's like nightfall think after maybe like
k-oriented the benefit of being the coach yeah yeah you have to instruct
everybody equally understand otherwise I get jealous yeah okay well thank you
Thank you for joining me for the interview and good luck in your match.
Thank you.
There's one point in particular that stood out to me there.
KP says, you know, ever since our new additions, we've been in a honeymoon phase.
That's six months ago. How long did a honeymoon last?
A lot of people would dream on going on a six-month honeymoon.
Forever with the right person.
And it seems like they found their favorite persons to play with.
Get me a ticket. Can I be part of this?
I mean, this cannot just be the honeymoon phase, right?
This team has been very solid and very stable as well.
I think it's being very humble.
Obviously, they're way past the honeymoon period,
and it's much more than just coincidental
or, you know, kind of circumstances, helping them perform.
At this point, this is a group that, well,
first of all, seems to gel together really well
and their ideas are correct, their approach to the game
and everything they do.
Because at the end of the day,
performing at the highest level,
And it's not just about being good at all. It's much more than that.
It's being a good teammate, you know, being a professional.
What happens inside and outside the game.
So in order for them to be so stable, I guess, and so good,
they must be doing all of that very, very well.
Very professional.
I'm actually going to ask if we can get Lacoste's camera shot for a second.
See if we have the tech there.
Speaking of being professional.
Actually, Lacoste, can you lean a little bit to your right or left?
Doesn't matter. Other way, other way, other way, other way.
Little more.
Don't fall.
What's happening over there?
Behind you.
I don't know.
You tell me, Shira, I can't see anything.
Someone's just laying down.
Oh.
It's Blitz.
He's just resting.
He's just resting.
I mean, it's just that...
He found something interesting on his phone and he's interesting as well.
No, I don't think he's...
They were carrying him in the wheelchair and they took it away from him and they just left him there and he just stuck.
Like somebody helps a guy out like this can't stand up again.
You guys are gonna be all right.
Thank you for that.
Like cost we are going to focus on the team.
We're going to focus on team liquid, of course, as they are the X of KP.
KP is looking to impress them.
But I'm sure the feeling might just be mutual.
Don't take my word for it though.
Maybe Ace has something to say about that.
I'm here with Ace of team liquid.
Now you said I talked to you earlier in the tournament.
You guys were feeling pretty decent about how you expected things to go.
you're about halfway through the group stage, your score is pretty decent, but how are you feeling as a whole?
Like I would also say decent. Feel decent, don't feel amazing, because like we would like to be like on the top spot.
But we're still in a good spot, you know, we can maybe still make top,
but it's like unlikely I guess to get some one-off depends.
You'd have to beat Aurora, I think, and then the other team, which is Nigma, would have to lose their final series against P-Times.
It's like maybe but stars would have to align a bit and then we would probably also have to win some tiebreakers out of stuff
I could see that. Yeah, I mean but happen. You don't need to win the group stage. That's okay
In terms of like how groups to play offs usually ends up going in a turn
I've heard before that you guys collect a lot of strats while you're playing you figure your stuff out
Group stages are for learning. Do you still view it that way? Oh, yeah, sure. I feel like
Like from what we have prepped from bootcamp in terms of like heroes and stuff
It's a change a lot already like in these color days. Honestly, some heroes popped off that we were like not sure was that like strong and like
Just need to adapt to like what I was bringing to the table kind of how do you get do you get opportunities?
Are you gathering this information like the stuff you just said are you getting that from games?
You're playing is it from scrims? Is it from watching other teams play?
I think it's just mostly from our own games like mostly the officials over there
But also scrims. Are you getting enough of that from your officials though because there's only one series a day
Yeah, you have to adapt pretty fast, but I mean I feel like we can adapt pretty fast.
But also, I mean there's also some tournaments that you can kind of like try to like get
some info from.
But yeah, like a bit of a mix.
So what's your confidence against Aurora?
Where do you talk?
Do you think it might be hard to get top group?
But you can beat them.
Yeah, like basically I feel like we can definitely win.
Like it can go either way.
We know they're also strong.
But yeah, I don't know.
Like I think we're strong.
We can beat them.
Okay, we'll see what happens.
me and good luck in your match. Thank you man. We will see what happens. And I'm a little worried
of the way he describes it, how he deals with group stages, learning a lot of strategies from
the group stages. This is a very difficult format or at least risky format, the cost to do that with.
Yeah, you play one series a day. That's like you prepared a wrong strat, maybe something that
you've seen when they were playing against Nigma Galaxy, where Nigma Galaxy, they came much more
prepared where they had a bit of this like healing strat and the second one they really
stepped it up so gotta be slightly more careful, definitely how you're gonna be approaching
it.
And then single elimination after that.
Yeah, there's no lower bracket.
Yeah, exactly.
We're just only lower bracket.
Maybe they're just gonna go with that.
So that's just lower bracket?
Everything's lower bracket.
That's not what you think about it, honestly, I mean, why not?
And Liquid is no stranger to lower bracket rounds, so they're not gonna get intimidated
by this.
Okay, so let's talk about the matchup because we're feeling that Aurora is on top of their game.
They're doing so well only dropping that single game against Nigma Galaxy, whereas Liquid seals
seems to be searching. You mentioned their series yesterday that they looked better,
but at the same time they were up against L1, which is a team that's obviously at a different
caliber than both of these teams on the stage. But I think the drafting part and the strategy part
is what looked better because honestly, I felt the shakiness of Liquid from just from the draft
before even seeing them play, and if that already is better, then the hopes are much higher.
I think generally speaking throughout the season, the peak level of both these teams,
they're on par, if I would maybe even give an edge to Liquid in general, but in this state,
at this point in this tournament, they're definitely the challengers going into it.
Yeah, I kind of have to agree with this, because Liquid had a bit of a mixed results as well,
But this is also a team that on a good day like with Misha speaking
They like casters talked about it that Misha he looked very very stable
And he's gonna be the driving force for the team once again. Yeah, it all depends on
How they wake up
If they enjoy their lunch properly, did they have a good rest all that will come into play in the upcoming match
That's it over to the stage to start
Absolutely, we'll see if team liquid has woken up yet
But I know that you guys are waking up as well as we are getting ready for this
banger of a match coming your way. Now last series I know a bit of a stump if you may.
Falcons came out swinging but this one is guaranteed to be something a little
bit spicier. We have the top team in the groups facing off against a team that
is notorious for taking early groups a little bit easy and then really locking
in towards the end. So let's get this party started with our first team headed
to the stage. Allow me to welcome Aurora Gaming.
That is right. Nobody seems to be able to stop these boys as they have survived quite
a difficult group getting into that top spot. They got fans in the crowd. They've got the
boys walking out in full confidence on that stride. You can tell they've been practicing
that walk out. It was like seeing assassins come to this stage. Absolutely beautiful job.
And now we will see their opponents. Will these boys actually be able to pick it up?
Will they stop pretending? And will they finally get their coach off of the stage who's been
laying in the corner for the last 20 minutes? Ladies and gentlemen, bad introduce Team Liquid.
Now Team Liquid has been pretending, if you will, they've been losing some games that
perhaps they should not have lost, but now the time for joking is over.
It's time to stop playing with your food and destroy the biggest team in the Groups.
We all know Liquid could do it.
We all love to cheer for them when they are.
Well, we have to see if they have brought their A-game today and if they have learned
any lessons from this very competitive group stage.
Rory, you guys ready to put that key down?
They're ready.
Liquid, you ready?
Let me see it.
All right.
Gentlemen, please, your keys to your stations, get onto those computers, and let's get a
nice handshake out from you as well.
I know there's a very heated rivalry.
Here we go.
And beautiful handshake.
All right.
This match is about to begin.
I hope you guys are ready for what could be the greatest match of today.
Might be the last one, too.
Find out as we head into the match and back to the panel.
Thank you very much, Lax.
Yeah, we're very ready for Aurora versus Liquid.
The history of these two teams is mostly Aurora-favorite.
Actually, in this year, it is a three and two in terms of series,
but the most recent two series both went the way of Aurora,
so having a little bit more of a fresher experience with beating Team Liquid.
We're expecting Liquid to power up,
and I feel like we say that a lot because they do.
in tournaments. But are there any signs in this game, in this drafts, that we're going to look for,
that will be the proof? I'm looking at the Offlane. I want to see Ace on a, like, it's very hard to
dominate the Offlane right now. He has been known to dominate the Offlane, turn that throughout his
whole career into these auras, into these winning conditions for his team, wherever he was playing
on. And now, I think every Offlane has struggles. Like, it's very difficult to adapt and they were
struggling to find what's really good for him and if you see the adaptation
after they lost to Nigma Galaxy you can already see the off-lane winners. He is
playing a Nigma, he is playing these like relatively easy matchup for him, he's
playing that against a lifestealer, then he's playing Lycan into draw ranger, again
a winning matchup for him throughout the laning stage throughout the whole game
pretty much. So the adaptations definitely were made compared to what he
was playing against Nigma Galaxy where he was kind of completely shut down, that
he wasn't able to play the game and even in the meta that is dominated by the carries,
you still need to have your offlaner be able to do offlane things.
Yeah, and I feel like Ace has always been a big identity of the teams he was part of.
You go back to gaming gladiator days, they had a lot of strategies based around him.
And he was always a spacemaker in the draft in the sense.
You knew what to expect, they're going to pick his underlord, they first pick it, they
They know exactly how to lane it, back then it was with Tofu on the lane, and it was impossible
to stop basically.
I don't think they have the same in Liquid, they didn't manage to fit him in that well,
I would say, and they still end up often in a trap for a situation where the conversation
must be about, hey, what do you want to play here, that kind of stuff, and they have to
figure it out on the spot, but it doesn't feel as good.
So I hope that they went back to the drawing board, figured out, okay, this is what we
want to do like ace and boxy. This is how we want to approach the game. We're going to
this is the kind of hero pairings we're going to go for and it's just so that it
gives them a little bit more stability and confidence also going into the game
because that that that that shakiness can translate to the other lanes too and to
the entire team and now with the addition of gates I think when you lose one of
the side lanes very often it also hurts the other lane. Yeah do you think that
But because you're explaining how Ace and how he had impact on previous teams, do you
think that the current way the offline works because it's a safe lane patch, that patch
just also makes that he can't be the leading team and he can't be the person in the game
that you want it to be?
Not necessarily.
I think it's just a matter of like being on the same page essentially.
Like if you think of Aurora, for instance, we saw Mira play the other day and he had like
nine stacks, for instance, right?
So they were not playing up on the lane, they got what they wanted to get, and he was also
stacking knowing that at some point WS is gonna go back to the jungle, he's gonna be
wanting to clear some stacks because he's not gonna be able to enter the lane and like
the wave anymore.
They need to be on the same page with that, because you know we saw Ace and Buxy trying
to dive the tower for instance and it didn't work, like maybe this is a little bit outdated
like or maybe it isn't, I don't know, but it's mostly about being on the same page.
You can decide to lane and apply pressure, you can decide to creep skip, you can decide
to fall back to something way more defensive.
Like we saw yesterday, it was on Group D where Netta, he started jungling level 1 with Darcy
here and R, he actually started with the Wind Lace.
You can tell they're on the same page, right, because the position 4 bought items to try
to get what he could on the wave because they knew that, hey, I'm not going to be laning
or maybe, depending on what they do, I might linger a waiver too, but no matter what, I'm
falling back to the jungle.
So I really want them to build their approach to how to play the offlane together in this patch and to stick to it.
Do you think that the offlaners, like the players that play the offlane who were more sacrificial compared to the offlane dominators,
are going to be shining more in this meta because the teams that have used to play around offlaners who don't get as much farm
are going to be having an easier time in the meta?
I think naturally they will, but again, these players are, you know, star players, like
world-class players, you shouldn't be needing more than a week to add up.
It's like, okay, you figure it out, you draw the right conclusions, you get to practice,
and then you fix it.
These players have been around forever, like they've seen it in the past.
This is like no revolution or anything like that.
It's just like you have to change your mindset, change your hero picks probably, and also
Break it down to your team, because it has a lot of impact on many other things, like, for instance, when you're jungling, it's much easier to connect to runes, because, you know, you're not being like, you're not in range of getting hit by stuns, you're not, you're closest to the runes,
you're closest to the runes also, just physically, anyways, there's like a bunch of stuff on the map that change, it's all about teary crafting it as a team, and making it happen in the games.
If you have to figure it out on the spot, I think it's really, really difficult.
Well, let's hope they don't have to figure out this draft on the spot as we are in it.
We got Team Liquid on the dire side with First Pick, and they went for the Earth Spirit.
On Dying was the answer by Aurora, and in terms of usual suspects that we see banned.
Maybe interesting to note that the Drow Ranger is untouched.
At the games that we've seen, Drow Ranger, at least the ones that we were covering,
A lot of the time it's drawranger, she's stuck in the base for like good 20 minutes defending and then losing the game.
So I'm not really...
It's great.
Yeah, I'm not...
It's good, I think it's good for meta.
Like, all we have to do is get rid of shit, I think, and we're gonna be having normal games.
I also gotta say that I've been very impressed, not just by WS, I've been very impressed by Undying from the offlane.
From position 5 as well, but from the offlane with the blink dagger pick up, the DKB.
The Cerro Steel is extremely strong and it also could be potentially
like an answer to this Earth's grid that has been contested in almost every single game
because of the low cooldown heal that you have.
A 6 second cooldown up to 10 units which is 500 max heal, it goes up even higher once
you get to level 15.
So you can out heal magnetized damage that's going to be very annoying for Earth's grid.
Yeah, it's a very good hero.
It's been looking strong and as you said it's flexible.
that also gives you some agility in the drafting phase which is very precious especially on your
first pick because I'm just actually looking I'm okay for some reason my brain was telling me that
liquid would have been the invoker because invoker is one of the answers that liquid decided was
like good against earth spirits like we've seen them pick invoker twice yesterday or the day
before against Earth Spirit teams. So maybe this is also why Aurora, now that they banned
the Invoker Liquid, they're like, well, that's a free entry for First League Earth Spirit.
So they're going to be pretty happy with this First Face on Team Liquid.
Nibbana, the Centaur on the side of Aurora with the Lion and the Keeper of the Light removed
on the side of Liquid. So we're moving a couple of position 4s that would be very good with
I'm dying off lane Mira's lane. It's getting a lot of respect so far in the tournament
It's either ban sometimes it's snatched by the other team and coddle is just because coddle on dying is such a toxic lane
It's probably one of the strongest we've seen
Like the carl pairings already on dying pairing for that matter
Good amount of damage with this hood link it doesn't really say anything. This is the hero that
is going to be for Mira. This is not a hero that Kairi does play. We've seen also Kairi
getting a little bit of priority in some of the drafts, saving his pick up until the last
one where they picked Jakiro, and he completely dominated that game with Jakiro, getting quite
a lot of priority, and also showing that some of these forgotten heroes are still
relatively good at meta in the right hands, where he's still banging up the warlock,
securing the lane for Nightfall, or even Jakiro, where they can kill a hero from 100 to 0 easily.
And you see the difference, right, with teams' stakes on hero match-ups, and somebody is
strong, not everybody can be right, because yesterday we saw P-Time against Aurora, and
they twice picked Earth Spirit against Ember.
This time around, Liquid is banning Ember Spirit, so it's like one team seems to think
that Ember is a corner, and the other team seems to think otherwise.
All these things are going to be settled once we're past the group stage, in a sense, because
Well the teams with the superior ideas are going to be the teams going through and the others are going to go home
This is a flex pick for liquid I think
It could very well be boxy and it could also be Mickey on Windranger
I quite like the windranger against undying on the lane personally. I think it's it's pretty chill
Especially if your position 5 is also aggressive
Maybe no which doctor actually
Maybe that's not the best pairing. Witch Doctor, very good hero against Unvying, in my opinion, I mean, it goes both ways, but it is one way to make sure that this Unvying is not going to reign supreme in the teamfight.
Just get on top of him, check the meta-dict, I mean, whatever happens next is usually Witch Doctor dying, but you know...
He got the job done.
Yes, he's going to be taken down with you.
Yeah, he's okay to die with the Grigri extra bit of a gold. I like how Liquid approached this. They were picking up the position 5 here.
at this stage making sure that they can still flex the winranger and potentially
get to maybe like a very good answer to the enemy carry hero potentially pick up some spectre like the amount of damage the
It's a good laning partner for spectre because spectre needs some kind of
Sustain in the lane like this hero is not self sustainable and with the addition of which doctor increased aoe on the hill by 150 aoe
It makes it so good. Yeah, that's another answer
we've seen to the Earth Spirit so far, to the Earth Spirit mid, which is the most dominant
hero of the tournament.
You know, we were showing this morning the most picked heroes, and Earth Spirit was like
pretty much number one.
We've seen Largo mids, we've seen Ember Spirit, we've seen Invoker, and we've seen
Lina come out.
I think the heroes like at 80% win rate or something like that, it's played like six
or seven games and won, you know, 80 or 90% of these games.
So it's too early to say whether Lina is like the top hero in this meta, but it's definitely
effective in some games and this could be one of them. You have an undying position 3 so you have
a natural frontline and especially the way WS is playing this hero he's super reckless like he
goes blink first item, blinks in, clicks ulti, clicks tombstone, he kind of forces the enemy team
to look at him so that's going to give a lot of space to Mikoto to you know play Lina which is what
the hero needs. Do we feel confident about where wind ranger or spirit are going to go in terms of
mid carry four options or do you feel like they're leaving it open more?
Well, it's hard to say. I guess Winranger plus four is acceptable versus Jekiro. I don't
think it's amazing that Jekiro still wins the trade and maybe you want to think of pulling
waves against this Jekiro plus counter pick because they also have the ultimate last pick
from if I'm not wrong on Aurora. So it's going to be a very tough safe thing to go to. So
So in that sense, did you really want a Windranger there?
Because Windranger is kind of designed to lane,
or are you happy just putting it on position one
and try to damage control the undying Windranger lane?
I don't think it's a clear win for Windranger
which doctor, but it's a stable lane.
It kind of depends on what Ace wants to play.
I can see Ace maybe pick up something
like a Nightstalker, Darkshear,
these type of heroes that can get on top of like,
it's a very, this is also good
because it gives you like the blink blade mail.
It has always been good against Lina.
They have no say in the point where maybe Undying gets a short,
but Core Undying's they're really not buying it.
Might need to buy it.
Might need to get slightly more priority in this one.
And again, we talked about the ways how they can make Ace lane easier.
And Axe is going to be that type of a pick.
Not the easiest lane to lane for him.
Because you're planning into Jokiro,
you're never going to be having that good of a time.
And you could always try to creepscape.
So, yet to see what Nightfall is going to be playing, and they are removing one of his classics,
removing Karrie Doom. I don't think we've seen Karrie Doom on the games that we have so far covered,
but it does feel like it's still very good. We've seen a couple of respect fans coming out.
Yeah, it is very good. And I personally am not the biggest fan of the Axe. It's okay.
It's an acceptable pick, but I don't think it's amazing by any means.
like the lane is going to be really rough.
I don't think it's a great axe game either, to be honest.
Not that I've seen the amount of heals and dying
is also able to provide.
He has the tombstone, like he has the shard,
the heals, he has a lot of counter plays against axe.
Axe calling in the undying is most of the time
a disaster also, when he has his ulti form,
you just die basically from calling him.
So essentially this axe is a little bit, if in my opinion,
I think it's gonna leave liquid in weird spot
because their team fight potential,
I think it's kind of out of the window. I feel like Aurora already have like a big teamfight advantage
Even though they have the ultimate aspect. What would you prefer this pick was?
I think like a like a like a like in for instance would have been amazing like all these heroes are really bad
Which is summons on dying is actually also terrible
Which is summons like this hero doesn't buy armor before like he goes they go bling they go big KB
Like it takes a while before they actually get an armor item
So they die really quick to some some like in or or or some beasts
I mean, these would have been harder to lane, but as we said, Lycan is a cheater,
because he can always pull the wave, so he doesn't really need to bump his head against the wall.
But I mean, we'll see how he plays out for them. Axe is never a bad pick.
The hero is very solid, very stable, but I think they're always smiling.
Like, that's the second time not in the picks to Kiro, and he has a midi position 3 coming to his lane.
On Liquid side, they decided to remove the ult, like we've seen more of that play yesterday, it was very good.
Again, as we said, it's going to be hard to pressure Nightfall, because this Jukiro is going to rain supreme on the safe lane.
I could see like a tiny 4-Royal aspect. I think it fits their lineup really well. Very good against Axe.
Decent matchup also versus Ursprit. You're just too tanky basically to care about the spells.
It's also a bit of a mix damage. Having status resistance feels really nice.
And as you said, super tanky. Stabilized lane gives you kill threat.
Nightfall, like a lot of his heroes have been also banned out and he has interesting hero
pool as well.
Maybe something is like, okay, this is like what's classic.
Okay, we'll go back for that.
It's a really good hero against Dying on the lane, by the way, like it's one of the counters.
I think one on Dying plus three was popular.
TA also became popular.
Super good lane.
You can always blink out, kite him with your traps.
It's quite solid actually, this T-Pick. I really like it. Also very good against Lina.
Lina is very susceptible to physical damage. T gets on top of Lina at all stage of the game.
We have to see enough Lina's, but it's a lot of split push like travel, aghanims, clear waves from the fog.
If she ever steps on the T-A trap, she will just die.
What about nightfall? T-A, T-A-L, yeah, there it comes. It's very good.
PL or Naga Siren carry would look insanely well because of the items that you're buying.
You don't care at all about the battle hunger in the lane.
It's very good.
Like you have a dispel mechanic, double dispel mechanic against Earthspirits.
It feels really nice.
You can pretty much dodge anything.
We're talking about one of the best PL players in the world.
And we've seen PL, I believe, three times and he didn't lose a single game yet.
That PL pick is rough.
I am a little bit worried.
You're on a timer, you're on a massive timer.
But you have really good heroes to accelerate the game.
Like EarthBird, super fast-paced, you know, very, very active.
Same with TA.
TA objectives taking hero, turn mentor, rush, it can happen real quick.
And same for Axe.
I mean, Axe if he's really like, if he wins his lane somehow and starts to tripskip, we
could be like, he can hit some crazy item timings.
So, but yeah, Liquid cannot allow a slow game because as soon as night falls online, I don't
want to say it's GG, but it's as close as it gets.
There was a time like maybe a year ago where I think it was Mickey who first started this.
I'm not going to call it Milner TA because you're playing against the Illusions and you
need to adapt somehow and you don't have enough AoE.
So I want to see if Mickey is maybe going to go and try that route because I don't see
the other answers.
Interesting.
You can get a Shiva from the Earthspirits, you can get a Mjolnir TA.
I still think they want to win the game before it gets to that point, but interesting.
He actually started against Illu Heroes and I think he realized, well, this is actually just good.
And he started doing it in games where they weren't even Illus.
So perhaps still viable, we'll have to see.
His axe is not also considered somewhat viable to PL.
I mean, you jump in, you call, you kind of know who the real one is?
If she gets to call him, it's amazing.
The thing is that a good PL there should never let you call him, he will always double, like they're gonna play around the Invis, like the Shard, it's, you know, and with his lineup, there's gonna be an underlying starting the fight, like the PL should have enough freedom to kite the Axe around, and in this game it's pretty simple, like Axe is the only hero he has to worry, so yeah, be sure that he'll have his screen, his camera on the Axe, and he will just...
I'm gonna get the value out of Solred because you have PL, so with all these extra units
you're always gonna get the max amount of heal with the 10 units, so that's gonna be
500 heal on a hero like PL that gets it from low cooldown.
It's gonna feel really nice knowing that you can't really die that easily from 100 to 0.
Kill on dying combo, look at that.
Yeah, it's quite the treat for Aurora fans here.
They look solid in their draft, they just have to make sure that they don't give Liquid
too much, but Liquid doesn't run away with the game because if they get a big lead and
can force the game to close out early, then they are definitely having a good shot here.
So it's a little bit of a race against the clock, if you will.
The main question is, can Team Liquid win that race against the clock?
Do they have the tools to do so?
Do we think they can, Seth?
They can.
They can for sure.
It's gonna come down to the lane increase honestly, but my only concern is that Nisha's
playing a losing matchup.
No matter how good you are, I think this Earth Spirit versus Lina is, I don't want to say
it's unplayable, but Lina is gonna bully you.
There's no way around it.
So in that sense, their biggest tempo controller is going to be slowed down, so it will have
have to come from maybe Mickey finding some, you know, some clutch moves early in the game.
Same with Ace, like he has to play a fast-paced style.
We'll have to see.
We'll have to see, and we will see as it is time for game number one between Aurora and
Liquid with Cat and SVG.
Finally, we get a chance to witness the greatest Phantom Lancer player of all time.
people have been picking it. You saw Yandex have already won two games with it. BB team
followed suit with the pick up themselves. Aurora have picked the Phantom Lancer and
other tournaments, but here at EWC, the first time we get to witness it, Avery, I see that
he's the best Phantom Lancer player in the world with confidence because he's got the
stats to back it up. What would you guess that his win rate is on this hero?
Improfessional gameplay?
Improfessional gameplay.
Probably 77%.
80% over 80% with 52 matches.
That might be the highest player hero combination win rate
with over 50 games.
That's crazy hot.
Is he beating up milk man or though?
I mean, you know, who's he playing against?
Well, two years ago, he actually played against Liquid.
Yeah, so I stand out on the last two minutes.
It is a scary player here, a combination that is for sure.
Let's be honest, the greatest PL player in the world is the guy who was in your last pub.
That guy is the greatest PL player I've ever won.
He's playing against a real infletchable.
On the enemy.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
The last guy you played against in a pub.
In professional gameplay, it might be Nightfall right now.
Very well, probably he's Nightfall right now.
There are some minor counters on the side of Liquid.
Axe is a top three stat counter to this hero.
I think it's mainly pub driven stats, definitely not as good in Pro Dota.
If the PL player knows where the axe is, if you doppel dodge, he doesn't do a lot, but you can't go to Zag's, you reduce, he looks cool down.
You get a larger AoE call now. The shard can be interesting for some extra melee.
You have more tools against the PL. I don't know how much it changes your actual win chance.
But I could see a popping off be a really good start.
And of course the lane can be very good for your own axe if you get a fast vanguard. PL doesn't touch you too much.
Her spirit can also be okay, but generally, you're not doing anything to him.
He just dispels your magnetized and he's just running around the fight and you're sitting there like wishing you had better A.O.E spells.
So again, I think Liquid's answers are really about being ahead.
Like, that is generally the best way to BPL. You just get ahead and you can kind of just run him down with anything.
This is really a true game of that nature where your soft counters are not going to do the job unless you have a net worth advantage in this game.
Because the TA matchup is a hundred to zero there. There's no way out of this matchup for Mickey needs another two cores to pick it up
What do you think about the Mjolnir build as it's not an answer?
No, I hard answer your relevant Mjolnir doesn't touch us here anymore. Okay, those days are gone
You have to be able to chunk him down. He's gonna get tank. He's gonna have three four thousand HP right?
You procky Mjolnir twice is completely irrelevant. We're talking about an actual hundred damage or something sure so
Better just to go a normal build and play for tempo and take fast road songs.
If he wants to build, we only build because he likes it. I mean, that's fine, but you're not doing it because you're against PL here.
In my mind, it makes no difference.
I am excited to see more Lina. I'm really big on this hero.
I think we should see this hero a lot. I think it is a...
I'll make a bold statement here.
I think Lina is a top 20 hero in this batch.
Top 20?
Just in raw power.
Basically saying it should be in every draft pick or ban
It should pops one. Okay, so the thing about Lena is she is a little one-dimensional
Which I think hurts her draft potential. Okay, all right
like even when she's broken you're not gonna see her in every draft just because it's rare the hero can't
Get countered in some way. He's already back pedaling, but I will say this here has a lot of build flexibility now
It can become insanely tanky and I think people
still don't understand the truly broken builds on Zero. I'm gonna say I'm gonna
I'm gonna say it there so I think if we see players develop the Zero more and
understand what it can do and how you can scale with it it's we're gonna see a
lot more it's really scary in the late game. Sounds like Liquid should hire you
as the third coach to teach them how to... I only do second or fourth coach
thoughts so sorry. Unlucky. They gotta fire one or higher another. They don't
consider the option
well baby aurora could pick you up
they don't need me there
they're doing quite fine and sure they are looking very good so far
ace
who's been doing some backlating and they're actually going to make an
effort here to chase him out of it
it is actually working
meanwhile mid lane matchup talking about that lina makoto is killing it in cs
twenty two and eleven
He's destroying Nisha. I mean, we did a little pre-record earlier, talked about what kind of Nisha are we gonna see today.
Well, this is not the Nisha that Liquid wanted to see, at least not so far.
Rough matchup for him.
We haven't really seen our spirit win lanes unless you dominate the CS early.
There we go. Let's get some Maureen tricks in here. Just, you know, the lane's not good. Don't lane at all.
Range creep? Oh, we got it.
Very nice. Very well played. I'll give him a little respite here.
here, probably go to base. As Mikoto is full resources, he is vibing in this lane, gonna
get real fat and this is a great boots travel hero. One of the fastest farmers in the game
when you get your build online. It sucks that it's uh, liquid anyway, it sucks that it is a
safe lane Jekiro, making a whole lot harder because they do have the back lane because
because Shakira's quite the laner, and as a result,
Nightfall is getting great CS.
So the threat, they're gonna have to hit the mid-game real hard
because they are not shutting him down in the laning phase.
I think it's a product of Winter Ranger just not being able
to synergize with acts that well in the lane
and exert some sort of aggressive presence
against Shakira in particular.
It is a very clutch pick up fire aura.
Cool to see this hero come back a little bit,
as the doctor gets solo-ripped into a living.
Yeah, they, I don't know if they buff SoulRip or something, but I've been seeing this SoulRip built up by these Core Untimes.
It's actually insane how much damage it does.
It does a lot.
I'm surprised.
You used to have the max units, Cap.
The fact that it's always 10 now is a pretty big deal.
Right.
Especially you just drop Tombstone, zombies pop out, you SoulRip somebody, it's guaranteed max.
It's a lot of burst damage in these fights.
It's a very low cooldown spell.
Always been a very good spell at level 4.
Yeah, 80 mana for 140 damage.
That sounds like a great trade-off.
That was like a Timbersaw spell for eight years.
Yeah, it's true.
Silence on Alina, instant trouble. Great push, whack for Mira.
Is that enough to save Makoto?
Makoto turns back around, Luguda plays straight to the base of Tofu.
Tofu with the heals will not be able to live long enough, Kari.
Should be able to get away here, no problems.
Alright, Makoto survives, gets a power rune.
I do think the weakness Alina is, the roaming.
Skirmishing against us here early.
These really susceptible to just getting going and dying because you're not that mobile, you're not that survivable compared to almost any other mid you're gonna pick.
If you can ruin his early game a little bit, you set all his timings back and then it can be a slow crawl to get there.
You can see these linear games where you have 4, 5, 6 deaths, even if you're winning the lane, just because you start getting and changing.
So the fact that Makoto can survive that is pretty big.
Simultaneously though, these Earth Spirit builds where they don't go any of the rolling boulder early on means that you're less effective.
at being able to go for that all-in kill, right?
Definitely hurts you, your potential in this matchup.
So, you smut the Wisdom Shrines.
Peel free farming. Vanguard is done for ace.
You can start to get a little more aggressive down here.
And this is the point where Liquid would want to bring heroes into this lane
and start ruining Nightfall's time.
They need the extra magic damage to kill this Vanguard axe, so they bring in Mira.
Aw, he dies here. He is definitely dead. It's just a question of how much damage can they do.
Karius probably could have died at the Maladik, but Nightfall is getting three swings on Tofu.
He doesn't opt to chase him down, just accepts the 1 for 1 trade off, which is still to their favor.
48 and 13 is his CS. Gets to be a part of the kill, didn't get the last hit, but now he's got his level 6.
So even if the Axe were to start asserting himself in this lane and start kicking him out,
well, he's already got juxtaposed to farm up Neutrals just fine.
Jump to kind of a little bit there if you're ace. You need the supports with
you to take the fight into this Phantom Lancer in Aurora. They were ready for
that play. Pre-emptively there with supports, get a big kill that's gonna
keep Nightfall on this lane, sets the axe back considerably, no aggressive
potential coming out of this lane. That is bad news for Liquid because now you're
playing against the last pick Phantom Lancer that is not getting pressured in
lane. In fact, he is the most farm hero out of this lane phase and he has an
absolutely free carry matchup. So what's the game plan here?
Well, that was a question. What's a game plan?
Back to the mid-game where you get Blink Dagger on Axe and you go from an even game,
and then in 10 minutes you've won the game.
And if you don't do it in that 10-minute window, then you've lost.
That was like the most optimistic game plan I've ever heard.
You asked me for a game plan, and I gave you one.
Get Blink Dagger, then win the game in 10 minutes?
Yeah, pretty much.
Do you disagree? That's not like...
I don't think that's physically possible in Modern Dota.
But I think that's the best game plan they have you should be a coach be a very coach
No sarcasm, I choose I'm gonna optimistically
Believe that that was not sarcasm. Okay that you are genuine about your feelings. That's why you make a very cool
Very optimistic. Thank you. Sometimes that's what a team needs
And Aurora are chilling right now. There's no pressure on them to make any sort of moves.
The more this PL gets to sit bottom, the happier they are, same with the Lina mid. These are two heroes that just won.
They just want to sit for 12, 30 minutes. You know, get the first little farming item up.
The boots that travel the Osh or whatever it is, have a nice slow-paced game.
There's no ganks going into a mere vibe and you're getting levels.
Levels are super big on this Lina, so every time you don't die, that means you're getting XP on the map.
That means you're progressing your game plan.
They're feeling very comfortable right now.
I mean, legitimately, when would you say the timer is that Aurora have like, let's say
a 93% chance to win the game?
What items does Phantom Lancer get to that it's like, oh, okay, Liquid you probably have
lost?
If he has Manta, Ags, and he has highest network in this game...
I think that is the point.
Okay, I don't think it takes much if he's the highest network, right?
That almost sounds like the Axe needs to get a blink tagger and win the game in 10 minutes,
otherwise he'll get those items, but the game is pretty much over.
There's gonna have to be something that happens here, for sure.
It has to be from the Earth Spirit in the Axe.
If, again, we go another 10 minutes and your Earthcared Axe are combined like 0-1-1 or something,
I just don't see a panning out.
Of course anything can happen in the World of Dota 2, but I think this is our worst game
plan and it's falling in place for him right now.
See if Liquid can get something going.
You always have that TA wild card if Mica can find some good early teamfights.
Gotta snowball the game into an early deso, early roche.
I could do some serious work here.
Liquid looking to find something on top of the magnetized, but once again a roar just
already set up for this move.
They're one step ahead in this game, it feels like.
Yeah, but they're like not being able to win the lanes super heavily.
And then now going into the situation where in some of these early games, Garmishes, you're
fighting into and of dying, very tough hero to fight into, just doesn't really look like
Liquid has a chance of, you know, being up 5-10k in the first 20 minutes.
They just kind of have to sit back, hit their timing, and hit it really hard.
Tower down for nothing, Nightfall just goes back through the gate.
No pressure on any of these objectives.
Shackleshottos land on WS here, they do not really have anything to follow that up though.
annoying trying to go into the sometime when he has the Cecil Sturge anyway
there's not even gaining map control or anything my best guess is you you should
be killing this Lena mid yeah well that's what they just smoked to but the
rune spawned bottom if it spawned top and Lena goes for it then maybe they had a
chance to get a kill there but instead they're gonna have to go deeper into the
map which is a dangerous proposition. Hey scan Makoto if you get on top of Lena it's
free kill every time. Amp damage on Nisha is also super value here. We'd love to take a fight,
but once more the move is red you miss your opportunity. Yeah you're just gonna have to
take the consolation prize which is going to be going for the support that's showing mid.
Mira, we'll die to the amp damage from Nisha. You hit this tower? Not really, have you seen?
One dragon slave and you're pushing it dead. All right well you're getting to the
desol on Mickey and I think that's when we will see Liquid try and do something more drastic.
You should have your bling dagger on the axe as well. You can make a nice smoke move into mid.
You just jump Lena, bring him down with death, so he has to take a tower.
You can start to snowball this game in your favor.
We'll see if Aurora can read that move as well.
Because right now, if all I'm thinking about if I'm Aurora is protecting my Lena, protecting my tier ones,
let the PL do his thing solo.
So just try and read the moves going into this mid area of the map.
And you should have a pretty good time defensively here.
Sad part is he supports up nothing to do on Liquid.
Least Aurora, you can confidently make some moves because your heroes are actually quite
good versus TA.
You can burn through that refraction pretty quickly, and with WS picking up the blink
dagger, joining in on that kill, nice and easy, Nisha, he tried to show up to help, he does
get a really good magnetize, melee threatened by the Luguda Blade, LSA does land for the
Shackleshot holds them back, needs ya, trying to survive against the zombies, but it's too much.
They overwhelm him, and Liquid will get nothing out of that.
Not a...
Boxing might die here too, this one dines really fast.
Yeah, he is.
With the Blink Tagger, pushback lands, and a Soul Rip.
Woo!
That's max level right there.
That's another thing, you can go 4-4s-1 on this hero as an offlaner.
You don't need to play around the tombstone that much, just drop it, it's a nuisance,
and then you're just Soul Ripping people for days.
Five hundred damage max level.
Rough fight for liquid. Losing your cores like that for nothing.
This Nina is fat. This Keel is fat.
Stacks are being made. It's coming up all Aurora right now.
Dance of Dunn and Nightfall is swelling his way to an Agile Scepter.
Do you probably say that's done in what, less than 10 minutes?
Oh for sure.
It should be done, oh, six or seven here.
Okay, so top net worth man to axe.
Maybe not even that long.
Let's see how fast you can farm.
You have your blink on axe.
Yeah, and he's not doing anything with it.
That's a TA.
Nothing with it.
to blade mail to to be up the red to these heroes? Part of the issue?
I guess. You just keep doing the one more item thing, then you're just gonna one more
item yourself out of this game, right? Unless, unless we just liquidize it.
To be fair though, to be fair, you need to kid on acts in some games. Yeah, we've all
been there. Yeah.
What do you want him to do?
Okay, let's put it this way.
His Blade Mail Effect has been killing Phantom Monster.
A little bit here.
A little bit.
It's solid.
He does a decent amount to himself.
I would say realistically, what's more likely to kill him
is just getting that locked down in the first place
and then Liquid rolling in.
Getting some follow-up.
Gary!
Trying to play pretty deep here.
With sufficient-
Here comes WS though!
Drop the tombstone right on it! Full supports are already dead!
Oh my!
Way to go!
Couldn't even, uh, add a D to get the Kloyblade. He maybe got the chopper so slow that he'd run down right next to the rest.
I'm gonna ask a bold question, Alist.
Uh, go ahead.
Is this game over? Like this?
It...
I...
I...
It feels like...
It feels like...
Yeah, it does really feel like it. I mean, these T-Fights are just not...
It's playing with your food.
You still fast boxy disappeared, you got sword, sharp shot.
His hero just disappeared.
What is the threat you're focus firing for on Maladix with an axe ball without blade
nail?
You know how fast this supports that?
You know, yeah, you got a chop on a jacquero, but how are you taking the long fight here?
Do you want to roll in this as an Earth Spirit?
No, there's no way I want to roll into any of this.
I just think when you're not going on Aurora, Aurora is going to eventually set up on you
and you don't really win that fight.
Now we were talking about it as if Liquid needs to take the temple.
Right now it makes Aurora look like they're the one with the tempo draft.
We're still having this very spooky family lancer who is 10,000 net worth and he is
1,000 gold away from an Agnecceptor.
problems here to solve. It has to be the TA getting involved now. You have to win some
fight where Mikkei can stay alive, come in clean 3 or 4 heroes up, get deso charges,
into road shot. That is your way back in this game.
They're trying to do just that. Mikkei can connect to this fight. Could be a great one.
Gonna have to just blind initiate, he do spot the hoodwink. Watch them do them.
Don't get the chop on Forged Sion, they also only get one support pick off.
You have to keep going here, you have to just keep pushing forward.
Either got a feel that's enough for you to be able to do Roshan or keep getting kills or get a tower off of this
At least you get a deward
Loose haste room to Makoto that kind of sucks
Well, can you do about it if Rosh were top maybe they would have just done it there a
Little awkward on the timings
Nightfall he's chat wheeling tells you how comfortable he is right now
This is an average pub for him
WS with the early BKB, just one more item, just one more picked up to make sure it okay.
Liquid, they're gonna have a really tough time running us over in this window.
They're gonna have the ads on the Codo too.
I don't know, Liquid's just not playing it within the urgency, which says to me that
they have a different read of the game, so I would say it tells me they don't know what
They don't see an opening.
It's hard to play a difference if you don't see a play.
Aggs 1, Aggs 2.
Both being done.
Phantom Lancer and Lena will both collide their big super charge items.
And, uh, well, I believe that says Phantom Lancer is top network, so Avery, you said that that's, uh, what, 93% chance?
I think they are extremely favored given this map state.
Dota plus, it says it's 80%
Yeah, that's...
Wonder how much that'll take down with the TA lineup, not getting Roadshot.
They smoke up and into the 2-Lane.
Well, you'd be else flying in for the axe.
It does up your kill threat a lot, especially if you can land a call on either the Lena or the
the Phantom Lancer. Aegis on Nightfall. He's just gonna run into him.
He's breaking the smoke. He's spot filled with threats running down with the Agon Encepter,
but he doesn't want to go too far.
You have double blade mail on your initiators. You gotta get something done right now.
Even Micae's trying to...
Hope in praying that Makoto will walk into the mirror.
Nice idea.
Actually, Koto's not walking into anything right now
Yeah, because in park he can walk anywhere. He wants to he's got boots travels
He could take the long way around you can teleport somewhere else around the map
He doesn't have to play in this triangle area
Wisdom trying to spawn in potentially a point of attack here
Torrents are still available to Aurora eyeing up that bottom
So they're going to concede a wisdom shine to take Tormentor.
Something going liquid's way, because I told that they were getting his Tormentor regardless.
I've seen the conceding all ejected, Spoxy's going to try and take the mid tower, Makoto's
going to pop out, Bushwack doesn't land.
Power will still fall at some point.
44 HP.
Good data.
Strong gust of wind at this point.
You get the boomerang too.
Very nice. That'll amp up the Lina's damage.
Oh yeah.
Very deadly combination. Just the two of them. Kill anything in this game.
So you're not gonna reevaluate this at all?
Revaluate what?
I don't know, matchup. The liquid just seemed unconcerned about this.
You really think they're so like what even if you don't feel like you know exactly what to do like
You still have the general idea of like okay. We have to force a fight somewhere. I would have urgency
I'm a I'm an observer, you know, maybe the game feels fine
Curious
They're gonna rat a little bit
Here comes the Phantom Lancer though, and he is not to be trifled with, especially with
an Aegis.
A real rebuttal.
He's working towards a Scotty, which is gonna make things a little rough for TA.
Good just, hey, you're gonna go on the fight and just axe, call Nightfall every time.
And you can follow up with other stuns, you will be able to kill him.
Right. Maybe the confidence is there. Maybe Ace is like,
here, I'm gonna have this guy's number.
We'll sweat it.
Foxy getting a blink dagger, certainly gonna help with that.
Ooh, nice little Satchby carry.
Okay.
There's the call on WS, and now we can see that Dessau put to use
quick little calling blade to chop him down.
There's a lot of gold for that kill because
Aurora is up in net worth right now, and he had a dominating kill streak, so...
It does instantly respawn here.
You get the, you get all the, the goodies.
And then Chance for Ace to move along to his BKB.
Kind of waiting to see like some sort of item queued up, but it's like, oh, okay, now I can see
how they're going to deal with Final Answer.
And Meltip wasn't particularly inspiring.
It's got to be Axe BKB
Ags at some point. I have to leave Ags as one of your best tools here.
Okay, yeah.
Refresher, you could double-call him with infinite spin.
Sounds kinda like the lawnmower.
I was gonna say the ballerina, but lawnmower's probably more fitting.
Mistwashwank mid.
Here's spin fishing for these.
Here comes lightbulb.
Oh!
Click away.
Run away!
Everybody run!
De-claw!
It's actually went for the call!
Still as ages, so you don't want to fall to it.
Trying to get these side blade hits on the real one.
Meanwhile, Tofu...
At a position will be left behind.
A rough one for the Doctor, but he's got his Grigory going, so...
It's not all lost here.
700 in the bank.
When do you pop the Grigory?
What a long time.
I'm waiting till that baby's got 3,000 on it.
Visha has to BKB defensively. That is one thing.
This lineup does not have a way to stop BKB T-Pilts.
And they will almost never, unless Lina or Phantom Lancer want to get a basher.
Which they might, if it becomes enough of a problem.
buy it. I don't think they really care about it. You just keep pressuring the map, force
them out of areas. You're gonna continue farming and scaling here. You could see that like
you have a Bissell for Nightfall. I think you will want the Scotty Butterfly Bloodthorn.
Something of this nature.
We'll punch this to go on this hero.
I'm not gonna lie, this is a boring ass game.
Both teams just settled into farming, Aurora are obviously very comfortable with it.
And Liquid seemingly are okay with it.
They're gonna set up for the tower. This is a great setup. They don't think the lane blade
Too bad they actually jumped as early as they did. It would have been nice to get both supports there
But they can get another objective now
Okay liquid finding some openings here getting a couple axe calls into some towers
It's not all doom and gloom they have a gem running on the win ranger pretty hard hero to kill unless the leaner finds him
Get a lot of map control off this
work towards your BKBs and should have a pretty nice triple BKB timing I guess
maybe Mikkei won't want at this game if he thinks he just needs to go as much
damage as possible yeah that certainly seems to be the case building up the
Daedalus now
she was for the big bad on dying we saw him you know Hannah he had a problem with
that direct damage earlier when he got called shackled. The TA killed him pretty quickly,
but that Shiva's armor will definitely make a big difference.
Quick smoke from Liquid trying to catch the PL top. He vacated that area a while ago.
Misha, just going Kaya Sange.
Not the real special there.
No.
Well, I know one of the reasons you're a big fan of Lina is this hero's stale.
Kind of out of control.
Oh yeah.
It's real juicy.
Level 18, going for Kaya Yasha and Blink Dagger.
You get some of those later talents.
Level 25 WS leading charge with the sheathes.
Blink's in, plus gold.
Boxie is already gone.
TP way six.
No, not successful!
Mira catches him right on the edge.
What a huge pick.
That is going to feel real good for Aurora.
You get the carry, and you get the gem out
of the Winneranger's hands.
Makoto with a fast BKB, a flame cloak.
pop he's untouchable unless you get axe called there that that's probably the
two best picks they could possibly get right because the gem pays dividends for them by
being able to clear out all these TA traps so it's liquid not be able to play the map
as well. You almost rather lose anybody else's game than those two right there for free.
They got nothing out of that right. And axe just isn't even here so this is kind of a
doomed fight if a war run into you. I don't know how that's not gonna, that was kind of
That was a fake pushback to be honest, but he's a two-time TI champ, so who am I to say?
He doesn't have a Casim stone, right?
No, I just checked that.
There's a rough one right now.
Here it comes.
Aurora feeling like three-atom Phantom Lancer is enough.
Trying to deal with the rats on the map though.
in the map though. Leader's pretty good at being able to deal with that. Flies off the
cliff area. Nisha... Oh, Xero's it back on Makoto. Hoping to catch him on where as Makoto
definitely dodges that one. Topu running down the river, meanwhile Ace, BKB, bigger run
for it. Shackle shot. Hoping to hold back the real P.O. but there's just too many illusions.
And he's going to chase him down all the way behind the tier three.
Look at him go.
What can you do about this? LSA stops the witch doctors. Topu did not make it out.
And there's two teamfights happening in this game and Lickr are losing both right now, so
Pick one try and commit to it make something happen here. Nice job
I'm not a jackal. You have so much armor dude
He's still there you go. Nice side blade hit side blade hit Somp the TA traps some deso charges level 20 now
Extra armor reduction
Kaya, Sange for Nisha, starting to power up a little bit.
If he can call this PL into the chain zone, the TIA hitting him, he can die, and that
can open up the fight.
It's an easy per Aurora to get picked though, between the lead and the TIA.
Vera having a blink dagger, getting that close range push whack.
That immediately just
Lawrence are going off nightfall city base
It's pretty free
Nice little arcane room bottom
Save that one for the Lena
Got given the gem by the way, so my colors just run around the map killing all these traps
He doesn't have to worry about TA jump in with some vision. He's not aware of pretty big for him
Roach spawn in two seconds. Will they see it? Don't leave the pit.
Found it.
Liquid are smoked up. Roach's gonna happen. You have to contest this.
They have a chance to get in here. Let's see if Roar is lazy in their position. Power shot on through.
Roar start leaving the pit. Ace gonna go in, hits the call.
Onto the real Phantom Lancer. No follow-up from the team. The dual-sector quickly stops any damage from the blade mail.
Now he pops the BKB and teleports away, they hit the LSA on Tofu, he's dead, slow down on the Templar Assassin, he's got BKB!
Is he gonna be able to...
No, that's shot. So much DPS coming out from the PL, when all those illusions surround you.
Right through the refraction, pretty quickly.
Ace is just going for an A to steal there, the second he blinks in and sees that roaches alone up,
he already knows he's just gonna try and bail out of the situation, you're not taking the fight without the Earth Spirit.
Don't have enough damage to all in this Phantom Lancer.
I will say, the peel on dying synergies is kind of nice.
You just guarantee max solar if you just heal this guy throughout the fight.
The cooldown is kind of aligned nicely.
You just hermit-doppling hermalsalorping.
Really annoying, actually.
Now he has a heart, so he doesn't need anymore sustain.
He is tanky as hell.
4200 HP Phantom Lancer.
That is some damage right there.
Nightfall is Upshirt Boxing back to his fountain while he hits the tier 3 at the same time,
sent all his illusions running after him.
And Liquid!
They're looking at us!
They're just farming up some bits of the map.
It's without the gree-greed going though, so that's true, 1150 on the gree-greed, he's
getting up there he could pop that way later on for surprise hacks you never know
yeah another 80 minutes and maybe a sneaky divine rent here I like where
that's going
all right nightfall verse five let's go actually good let's go sorry to kill
tofu they got the Malodict on him he's going no it's 25 into the fountain all
of his illusions hitting all of the heroes on liquid well he himself ducks
away. Man this hero is so dirty man. It is pretty damn good. He is one of the true dirtiest
heroes in the history of this game. He's gonna keep throwing illusions at Ace. He keeps delaying
the Link Dagger initiation. Oh 1v5 again. Inflates your 4s. Man just don't care.
An attempted shackle. That's gonna be a tough one to land. I'm not gonna lie.
I don't even know what the opening looks like, exactly.
And I'm kind of waiting around, but I don't know for what.
Lena pops out from the side, look good a blade, but flies away.
Actually, the flying in expired, he's going to have to TP out.
Meanwhile, Ace, though, through a BKB, he dies.
It's just too much physical damage at this point.
Nisha has to pop his own BKB.
KB. Nightfall is sticking to him. No, he's gonna go after Tofu again. Why not kill this doctor one more time?
Send him back to the fountain.
A site is done for WS. They didn't need initiation, but they have it.
Go back here pretty quickly.
They want to continue the siege to all ages for two minutes here.
The most casual two lanes of barracks you'll ever see.
He is just zoning them to the fountain. This is disgusting.
Yeah, I feel like this is very inefficient from Nightfall, but it's really funny.
He's probably enjoying himself.
That's all it counts.
Oh, they found the TA.
Goodbye.
That might do it here.
Austin, I don't know if this game has too much, too much more in the tank.
So Liquid, all the talk about like what they might need to do or anything, they're gonna
GG out without a team fight without without a single initiation from axe
into an earth spirit roll in and TA jumps in after it you're just gonna go out
to phantom lancer slowly hitting buildings and running illusions I think
we saw this in the other last appeal game who was that
BB team yeah teachers playing that but who are they playing against because
Basically the same thing happened, they got last appeal and we just never really saw them try anything, it might have been...
I don't remember who that was.
And as the last fight will commence here, it's hard to...
I'd start to look at this team fight with any real, uh...
Oh yeah, they had no shot at doing anything here.
Aisha!
See if you can roll out. It's pretty much, will Liquid survive after going in?
Shackle?
It's actually low off of that shackle, but yeah, there it is, GG.
Okay!
That was one of the games of all time. It'll add to nightfall, PL record. He's instantly
out of there. He's like, don't you ever disrespect me again by giving me the last big fan away.
It's over no counter and that is a demoralizer right there, man. Those games are just-
It was an extreme gaming. That's who I thought it was. It was a very similar thing. They're
just farming and they're buying a couple of items in theory or against PL, but really
are they, you know? Yeah, we all know where this is. Yeah. The thing about the hero is
You can just go this build where you just get really tanky.
You're not even building damage, you're just a super high HP toggle
and you kill off the strength of the illusions having a minimum DPS now and...
Like what are you gonna do? Even if you actually gonna call this guy,
he deals like 300 damage himself. You know, congrats.
Like there is no conflict.
Sometimes you just get cheesed in Dota.
Sometimes you get last pick Final Answered.
You gotta be able to write it off, go next, game, reset the mentality.
It's always tough to do.
Cause you just feel like you never had a chance to win this game.
Is there a chance?
Yes, technically, I don't know how feasible it is.
Maybe you're just supposed to start running at this PL from like minute five
and just play super chaotic though.
I'm trying to like bring Nika through the gate four times in the first 10 minutes,
you know, some wild shit like this.
I actually think the real opportunity in this game was probably mid.
I think you're supposed to chain gank this, Lena.
And I think you have to take an early point in the role of your Nisha.
Sure, because it's not able to.
Yes, it's not a default build.
You don't feel good doing it in terms of your game efficiency.
But I think it's one of those games that is so offside that you need to make something happen very early and just outskill your opponents and drag them into bad plays, free up space on the sidelines.
And the way you do that is I think you're going to start rolling on this, you know, like on the four or five and bring supports in.
Like, none of these things are things you want to have to do.
Yeah.
But if you do nothing and you just let this game progress, you let the peel on the lean of art, you're losing this game.
I like, I refuse to see it at win condition in this scenario.
It's just not doable.
So this is a conversation you and Seb are actually having backstage.
We've talked about like, modern team teams, you know, they're better than they've ever been in many ways.
In particular, efficiency. What are they worse at improv and creativity?
I think sometimes, like, I think sometimes you get stuck in these efficiency modes where
you're just defaulting to like, what is best for my hero, what's best for my team,
and you lose sight of the bigger picture.
Well, the bigger picture is there is still a second game, because Liquid had no chance at game one.
they did not they got that overall last pick PL on Aurora and let's be real we
kind of already saw the writing on the wall then and lots of breakdown here with
this game one nonetheless and also maybe some extra information the game is
still going on my right but p-time is in the lead against the galaxy and that is
also having an impact on the teams here on the stage I'm here at the cost and
And Seb, Lacoste, this game, P.O. overall aspect, what can you do?
Well, not much here, right? It's one of those things that it does happen.
Maybe they didn't see it coming, but I feel like the chances of them winning the game
after seeing the draft are like sub 10% because of the higher caliber team that they are playing as
well. Maybe, you know, if Liquid is playing some qualified team that doesn't really know how to
to close out these game, how to utilize the map and everything. I'll give them higher
chances but this is a very expensive, this is the PL guy, like this is the, you know,
Nightfall on one of his favorite heroes. If you're an Eastern European carry, you'd
know, need to know how to play T-Beat, Naga Siren PL, that's how you come into the scene
pretty much and the pretty solid performance, you know, nothing too crazy. It seems like
they had it in the bag since the start playing with the Chakiro as well. I really love the
fact that they are utilizing these more like untraditional position fives like
jukiro warlock these are heroes from the previous patches but they're still
finding a good way to use them. Yeah for sure and I think one one thing to add
to is I feel like this on dying first pick is not really answered in a sense
because when you think about it like it they started on dying and it felt
unbeatable in the game right and I think usually from a draft student
perspective you have to go back to that it's it's not normal like it's not okay
like usually when you first pick a hero unless the hero is absolutely broken
which I don't believe on dying is broken I think it's very strong but it it
should it should pay the price right like it should be a hard game for him or
have less impact because sure the PL carried the game but I feel like even
before the PL came online they hadn't dying issues that's what it felt like he
was clicking tomb he was you know I'm thinking of the fight in their triangle
sure there's a PL there, but realistically how much did PL do? I think it was much more of the
Undying, just like pressing the spells and everybody has to run away. And just if you look at the
lineup, there's like a TA, but TA is playing versus PL, so N.J. Kiro. So TA is playing quite
careful. I feel like it's an axe, Earth Spirit teamfight versus Undying. This is what Undying loves.
So in that sense, I think some teams have to go back to the drawing board in trying to address
and I'm like, maybe it's just that good, you know, but I'll only, it will be my conclusion
once I see like a proper attempt at countering it, because I don't think these heroes do
the job.
Yeah, I think this heroes also not countered by what we call traditional counters anymore.
This is not like, I'm gonna pick Marana, Snapfire, Killer Tooth, this heroes not about the
Stoomstone anymore, it's more about Decay and Solred being on low cooldown, picking up
at the ping-tagger and walking onto a target creating vasillian zombies amplifying that
damage.
I think I need to kill a 9.
Like, I was looking at the game more closely because I'm getting upset that this hero like
don't need any game so I'm like, what could beat it?
And it's sitting on 1.9 thousand HP, minute 35.
It's actually super squishy, like it's deceptive.
You feel like this hero doesn't die, it dies.
It actually dies.
It gets bursted or it's very susceptible to physical damage.
So I'd like to see teams starting to tiericraft a little bit like how do we counter this on
Dying?
Because I think it can be countered and the thing if you counter on Dying all of a sudden
all their teamfight is gone because the hero doesn't really like you know it doesn't play
the map essentially.
If you're playing on Dying and you can't fight it's the most miserable.
Level up won their first game otherwise I see a big one.
That's a level up.
So they're quite level up there they won against L1 team and Rohr now on top of the group has
said like my galaxy is still playing as p-time right now oh my god I glanced over
to the side and I don't I know you don't see it but they showed the graph and I
said p-time was winning and then there's the biggest biggest rollercoaster
drop-down coming out from that graph in favor of the galaxy so I still going on
but sometimes I'm wondering I'm hoping that you guys have two streams going on
at the same time because quite a math one but this game particularly you guys
We talked a lot about the Undying, that was not overall first pick, it was actually the Earth Spirit
and Earth Spirit was kind of countered by the Lina.
Could this have all been solved?
Just all been solved by just having a Sapphire first pick instead.
It's not the Earth Spirit?
Yeah.
I mean, it would have been a different game.
I like the Earth Spirit first pick, I wouldn't take it away.
I think it's a very strong hero right now.
It was Connored, but at the same time, again, I'm going to go back to the Undying
because I don't think Lina was the issue.
But Sapphire counters on dying?
Yes, it does, but...
And it doesn't.
Like, it counters Tumson, but as Nikos mentioned, I feel like there's another aspect of on dying
that's maybe even more oppressive to play against.
He's just blinking on top of you with ulti on, and you have to run.
And I think either you should be able to run more effectively, so I don't know.
Stampede, Sun of the Siren, there are tools in the order.
Or you need to not have to run, you know?
Which, again, there are heroes to do so.
So it needs to be addressed, but essentially, Earth Spirit had a slower game, it's meant to be.
Again, it was perfect, so it was punished, so it's not a, you know, classic, perfect Earth Spirit game, it's a little bit slower.
But still, it had some impact, I think it was the only hope in anything for Liquid that game.
Okay, we're gonna talk more about Zombieman, because Lacoste has found some high-lightable actions.
Yeah, Zombieman, he seems very strong in this current meta-shever,
because I believe we're gonna be able to pull up the clip
because this is a smoke that is happening and the team liquid they're gonna get
approached by Mira who kind of gets his smoke broken immediately pick off like
they have very good heroes against the PA throughout the whole game and then you
see the power of Lita this is level one a rolling boulder and roll in Misha like
he just doesn't have it on the short cooldown and then they drop the tombstone
you can see Boxie this is not a core of Inventor by any means and I feel like
this Elden Undying is just super policy multiple zombies chasing him down and then he blanks in
decay and there's so many units around him and all you got is like zombie zombie every single
time it's just not fun to play against because you don't have to disengage there's going to be
another clip that you did mention in the triangle which is going to be where jacquero here runs in
And he's under division of the enemy team, maybe I need another head to be Jokero in
the enemy team, but yeah, we're gonna see it again.
I can go back real quickly, here we go.
And Jokero is under division of the enemy team, and they are gonna get initiated, like
they're gonna initiate on him straight away, and then again, he blinks in Tombstone down,
there's a bazillion zombies around him.
Sure, you got a dunk on Jokero, but what's gonna be the price that you're gonna be paying?
For Aurora, this is a type of gank that I call K.O.R.R.R. or K.O.R.R.R.R.R.
because he's the only one who dies and the rest of the team is going to be able to clean up.
It's disgusting actually, without dying like that.
There are some counters, there are some counters, there are some counters.
You can ban it.
No, you don't have to ban it. Just beat it.
Like Illu Heroes, Summons, Naga Siren, like there are some heavy, heavy counters
that are dying in the game of Dota 2. It is time to pull it out.
And it's not wish doctor because obviously that is my team like we're trying that the biggest yeah
I mean which doctor is decent, but not in the game
I mean you can't expect a position five to fix the team fighters like you're asking too much from your file at this point is like
It's like come on like I'm new all my gold is going into support items
And you also want me to be able to out fight them like get yourself some core players
Easy. It sounds like such an easy solution. Unfortunately for Team Liquid, with them losing
this game, the chance is to force out a three-way tie at the top of the bracket. Go. They no
longer have a chance to do so, so they're going to be playing in the survival stage.
I think that they will be still... Actually, they'll probably still be... They'll be third.
So they will play and they want because Nick McAllister is still ahead on points, depending
on how the game goes as well.
But yeah, so they're going to be playing in those survival stages and that's really
going to be spooky and you know, what better practice than play against the number one
team again on stage.
For Aurora, definitely still not to play for because they want to be number one in the
group and there are still chances for them to be forced to play tie breakers against
Nick McAllister.
on the result. I think we've got to see versus P-Time. This game in particular, what do you
want to see change the cost? Because we can't just all focus on the undying. We want to see
something, maybe because at the start of the series we said we wanted to see them all on the
same page on the side of Team Liquid. Yeah, I mean we saw some disconnects from the offline as well
in the previous games that they did play in this one. There also wasn't really that much,
There wasn't they weren't really oppressive in the lane. It's quite difficult
It's not a traditional turret hero that we are seeing but again
We are going back to them switching up the melee range combinations instead of playing the melee five with the range
Position one they are going for the other way around picking up these stronger laners from the previous patches
And I want to see maybe team liquid also going in a bit of a like different direction because I feel like this is something
right up their alley, some blasts on the past,
bringing in Temporal Assassin,
but doesn't seem to be fitting in.
I know that some teams have tried it.
It does look good in some situations,
but we also talked about potentially,
maybe Spectre coming out on this date
because it's strong with Wish Doctor,
yet to see what they're gonna be able to bang out
in the second game.
Yeah, we're gonna find out what they're gonna pick after
in the second game.
If you're wondering, what is she talking about
all the time with potential tiebreakers and groups
and stuff like that and survival stage what she talking about don't worry we got you covered
This year, the EWC Dota 2 format is more cutthroat than ever.
This is how it's going to go down.
The tournament starts with the group stage.
The teams will be split into 4 groups of 6, where they'll play in a round robin format.
The top teams of each group qualify straight to the playoffs, and the bottom two are eliminated.
The remaining teams move on to the survival stage, which is a single elimination best
of three gauntlet style bracket.
The teams final chance of survival.
The first round of the gauntlet bracket starts with the third and fourth placing teams from
the group stage.
The winner will meet the second place team from group stage in round two.
Only four teams will move on from the survival stage to the playoffs.
The playoffs are a best of three single elimination bracket, where a single mistake can be the
difference between moving on and being eliminated from the tournament.
A third place decider will be played for a bigger chunk of the prize pool, as well as
valuable club championship points.
The grand finals match is a best of five for the two teams that have fought their way through
each stage of the tournament.
Only one of them will remain undefeated
and claim the EWC 2026 Dota 2 trophy.
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Its trophy system is built to match.
The club championship trophy,
awarded to the one club that rose above the rest
and reign supreme across all EWC games.
Every participant earns a key engraved with their name.
That's their right to compete.
Raining champions hold a key unlike any other.
The Game Trophy is the ultimate prize
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Incomplete until a champion's key is inserted.
The champion's keyframe is locked into the totem, a stone marker of legacy.
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At EWC, nothing is granted.
Everything is earned.
You are watching Dota 2 at the eSports World Cup!
We're live from Paris and we're getting ready for game number 2 between Aurora and Team
Liquid.
The first game going the way of Aurora in the second game, but we'll just have to wait
And we're hoping to see some adjustments coming out from Team Liquid who has had a rocky,
laning, not laning, group stage, laning stage actually also, so both are correct.
Rocky group stage here in Paris, and normally we see them fix stuff during a group stage,
but we haven't seen enough of them yet to say that they really have, so.
No, I would agree with that. They need a little bit more time as it seems.
Again, they have secured themselves away out of the group, so that is the positive.
They got a couple crucial wins that is not going to threaten their tournament life.
So they're going to have more time.
I actually think that them playing an extra stage is a good news almost at this point.
I think they need the time to figure things out better for themselves.
Again, this is a team that...
Yeah, what are we...
Sorry!
Yeah, go for it, go for it.
I just saw and got news that Nigma Galaxy did win their first game after being completely down and almost out, but P-Time
found it a little bit and therefore Nigma also wins. Therefore, them and Aurora still tied for first place in this group.
So a lot of extra pressure on Aurora. How are we going into this game?
How many times can you beat back actually? Because Nigma, they have been back like literally 20 times so far and they're back again.
They're like hobbits, you know, back and then back again, or like Lyon from Dota, back to hell and back again.
It doesn't feel like this team definitely powered up, but yeah, most definitely a lot of pressure on Aurora.
And we're going to be seeing the ending of that apparently crazy game that we're going to need to re-watch,
because there is a 60-plus minute game and I see Sumail just machine gunning down the throne.
Yeah, I made one with an Aided Apparition gun.
You see the body language from the players, this is like extra happiness for the team,
especially for a group stage game, so I can only assume that this was an epic game to
play and to watch.
Yeah, I can only imagine, I saw the seats in front of the B stage where they're on were
completely filled during the game as well, a treat to watch, we're hoping to have a similar
type of blockbuster coming out from these two teams, but one team is just at the moment
delivering about the other one is not and I feel like that shouldn't be the case
is it it's not because we talked about this before this here is what cause we
talked about the offline and how ace has been struggling to find his putting a
little bit but it can't just be the offline it feels like it's all the whole
team a little bit now it's not the team liquid that is on top of their game
right now sometimes you know you have ups and downs the peaking at the right
moments going to be the big thing but this time around the team liquid they they had it a little
bit rough a lot of time they would see them maybe fix some of these mistakes that they've been making
right now I don't feel like they are having the solutions it seems like the other team they're
slightly more prepared in a way where they are bringing some like new crazy ideas to the table
as well and also like you are playing against Aurora I would say that Aurora is the best Margot team
out there and that you are gonna have to face like different issues whether you're
gonna be playing against this undying that you didn't have answered to in the first
game or potentially you're gonna need to give them this Largo which also looks
pretty unstoppable in their hands. I like the first phase bands for Mora I love
this time around I think they're threatening the Ember or the
Ursprit pretty early in the drafts because I think the common corners are
not that effective I mean there's like still the niche a slaughter on liquid
side that could come against these heroes, but no Invoker, no Caz, no Oscar Caz, could
also be Mikes of course, but I think Aurora, it seems actually the way the meta is developing
that whoever has the first pick has a decent edge. Actually never mind, they go for the
puck, this is interesting. So they will tank the puck which is Earthspirt matchup. I wonder
if Liquid's gonna grab it, we've seen Earthspirt have a lot of success, they were willing to
first pick it like blindly last game, so there should be no reason for them to shy away from
I think the hero has a really low 1-rated tournament.
It does.
It's like sub 30% or something.
Yeah.
I'm quite surprised by this.
I think it's...
Yeah, and they go amber.
Both heroes are really good against both the amber and the air spirits.
And we've seen even Aurora actually prioritize the amber a lot.
I'm quite speechless actually by this part.
I don't really know what motivated it.
I would have been okay if they picked up Largo instead of Puck, because this is the hero that we've seen.
Teams also flex from the mid lane as well.
It could be potentially a good response to Ember Spirit in the mid lane, like you talked about a lot about the matchup Largo in the mid lane against this Earth Spirit.
Who can't shut him down, you have a lick, it's very good against Ember Spirit throughout the whole game.
Yeah, the Dispel, I think it's a fail.
They max shield all the time now, so very annoying for Ember to play against.
And Pock is sitting in, as you said, she's at sub 30% win rate, 29 to be exact.
This hero also, I think, if we go back to the previous Alakya,
Mikoto Pock, one of the best ones out there, like Nisha Pock, Mikoto Pock,
definitely gonna be up there.
The chances of, because I did the stats, the chances of him winning the game,
when picked in the first phase compared to the second and third phase,
it, they drop off pretty, pretty dramatically, I would say.
We're curious as to what's coming in our second phase of this draft, but before we get there,
we know for this group that the top is very heavy and we are very excited to see what's going to happen there,
but we already know what's going to happen at the very bottom.
As we are seeing keys, our first keys getting crushed, L1 and level up are having their keys properly demolished.
It's a tough life.
It is a tough life.
She has extra rewards.
I mean, losing feels bad, but then you see that extra step of like seeing something be
taken away from you.
It's like golden.
It's shiny.
They take it and they just crush it.
You got to have it for the whole time.
I'm glad I'm retired.
I can't take it.
They put a lot of effort in there.
You can take your key and you can put it on the side, too.
Leave it with me.
I won't be coming tomorrow.
I won't be coming in.
I'm feeling sick.
Yeah.
I don't want to watch this.
your dreams getting crushed as well and then yeah these are the two heroes that
we also mentioned that are gonna be causing quite a lot of issues for them
so picking up removing Largo and removing Undying which I think is the
correct step for Team Liquid and also picking up Tiny for themselves so
opening up with two cores straight away there's a slight chance that you might
play Tiny from the position 4 if you have Darkseer but maybe Enigma but the
chances are quite low and it's also a very good answer for Puck throughout the
whole game like this hero doesn't really have that much survivability if he gets initiated
on.
Quite an early tiny pick, but again if they did the researches, perhaps WS's hero pool
is not that punishing against Tiny and as you said maybe it's also flexed.
Obviously great against Bok, so I don't mind the pick so much.
It's kind of funny to note that they exchanged second phase bands in a sense.
I think it was Liquid that banned Coddle Lion last game and now it's Aurora that banned
Coddle Lion themselves.
Obviously Coddle Ember, very strong combination of heroes and the Lion would have been a pretty
straightforward answer to the puck.
Given that I think Ember has a slight edge like mid against puck but then obviously puck
they just sit down and you know start farming back up into the game against Lion, it's much
harder to scale.
The mirror hoodwink which we've seen already, very good, very efficient, plays pretty well
with the puck, make sure you land your spells under the coil, very good setup for the hoodwink
spells, so pretty solid opening from both teams I have to say so far.
It upsets up a lot of these position 5's that are very good against puck, I'm leaning towards
Vayne who's still in the pool for Liquid because Liquid just one nightmare with a fiend's grip
for two seconds, it gives you just enough to kill the hero.
I think they have a relatively good amount and Aurora are not going to be fixing anything
because they feel like the supports that they did have going back to Jakiro one more time.
This team is probably the only team that has been picking up this hero and also having
great success with it.
It looks great every time you play as a youngster.
Maybe it will be stolen by other teams because there's no reason not to do so.
I'm just a little bit curious to...
Oh yeah, actually, would this be like the first time Earth Spirit is like not picked or banned?
I mean, all the games I've seen it was always contested.
It's completely ignored in this draft.
That's pretty funny.
Both teams decided, you know what, let's just have a one game break.
Gentleman's agreement, no Earth Spirit allowed.
Let's play something else, you know?
That would be cool.
I mean, we guess we have the mid lane is already in attention, so let's know.
Oh, it's coming.
Oh, no.
You know what though, when you were talking earlier, and I know this has to do about the
and dying was already happening. You know, you need a way to run, you named another song
and stampede and I'm like, mmm my shadow.
Actually it's not about, actually. No, I don't know. I think you're, oh never mind.
It's not ignored anymore. It's in the bowl or spit. I was just kidding.
But um, no, you know what? I think you have a pretty good point here.
Maybe you're on a-
There's no one dying.
Yeah, right there. You know, of course there's no one dying.
Wait, well you baited me into like jumping on board and then you just leave me.
leave me there. Okay, so it is bad. I mean, Mirana, the problem with the heroes that what
it brings is a little bit is a little bit lackluster. Like, honestly, what does a hero do besides,
like, maybe stunning a hero for a while? Like, I don't know.
It's a free smoke. I think this is the biggest part of the hero. Free smoke, yeah. Free smoke.
Every two minutes, doesn't even have Salamane anymore. Like, I think the hero was really
allowed to be in a good spot when you were getting that extra. At first it was 20%, which
was kind of bad but then with the 50% bonuses on Lotus it's quite a lot of
increase and now that's gone as well so I feel like that also that the hero lost
that part it feels really bad and this is another issue that's gonna be thrown
at them I feel like when we talk about like the big-boy Timbersaw players ATS
always gonna you know be in their xxs but WS this is one of his most
successful heroes that I've seen him play and he always delivers.
Yeah, and Mirana Thailand sounds like a really, really good lane for Timber to go to.
I don't think they can stop him whatsoever.
One thing to mention also is I've been quite impressed with Mirra's ability to, well, I mean,
lane and secure a stable lane for his off-laner, but also stack.
He's been stacking a lot on his heroes.
I think every game I watch him, he has like eight or nine stacks in the early game.
Like his mid laner is constantly clearing stacks.
It's disgusting.
This is an amazing game for that, both Buck and Timber are going to enjoy hearing stacks in the triangle
and I don't think he needs to lane too long.
They should be able to walk away from the lane pretty early on and leave the Timber on his own.
Do they need another playmaker from the off lane?
I feel like this could be a very, very good night stalker game if they could potentially bang it up
Cause I feel like in terms of the damage that they have and control, they have enough.
It's just like, I'm just looking at this Earth Spirit and looking at this Zukiro, and from an Earthlaner perspective, you know what's going to happen.
Like, at some point, the Earth Spirit is going to be like, good luck, good luck to you, Amado here, which, again, could work.
But you really need to make sure you have like a fallback plan on the Earthlaner.
because there's no such thing as being in lane 1 vs 2 against Ilja Kiro lane, like you just can't enter
so you need to start jungling I guess
so NiteSucker I think is good for the game but is it playable against what they have?
I guess that's why they banned out of Lickman and Darkseer because both of those could potentially help themselves out in the jungle
So what else is there for ace? Like all the honest offlaners you know like the Axes and the Santars
Tars and like they kind of need some laning like laning time. They can just jungle straight away
Darcy is out as you mentioned the nigma is out. I think the pull is quite limited one here
We haven't seen so much. Okay. Yeah, it's a joker win ranger. Yeah
Yeah, I'm happy. I'm not playing this game
That's enough thing. You know, you don't see it. You don't see a way out
I'm just you know, I'm just putting my mind to try to figure it out and I'm like, you know what?
I'm not gonna figure it out. I'm gonna sit and watch what about some like dawn break
just throw it in there. I don't think this is an easy pick by any means. Also the combination
on Electrochers, I don't think we've seen these four, even like three heroes paired up together
because to me, I look at the icons of the heroes, I'm like, yeah, I haven't seen this before, at
least in this meta. At this point, pick another spirit and hope that something happens in the
game when you have the three spirited United or something, you don't know, maybe you just
Just instable in or something like that, just big storm.
That's all I would do with some Void Spirit for the color scheme.
Yeah, I was gonna say, if you were gonna go for the magic effect, you need to have all four surely.
Yeah, but that's too late.
But I guess if you get Void Spirit color-wise, it looks really cool.
I think there's something intimidating.
Oh, it's really... is it that bad?
There's nothing that you see.
I don't know.
It's a really tough one.
I don't blame them for using a lot of time.
Maybe some doom as well could come out.
How do you lane with Jekiro?
You don't, that's the easy question. You don't in this meta.
Back in jungle?
Yeah, jungle. X jungle level 1.
They need to be pulling waves, but I think pulling waves against Jekiro is not that simple, I would say.
I think it's pretty toxic. Even if he could even buy boots, the lane is that free that he could just buy boots on Jekiro and just run around bullying people.
Yeah, Enigma is out. It's not a good game. I think bad could lane, but it's not good.
Oh, this is a tough one, they have enough, this is the older time going, they will go
for Centaur.
It was on the dot, right, they used all the rejection on this one, I don't blame them,
I think this was a very, very tricky pick and I don't think they're super happy with
this one.
The bright side of Centaur is that it's a decent hero versus Windranger, but it's only
decent if you have some sort of equivalent network.
If you're sitting at 2K networks and Renegades at 6, it's not decent at all. It's super bad.
This is double melee lane against Jokiro and Windranger. You're gonna get Click to Oblivion.
I'm gonna show you that Kaori must be having the biggest and nicest smile on the face.
Yeah, he's gonna be happy.
He's like, oh, my Jokiro is gonna cook once again. They're just gonna sit there and tank my right clicks and my spells and I'm going to love it.
They got great disengaged this game on Liquid though, except there is something called Coil which would not let them disengage
But if you kill the puck and run away, I guess that is the plan. So the plan is laid out
I'm looking for like Sparks of Light. No good attempt, but not good enough. Something else, please
Oh, they actually have a lot of disables this game. They do. They could kill Puck. They could kill Puck
but the problem is WS on Timber, so you have Centaur, you have Tiny, this hero
shreds through these heroes and he's also not really affected by these heroes, it's
not like an explosive damage they do have, I feel like it's a very very good
Timber game. Listen draft against drafts, yeah the Timber is an issue but let
Amber vessel, something something magic magic, they can handle it. They have some
good arguments if the game is equal and stable, there's like a massive laning
issue. But at the same time, Liquid players are world-class players. They can outplay,
they can outmanoeuvre. If there is a game where it's going to be required, I feel like
it is this one.
This is where they show that they can pick it up in the group stage.
Yeah, they need to overperform, in a sense, because tough side lanes and I don't think
it's the easiest Ember game either. In other words, matchup for Nisha, with that being said,
I think Ember vs Glock is pretty favourable for Ember, so perhaps he can be the one putting
his team on his shoulders in the early game.
Let's talk happy things.
Happy things.
Aurora, they look very good.
This draft was definitely the extra 10 minutes that KP took to prepare for this match compared
to others.
I think it really showed.
I feel like they cornered Liquid and they got a well-rounded, nice draft.
They did, and also have in mind that this is, I would say, the best Windranger team in the world from the carry position.
And it's Nightfall again. They are giving him priority. It showed in game number one with PL.
It's going to probably show in this one as well, considering that it's a very good Windranger game.
It is a very good Windranger game. I'm sure Nightfall is going to pop off on this one, as we're going to find out how it will play out exactly with Caffeine SPG.
Game 1 was insanely rough if you are a liquid fan.
Avery, is there hope in game 2?
Always hope in game 2.
You can make some adjustments, reset your mentality, come in and just play better.
And it can't get much worse.
That is most definitely true.
I do still favor Aurora here.
I think their draft just...
I would rather play their lineup than liquids.
I think this Timbersaw looks really devastated in this game.
I don't know how they're gonna deal with him.
They did answer the puck pretty well.
I liked the opener for Liquid.
I think trading puck for Ember is completely fine.
You get a really solid hero for Nisha
that he can just won me five with.
And I think this is the hero
that I want to see Liquid play through.
I think if they play through the Nisha Ember,
he gets rolling.
It's gonna bring them all on it into the game.
You have a lot of chain disabled with Earthspear
coming in on top of it.
Huck can die in this game.
Winteringer can die in this game.
The support's competing in this game.
You have to get that snowball rolling,
and then I'll see this draft come together.
Well the biggest question about these lanes, how do you fix the off-lane scenario?
Liquid needs to fix their off-lane which is super scary, Chikiro, Windranger, are they
going to be able to get poles off?
I mean that's definitely the most ideal scenario.
And then in their safe lane, can they take out the Timbersaw somehow?
Slow him down because he will be a massive threat throughout the rest of the game.
to Boksy for those ideas and you can pull waves top, set the center up successfully and then
do the classic like TP and Defog roll on somebody bottom or roll on the puck mid if the opportunity
somehow presents itself. You can dominate some of these games on your period.
Boksy tries to roll in. Whiffs gets the range creep denied. They get the lane back super
fast here with some of the aggro pulls. That's going to help a lot. So you don't have to go
go pull waves here.
Centaur's in a good spot.
Another roll in, another high-salt, another stomp,
a bit of right-click damage.
Not enough to commit for the kill.
Well, Boxie maybe thinks otherwise.
Very good harass, though.
Another roll up in three seconds,
but now he's going to be slowed down by the blood grenade.
I mean, he threw himself so far out there,
he's going to have to roll away to escape.
But he does have a healing self.
And again, more space for Ace.
More time for him to get Retaliate,
which he's now got level 2.
Top side lancer liquid.
You will lose this top lane over time, it's just inevitable and
the tiny Marana is not really gonna pressure this timber over the long run.
Maybe get a cheeky kill on him
with some chain stump potential before he gets too tanky.
I think WS should have a good time down here.
If you manage to, like, get some sort of pull or something like that.
Do you think Boxy thinks about rotating through that lane?
Avalanche, Aero lands onto WS instead of Vera, their intended target.
Very close.
Nisha, low, gets it by the orb.
No commitment, though, from Lakoto.
I want to see Nisha step up here.
Yeah.
You have to match up, he's super comfortable in on a hero that is prime Nisha territory.
He can do some work in this game.
Is it the freest Ember game of all time?
No, but it's pretty good here.
If you just get a fast Vessely and start running around, you have solid follow-up.
I always like this Marana Ember combination.
It's just very simple, very straightforward, very low risk, low cooldown, the red part
on the map.
Okay, got its range creep tonight.
It's been a minute since we've seen a Nisha pop-off game.
It just doesn't seem like he's in that zone right now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's going okay for Liquid right now.
I think Top lane is going better than I expected.
They got the Equal Rand a really good spot really early and had some favorable trades
against the Jekiro.
You're only now getting a stack pull off. Oh boxy have second lanes is stopping the Lotus
It would have been a sick play roll in kick him out take the Lotus run away with it
They're winning this lane though. You're getting ace to the helm which means you can kind of let him solo slash jungle
And roam the search here. That's the biggest goal up here
I hope you get this big Ursa Smasher. Oh, yeah, that's juicy right there
Fortunately, I couldn't get any part of the pull.
17, 18, and 6 for Makoto versus the 12 and 1 for Nisha.
He's really cooking in mid.
Just straight up dominating this lane with the puck.
It's not just the CS, it's the resources.
Oh, another range creep to die.
Nisha is gonna be so far behind in experience.
It's not often you win early denies with puck.
That's just not supposed to happen.
Sure.
He is really cooking.
He's gonna kill me really quick.
He goes off, slight, trying to dodge the orb.
That was a necessary dodge. If you die, you don't dodge it there, so put them life on the edge.
And you get your water rune stolen by a damn jikiro, so Nisha's gonna have to go to base here.
Yeah, a lot more freedom for Kari than there is Boxie, who's just trying to get Ace over that line,
and Helm of Iron Will will finally be bought now.
The craziest part of this game to me is, uh, Aurora has three Grandmaster tier heroes.
And this plucked Timber Hoodling.
Oh yeah, they do.
Oh wow.
I'm sure that the hero's effectively a Grandmaster tier for Calorie.
Meanwhile, only the one for Liquid.
Well, he should have run.
He should have used Dota Pulse.
Eh, it's also true.
Yeah, I would consider that a Grandmaster tier.
Of course you're right.
a comfortable lineup for Aurora as it always is.
Seem to stay with their greatest hits.
Can be a strength, can be a weakness.
That's how you use it here.
Double blocking out camps,
Foxy really making an effort
that there's not gonna be any pulls here.
That's bumbling.
I feel that Silencer Liquid honestly went better
than I thought they would in the first five minutes here.
They're doing a nice job controlling equilibrium,
controlling the pools.
Yeah, if only you could say the same about mid.
This one's the other way.
Yeah, it's the opposite way, Makoto.
He's got his level six already.
Nisha half a level away from getting his remnants.
What do you think about Rape Band on the Tuck?
He's trying to get some extra armor in here against the Ember matchup.
Yeah, I like it.
Pretty cool.
I think it's one of those things that if you asked Quinn,
he'd be like, this is absolute dawn.
First blood, collected, Boxy eventually was going to step out too far, it was just inevitable.
Again, he's just trying to create opportunities for Ace where he can.
The sooner they can get that helmet dominator, the sooner that Boxy can get the hell out of there.
Quilt does get used in mid lane, Deesha is just going to hold out underneath the tower here,
push back attempted, nice dodge with the slight though, and cleans up Mira.
Instead, Roland from Boxy will catch Makoto, not the Roland itself, but the slowdown on the boulder.
He has to waning Rift up to the high ground.
Arrow almost lands but a phase shift to dodge just to make sure and he will walk away with an amp damage
An opportunity in the future or maybe an opportunity right now as ace is in so deep and the call has been made
Aurora says okay, this end up is enough. We got a we got a punish this with an amp damage on a puck
It's made a whole lot easier to do so
Kind of just unlucky for ace that that mid sequence went that way
Or it's efficient for my go to the come up here with the amp damage otherwise
I think even if you lay the stuns to keep you out the game is dead
That is the timbersaw in action able to get the kill before he hits level six. That's how you know you're in real trouble
Shit, look don't push the wave in
Whirling death after whirling death and this is my biggest concern in this game. Honestly is I think yeah
It's the timber. I think the other heroes can be addressed here from liquid. I
Think WS is just gonna run this game over if you get tanky on this hero
Who's out putting any sort of big chunks of physical against you that we're used to seeing like there's no
There's no direct timber car in this game to me. And I think when that happens WS tends to make the most of the situation
Another dive on big a TV back into this he really cannot afford what's happening right now
No, but nobody on the team is gonna rotate to help him
Did it again?
Hey, throws out some damage. Maybe they can get the kill on Mira and return. Tofu jumps in for it, but the Lotus gets fed over.
Double Lotus.
It's half health now. It starts up, almost still got him. Surprising.
But Mira survives all the same. W picks up the double kill.
You still have two more Lotuses.
Yeah, that's what happens when you've got a winning lane like that, right?
You just don't have to use those resources.
That's a great move from Arora. Recognize this Tiny is always gonna tee me back into this lane, and you have the Chakram
You have the level advantage down here. Just bring the supports, run him down. Tiny's not great.
You're fighting early, right? You have one point plus one point average. Here's the body.
Ron is not great at failing these kind of dives out either. It's often pretty difficult to find connections with the arrow.
Oh, he's saying he's smiling while Bicke's, please, he should save me.
No, no, I'm going to say, I'm going to get my errand first.
He's having the best game of anybody here.
And he is now, yeah.
Oh, it has to go through the ember of this game.
There's no way around it.
But he's having the best game, and Makoto is still ahead of it in that one.
Says a lot about the other two cores who are over a thousand net worth,
Almost 1500 behind there, compatriots. This is a rough position to be in, no doubt.
The thing is, this is a position that Liquid knew was likely gonna be the case.
I mean, when you walk into these two side lanes, you know your top lane is a sat lane.
Yes.
And you kind of assume that this timber tiny is not really gonna go your way with the morana support.
If there's a little outplay potential, maybe you didn't expect it to go this bad, but you should kind of assume it's the case, so...
I would have expected Liquid to crash mid-harder here. That's a third death for Nikkei's to get switched.
Where do you go from here if you're Mikkei?
Boxing is gonna get run down with a focus fire as Jaffa and his army here for Nightfall.
Now, here comes the remnant. Nisha has to make a move.
Chains up into the stump. The kill on Nightfall would be worth it all if they can actually get him.
What a timely ice pad.
Oh, he's not gonna get close enough. He has no more remnants.
Slight, too long of a cooldown at level 1.
That was a big committal from Nisha.
Didn't get earned charges, used all of his remnants out of resources on the map.
That's gonna open up an attack for Aurora around mid.
They're pushing it in.
The box he does manage to grab the aggro.
Still gets grabbed by the bushwag though, pulled into Makoto's embrace.
They're just styling all of them.
They are.
Look at like a pub game out here.
Get the arrow on the catapult. That's pretty nice. Glyph will not save you there.
With light shadow, Nisha, they're just trying to get pickoffs on supports at this point.
Anything to get an earn charge for Nisha.
They got it.
He'll get one, one way or the other.
They're lying for death.
Two earn charges for him to work off of.
Now, can they get core kills somewhere on the map with that?
Another stampede up in 12 seconds.
I'm gonna need something because there's heavy pressure on the top lane.
The other focus fire is up.
Seach wagon push in.
Do I have the helm of Dom Creep trying to draw aggro?
Too hard to stop this one against three points of liquid fire.
Just roll.
It's dead.
No ability for this tower to defend itself.
And then you have to imagine a roar putting their sights on this last tier one in that middle lane.
For sure.
I'm sure Kori's going to be making that rotation pretty soon.
Oh yeah, I'd be looking at it.
Get some resources on Makoto, bring some heroes in his lane.
You can even rotate the Timber.
WS feels like his presence is needed and just slay whoever decides to show.
We're also eyeing a smoke towards bottom.
Perhaps trying to ruin Mickey's game one last time.
Yeah, keep playing through the Timber saw.
The catch of the coil ensures that WS comes in, delivers the damage, seems pretty simple.
But Liquid is playing hyper defensive.
Which usually means you end up conceiving objectives somewhere.
Nisha does spoil some of the smoke, does not get caught, the tower is under assault.
Arcane runes from the bottom too.
unfortunate room and you should just cannot get here close to vessel big pickup for Makoto
with coil off cooldown so you're heavily incentivized to make play now WS is clearing out the entirety
of the radiant jungle he's gonna have a very fast kaiassan so far what he's almost doubling
this tiny yeah yeah smoke before the vessel is done
man weird timing finger sauce nanny been out here but the slight change arrow
tried to use the sharpshooter to get out of position pretty fast kill so you're
not losing too much here you get to push some ways with the ember as well kind of
stacking the course bottom that's the only downside ever this gets you to your
vessel and you're gonna have three charges to work with here. So this is
where you can run the map with the Ember and the Morana. Pretty decent kill
throw on just about anybody other than the puck face shift and you always have
stampede the belly out of things get weird. Should be very confident right now
in this kill combination. Nice path into coil. The roll away breaks the coil. Box
is too far up. Now the punish with no coil to stop him.
Esha feels like this is gonna be pretty free. They cut down the tree there. That
Close, close, Stampeep, Mikkei, hits the avalanche on the plonk top of the air, there it's gonna land, and a big move, liquid, now hunt for more, but Esha got to be careful that focus fire, and, well, there's a timbersaw there, you're not fighting into that guy.
Game is flowing through the ember though, perfect connection for Mikkei, that's the power of the timiness game. You can always join these fights and make Makoto's life hard.
Auto-Chains on two, roll in.
Oh, Chakra-Mulm is going to come off, but with a magnetize and an avalanche, looking pretty good.
WS is still a problem though, and Voxy will experience that problem.
Oh, he's in first hill.
Aisha, 80, finish, a mob.
WS is so low, once again, a hero is going to slip through his fingers so close, but he's out of remnants.
No slight elastic.
Oh, that power shot brought three different heroes low.
Can Makoto chase?
Nah, worried about the avalanche turnaround.
And fair enough, another slight change, some long distance to arrow to finish him off.
As you said, laying through the Ember spirit.
Oh yeah, it's juicy this game. You have so much long-range chainstump potential
that every chains is a massive threat against Aurora, and they have no spell answer to it.
And look at the space the bot for any chase is gonna get the tower last hit off of his Helma Dom creep,
so he's farmed up neutrals and taking towers at the same time.
Here's sequence for Liquid.
You go from potentially being 8k behind in this game to only down two.
So massive pickups for them. If you get the Timber here, that's the cherry on top.
The last vessel almost did the job.
Tree throw hit him. He just lives on 20 HP.
So close.
That innate regen, counting for a lot.
And again, Lotuses. There were some stored Lotuses from Aurora that got pumped into that Timber.
Can't forget about them.
Yeah, I feel like that's been a progression over time, teams.
holding on to lotuses and playing with them more and more in the middle late game
especially if you're winning the lanes you don't have to use them in the lane
yeah just save them up they're huge in the big game what do you think about this
second item heart that's the palma dom into heart this is the scaling center
build yeah that's the big question is this the game for the heart build I
actually don't mind it here okay I think this is right because I think the way you
win this game you're not going to temple this game right I think the way you win
this game is you just scale all through your force together into the light game
the team's gonna be playing through the ember spirit that's your initiates
like chains into arrow and he can stampede into that just as easily as
blank I think it's fine okay I'm on board it'll also create a potentially
very very nice timing around like ember BKB plus centaur heart with a moonlight
shadow going in the Earth Spirit Guarantees initiation. You have some pretty tanky heroes
on the side, like all these cores are going to be kind of tough to bring down and it's
not going to be the easiest for a windranger, but that's where the Timbersaw is supposed
to excel, right? Makes tanky heroes a lot squishier.
WS has some work to do for him in this game in terms of cutting these big boys down the
side. If he gets bursted first, that's going to open the fight a lot for Liquid. And that
can always happen because they have so much chains done on the side.
He is trying to get a Lotus which will deal with the slight chain set up, but of course there's plenty more opportunity to get that land set up into Arrow.
Link's already online for Mickey. If you get caught by chains with this tiny combo into Arrow, you're probably dead all the time.
I'm trying to think if there's any way of war it can itemize their way against this kind of kill threat from the long range follow-up on the chains.
Dispels are nice, you get out of the chains, if you get tiny comboed, 4 stats, they can
help you get, like, the avalanche hits, maybe you can 4 staff before the toss, get away from
the arrow positioning.
I guess just, yeah, Climber Cape 4 staff is your best options game, it is a good Climber
Cape game too.
Nobody else might be able to survive, they're all in, chainsaw if he's climbered, I could
see it.
I definitely slowed down for war. That one chain kill sequence for Liquid did a lot of work to stem the bleeding here.
I'm not gonna lie, I don't love this trend of these Marana supports.
They just go straight agonimceptor, I feel like that doesn't go well for pubs.
Supports that don't buy any actual support items. That's a classic.
Yeah, some good moves, not gonna let him live, but it was nice.
They're scanning the puck on this camp, Mickay might be able to get a sick jump here.
This would be massive with the Invisroon close to smoke, but...
We're very good at dodging that move.
Yeah, definitely could have lost some extra heroes there.
So we'll finish the heart for the Centaur.
We'll push Nisha very close to that BKB, so we're getting to that mid-game timing.
We're looking pretty strong in the 505, especially with Moonlight Shadow.
Let me close the gap a lot easier.
if
if they might skip the shadow with this game
and just go for some work taken right click if you can use this move like shadow of it for better on that
Interesting plate call, huh?
I don't think they're stronger in a true 5-on-5 right now.
Liquid are able to get there, but they're just nowhere close to it on the map.
Positioning being on this side of the map.
Because it's the Timbersaw area, Liquid really haven't spent too many minutes in this area,
so it's kind of owned by Aurora. They take the Roche for free.
He's so high level, 16 already.
5-0, so if you bring this Timber down, he's gonna be worth a lot.
Public enemy number one right here.
It's gonna go for Agonimceptor. They do not have an Ole Fire here.
Nope.
My worry is that the Timber, I think he is the true carry for Aurora.
In this game, if he gets five or six slots, he's gonna be a massive problem.
Tormentor? Available.
Nice ball making his way downtown.
Yeah, Aurora, probably a little bit frustrated.
Because Nisha cut their lane.
And he's got another rendered to do it again at some point.
Good shards to pick up here. Pretty happy with either one. You'll get the boomerang.
Not too bad.
With the BKB being completed on the Emmer Spirit right now, do you think Liquid still fights into Aurora off of this timing?
Even though they have Aegis?
They absolutely can if they get good initiations.
It's all about being able to jump one of these core heroes. This is kind of a sick smoke if it lands.
No BKB on Nightfall.
Oh yeah.
And at the same time, the Emmer Spirit also killed the Hood Wank off of that Remnant Placement from earlier.
That was kind of sick as well.
Yeah, they did a nice little, uh, sandwich here in this area, get two pickoffs.
And all this attention, Nisha has to BKB, they have nothing to stop him,
unless he gets surprised by a stun they could do enough damage.
But it doesn't look like they can.
Uh, he doesn't have a teleport.
He's all in.
He's all in. He's going back in, he's gonna get both these kills.
I don't know.
Get out after the puck on the second life.
Okona's gonna chase after him.
With that shadow, he has no detection, he could just walk this off.
And he does have a Lotus still on Nisha, a great healing Lotus.
so he was actually willing to keep that fight going potentially.
Mira just teleported into a moonlight shadow tiny, instantly kills him,
so back-to-back deaths for Mira against sneaky cores.
And now here comes the public enemy number one, the Timbersaw.
And the Liquid are like, alright, we've got enough pick-offs, that's great for us.
We've almost brought this back to an even game.
Sick moves from Liquid.
You should just stiling on him with the surprise rendering on the backside of that map.
Effectively killing three heroes on his own, and then this is the power of Moonlight Shadow
in a game like this.
Because you have so much chainstone potential for any initiator, the threat is insanely
high across the map every time this Moonlight goes off.
Very nice spell for the Tiny to play off of for the other two cores as well.
For the Surge Spirit to get in there and look for some role initiations.
I couldn't make it.
This line of work right now.
Bring this game back to even.
They go for the tiny.
The harpoon's himself away.
Stampede trying to get him out.
Coil is going to delay that retreat a bit.
Can the rest of Aurora get here in time?
The avalanche is going to cover two.
Oh, he got hit by a stealer.
Yeah, the stealer's going to stop the blink away.
They really have a chance to get this.
Keep the damage on him.
Another ice pass lands, and that's
going to be the death of him.
Really well played by Aurora, keeping that damage on him.
WS did lose his courier, though.
Spensive courier.
Had the full axe finish on him.
That would have been a massive pick up.
Also, Liquid is going to lose their wisdom shrine, it seems.
And SWS is going to chase Tofu out of here,
force him to expend his leaps.
Agatom Scepter is done on the Marana, so...
Is this looking like a bit of a rat game?
Boxie finds the opening carry on the bottom lane?
I mean, they are splitting Aurora apart and getting these little pick offs.
I like it.
This is where the Marana can shine.
These types of lineups.
Just guerrilla warfare across the map.
This is another reason I like the hard-on ease because I think this is the what you wanted the game to turn into
And now he's gonna be able to keep up and form to scale really well here
And be able to put some pressure on Aurora in terms of what this like he looks like
I don't like you wanted Centaur involved in all these plays. It would have been too many heroes running around the map
You need some heroes that are gonna farm push waves clear those ancients
It's more a style to yeah there and
And and now it's you know, you're gonna have a triple bkb timing for liquid and timbersaw is not nearly the same kind of thread
He was five minutes ago still insanely far. Yes, no doubt about that. I've seen some of that on the courier
I don't be chairs. He's also insanely high level
Rora also don't have like she's the best initiation against bkb so the puck gets caught for that kill that is
Aurora
They thought it was just casual little pick off in the marauder, but this tiny continues
To ruin Aurora's plans and everywhere he goes. I mean he doesn't need a shadow play
They just keep on finding openings off this moonlight shadow another reason that this timber really needs to pop off because I
Think liquid did a very nice job at countering this first pick off
It's just no way Makoto's gonna have a good time in this game
He's going third item a on this which is effectively first item a on a puck because you're always going blinks which blade
Sure. And then you decide, you know, how am I going to imagine...
You just go in!
Because he feels so insanely pressured by the kill combinations here.
Yeah, you know it's bad when it's not even BKB.
Right. It's good.
So you can not rely on this first repuck to really do anything in this game,
relative to what you're used to.
It's going to have to be the other two cores picking up the slack,
and Liquid can continue to abuse that.
Honestly, their position doesn't look too bad.
No.
And how far in this timber is, I think they've done a decent job
debilitating the other heroes, creating a scary map-state for Aurora, winning the vision battle.
They have a lot of room to work with here.
Definitely looks like they are projected to gain a net worth leap over the next 5 to 10 minutes over the course of...
Yeah, I would say so.
All the split pushing and pick-offs that they're getting, like, carry in the bottom lane here.
Question is, is that enough for them?
Like, is scaling-wise is that gonna work?
tofu arrow off of the shackles hey I'm not gonna lie it actually feels like Aurora is
is a bit lost and they just seem like what do we do about this light chain set up what do we do
about this moonlight shadow all of this is looking too easy click they have to create a threat
somewhere because plays like these are not enough to win you map control you've got a shackle on
Nisha he's gonna pop his BKB he sells the Lotus to work with he's played a dangerous game he did
They did not make a clean escape, but the Moonlight Shadow, the extra bit of HP he has, and they're gonna go for the Simbersaw!
WS is finally gonna die! They have the magic damage! You knew it was coming eventually!
Liquid, they had the pieces together!
Five heroes converge.
All the heroes on top of the Simbersaw to get the kill.
We got the streak. Oxy, 700 gold for that wicked sick.
These supports are insanely far for Liquid.
All this pick-off gold. He has a full PTB.
She's got 60 more hundred in the bank, this Axe Marana's starting to farm the map.
Yeah, there are supports of the ones being picked up, so they have gained nothing over the last 10 minutes.
I think they need to bring the Timberslaw into more of these plays. They need to put the supports behind WS
and try and threaten something on the map right now.
Go for Ace. This is top hero to go for. I mean, the Focus Fire will kill Centaur before it kills the Windranger for sure.
Knifeball's already taken a hefty amount of damage. Liquid are a bit slow.
They don't know where they're going, they can't really punish, so.
The thing is, you see the instant backup, they don't know where the tiny is.
Yeah, yeah.
They might have seen him on the ward, but every time Mikkei is just kind of looming around
the fighter, you don't know where he is, you cannot overextend on these heroes.
Especially when your BKB is on cooldown, it's nightfall.
You see this earlier.
There's a four-staff, or the hoodwink.
Well, hoodwink's getting four-staffed, you know it's a good four-staff game.
or a necessary one let's say. They are slowly getting to utility on the supports
but the damage is done here. Liquid got a lot of this mid game they were looking
for. Their supports can push waves now. The cores can kind of solo threaten these
enemy supports. You can't babysit each other forever here. If you are Aurora you
have to make a decisive move at some point. It has to be through the timber
and he has so much of your advantage and your strength right now already level 20.
Look at look at tofu man. He picked up nimble enchantment and he also took the leap attack speed so
What an avalanche on two nice setup here comes the arrow almost
Tanks carry which would have been the death of inbox. He's still gonna be hunting but inside the pit
He is teleported away meanwhile. Nisha runs down Mira shackleshot does land PKB goes out with a focus fire
That's remnant. He's gonna jump too far away
Maybe Makoto can still get him they kick him away Nisha still alive for now stunned up by the broken coil
Makoto feels like he cannot keep the chase going though, even with a shield thrown and an Aeon disc,
he likely just wouldn't have the damage to finish him off.
Lockdown issues for Aurora right now. Having issues stunning these heroes, particularly in the BKB,
when they have zero control for it, you can always just BKB stamp it away in these fights.
If things are looking a little murky.
Yeah, they- Aurora, all of these fights are just gonna have to like,
jump in, force the BKBs, reset, but then how do you keep that fight going on a
second round, right? They may have very mobile heroes, but look at it as you said,
they have Stampede. Just get completely out of the fight if they don't feel it's
worth. Maybe early hex on the Timbersaw gives you more options in a game like
this. Okay, we're ready to go about it. More damage will also help on Nightfall.
If Nightfall can get to the point where his hook spires just killing you through
You don't need as much reliable lockdown here.
So, the Agatom Scepter initially on the Timbersaw looked really good, right? No nullifier hero.
It's gonna be, you know, pretty decent for the entire game, but it was also, like, he was kind of unkillable at that time anyway.
I agree with you that it feels like they needed better lockdown options, better initiation options, Pocky's dead again.
Rough game for Makoto because Liquid made it that way with their drafts, so.
because Liquid made it that way with their drafts, so not much he could do.
You know, Mira, you don't want to show against this Ember Spirit.
This has been a tournament of Ember Spirits.
Kind of freely being able to chase after squishy supports.
Toss up in the air, Kari.
Gonna be caught by Toku, his yules.
Aero Combo and Mira is still gonna die as they catch up to him
With Mickey liquid are you sweeping across the map? They're gonna force nightfall. Maybe have to use BKB. Yeah, there it goes BKB TP out
It's all retreat keep your chain breaks the harpoon pull back there. Yeah, I get him scepter preventing any damage from being done
This is gonna get this kill, but he's already blinked away
They forced your base here in 30 minutes
And what is the turn around potential?
So many DKBs already online for Liquid, they're so strong in the ball with the high HP pools.
Timber is normally the girl you want in these situations as he can chunk these heroes down
to size, but he cannot just stand on the front line on his own, but Kodo just has no game.
I feel like if you go first item A on disc like he has, there's almost no point in even
doing it because okay let's say you can survive these random games with a you're
not doing any damage you're not threat to anybody in this game yeah it's like
it's scaling with you it's only good if you're like you're in the position to
wrap the game and you're you know killing creep waves they go on you the
and just lets you live and then you keep that going for some sort of hard
carry that's gonna win you the game but that's not the case here right I don't
I don't think so. This is not an Elastic PL type situation.
No, that you had in Gay 1. You're gonna have to win the team fights.
BKB Timber definitely helps here.
Let's you trade BKB durations, keep the Timber on the front line.
Again though, I go back to how do you control heroes if you're Aurora?
What do the initiations look like? How do they start a fight? You can't just go
in and coil somebody. This is not a real threat.
And Moonlight Shadow is making your life very difficult
In this game, as Liquid setting a trap for these power roots.
WS leading that charge.
On the front lines, some self-lotus get rid of the chains, doesn't activate the axe, doesn't pull the trigger on the BKB.
But this is, uh, kinda feel like almost a bluff. I mean, Nightfall is showing in the top lane.
You, if you're Aurora, I don't think you could take the fight without him. He is too essential for damage.
Very precarious moment in this game for Aurora, if they want to try and bring it back, it's
going to have to be some 16-fight execution.
Oh, what an arrow.
It's 9 WS.
Stand off around Roshan.
Oh, Liquid, it feel like they're in no rush.
They've got 900 gold till Nisha has his agonim scepter, but they're going to smoke up anyway.
No lefire for Boxy.
Real.
Big item here.
Wow.
OK, well, I guess there's your nullifier, Bayer.
Wow.
I like it.
Horseback under the A-on.
WS, are they going to go for that?
No, they hit the back line instead.
Go for the puck.
They tried to hit it with the nullifier,
but no Pono did manage to get out.
Nisha, though, is still pretty untouchable in these fights.
He's just hunting down supports.
Got Kari.
Now he's going to catch Mira.
And Nightfall isn't even going to turn and look behind him.
He just heads for the hills, or heads for the gate specifically, just his way around.
Yeah, they should know that, right?
Somebody click on Nightfall.
Oh, he's spotted by the distillery.
He's gonna be, he has to fight his way out.
Hope he gets some sort of kill, and he does.
Nicely played.
He gets in front of Boxy.
That'll be one.
He's got something for his efforts.
I mean, there was, it was either you're dead or you die with honor.
He died with honor.
That's for sure.
And he died quite fast.
You have to just go hex timber and try and play out that.
There's no other way to combat liquids front line with any sort of threat right now.
With that in mind, do you dislike the Parasma being completed for Makoto?
Like, do you think he...
How many... how many sites do we need here?
Dude, they need more than one.
No, he needs damage in this game.
Okay.
This puck has to become a damage threat too.
There's a lot of issues to solve.
And usually that means Liquid should be able to take advantage of it.
This is an Aegis, they can...
They can go high ground with Aegis Banner here.
They can bend this game.
Actually getting the benefits of Aurora's early roast.
For sure.
Backfire pretty hard in this one.
Ha ha ha!
I could...
Dude, Ember Spirit's killing supports!
I don't know, man, it just looks so free for them in every game.
And maybe WS is free as well, change stuns up, didn't manage to get out the BKB Agatom Scepter.
Okay, one of the game.
Yeah, this is not good for Micke.
He might be in a weird position where he loses his ages for this, but I guess no one's there
to punish him.
Nightfall's in the area, but Nightfall doesn't have his BKB, so Nightfall can't commit.
He is so weird in terms of how fat this Timber is and how irrelevant he is.
Yeah, yeah.
I feel like it's a similar playstyle that no way out in Bikodo not get spotted.
I feel like it's a similar playstyle from Game 1, from Liquid which is like this time around they're avoiding what they were doing, just trying to farm up their items actually led them to a win condition where it wasn't possible in Game 1.
They also have a lot more catch and stun capability in this game.
I think this team prefers to play with the ability to threaten heroes on lanes and connect quickly, especially their support duo, to have it in speeds.
Stuns will do that for you, right?
Emberspirit makes the game easy, man.
If you don't know what's going on in the meta, just pick Emberspirit and Stuns will take any two supports behind him, and you're likely going to have some gameplay.
We'll see how Aurora adapts to a similar precarious position that Liquid was in in game 1.
Liquid, 8000 net worth lead, and potential high ground push.
Aurora do have a very farmed win ranger with Daedalus.
They have very poor supports who will continue to die around the map.
You know, at what point do you just stop going out there, you know?
At what point is it not even worth to leave the base?
Nightfall?
With the nightfall?
See ya.
I'm trying to see if there's any talents that are near or something, I don't know, it's
just not looking much better for Aurora in the short term.
I think you're gonna have to find a way to push this ultralake.
He's really surprised at Liquid, don't try to go higher with Sages.
Yeah, this gets popped, nullifier hits, but it's kind of already too late, puck his face
shifted, should be able to- Oh, did not get a chance to blink away!
He's already using Zorb, just on the outside of the coil range here.
Okay, he gets all good and with his saving him in some of these instances it is it is
And he's actually almost made his way to another item he almost has a drink so Makoto's recovery arc has begun
A long road
No doubt in impact, especially with the loss of that 25 towel
This is one of those games where you really needed that debuff piercing dream coil
Alright, so you talked about this, Marana Ags, and it really hits his peak when in level 20, well, Tofu, at 37 minutes as a support, is level 20.
How do you keep building this up from here? Like, he's going to have so much for it for the rest of the game.
I mean, he's keeping, you know, pace with Makoto at this point.
You can either go back for more utility.
Okay, so I'm going to take for Marana, site Wind Waker, even like Glimmer Force is still viable at this point.
this point you can't go octereen and play for the level 25 multi-shot arrows with a
super low cooldown incredibly toxic bill eblade oh it's very dying again yeah I
see now I mean poor guy again there's not much you can do against December spirit
I would probably just go octereen from top of okay yeah just just go over the
span of air there's a couple factors like the arrow span when you get to 25 is
insane lowering the cooldown on your moonlight this huge scheme all right
Sure they'll hang on war three combined with the 25 talent. They have a hex on WS
Doesn't get a chance to make his initiation though timber chain tries to chase does hit the site on a big day
Of course big games the one with the ages so not the best at length stopping the retreat here
This is a problem no fire placed onto the puck
Meanwhile the Emperor spirit jumps away from that focus fire time and time again nightball is forced to try and focus fire
Nisha just to keep him off the back line, but then he just gets away and there goes Makoto 1500 damage ace
It's a stomp on the WS. The rest of team is called the quicks. They said okay. We got the puck
Let's reset here ace with his heart is healing up pretty good WS really can't threaten even the whirling deck
He needs a number of whirling deaths in that entire time the hard to ask is healing centaur up
You always have the gym. I gotta group the pale you out to that's true
Such a broken hero in these positions where you have to tanky frontliners
He just a good expiring three seconds
They could draw this out a little bit
Oh, it's gonna be close
It's gonna be really close, he's trying to pull him away, kick him out
He does hard put down to low bril, he just need one hit power shot
It does hit 60 HP
A sharp shooter shot
Miro
Hits the goal
It's at the opening
A massive pick up with no tiny
Now all hell is broken loose and Aurora are gonna try and grab as many heroes as they possibly can
But there are more multiple threats here besides the tiny he should goes back in kills Mira
Boxie rolling after Kerry as well. They're not gonna deal with the timbersaw
There's gonna dance around him kill all the supporting cast once again curry's dead now
They go back for WS. He blinks away Aurora thought oh, this is our chance. We've killed the tiny liquids running
But it was false yours arrow goes out forced a buyback out of Mira
I think you still have to look for something here if you're Aurora.
Kind of do, right?
You've had very few moments in this game with any sort of advantage.
Tining up the map for this long.
If you just sit in your base, it's going to feel real bad.
WS trying to bait something out for some action.
Please go on me, but Ace, he disregards that.
He goes straight to the back line again.
Mir is going to beat a dive back.
BKB before the Jules goes off.
Ace secures the kill.
Oh, they found the puck again.
Hella fire goes out, he blinks back to safety, WS, timber chained down, they're poking at him, he's got to be careful.
That's an Agatomceptor, it's not a saving grace against an all-fire from Boxy.
And now you've got 60 seconds where it's a 4 vs 5, Tiny's going to be up and can teleport on to the outpost.
That showed you the strength of this liquid lineup.
You lose your tiny...
In a situation where Aurora did kind of outplay them with the expiry of that Aegis,
they got it right on the edge.
Yeah, it was a beautiful timing. Really well played by Aurora to make that happen.
And you still couldn't take the fight?
And you still couldn't take the fight?
Shackles, oh no, the Focus Fire!
Ooh, that almost kills himself on that one!
Hey, he does die!
How did he die there actually towards the end?
Star Storm. Oh, it was Prophet's pendulum. He had already killed himself from his focus fire. No, wait, no, he's low.
He's not safe, right? And then the Prophet's pendulum kicks in and all of a sudden, oh wait.
Whenever I'm sure how someone dies, it's always Prophet's pendulum. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That is not the hero you want to be focus firing if you don't have Satanic.
Well, now you don't want to focus fire anybody. Centaur has Retaliate Aura.
So everybody is going to be a bad focus fire.
Focus fire
It's tough it is real tough in this game I dare say it's impossible
liquid
Start taking away the buildings WS is farming for some sort of height. I mean all the all the farm in the world still top network
Liquid is up
26,000 off of his recent building. They'll all jump ahead of him, but he was still top network
At the end of that fight, and he cannot find an item that is a solution.
I really thought Timber was going to be able to do more of this game.
He's just been neutered.
That did not.
Yeah.
They're doing a very nice job of not over focusing him.
Just killing supports every time.
They just walk past him for like 95% of the game, and then every once in a while.
You know, they're like, okay, throw every stun that Timber saw hundreds of zeros.
Yep.
Taking up heroes, they can just absorb some of his spells and kill Aurora fast enough.
You have a double heart centaur, by the way.
This can't be the build, but it is badass, that is for sure.
Okay.
Isn't it kind of the build against Windranger, though?
Yeah, it's very good this game, I will say.
It's maybe the only time where it is the build.
The regen's insane.
And then he's gonna get yet another reaver with the Overwhelming Blink.
Okay, I'm on board for this.
Yeah.
I mean, it's the Retaliant Argus.
That's true.
So the aura is based on other heroes' strength.
That's very nice. Still good though.
I get him Scepter for carry. I'm surprised he got an item, frankly.
12 deaths. 0, 12, and 8. It's not been a fun time, but it does up the damage.
They have to make something happen before this roche goes liquids way.
It's a level 3 macro pyre.
So, if they could somehow...
Yeah, if Liquid all stand in the macro for 10 seconds.
Yeah, I was gonna say maybe like puck a little 20, oh well that's not even a talent anymore, never mind.
Scythe on the Ember, hold away by the Geo Magnetic Grip, kicked away,
get up the Stomp, oh no they got the Chain Stomp!
Lightfall gone!
No chance that Nightfall here today dies without the BKB being used.
That's the fight. That's probably the game at this point. Liquid gonna try and run down the other two
But even if they don't
That's another lane of barracks. That's gonna be probably be megas
They can go back and do Roshan if they want to be ultra safe about it. Fuck
Don't want to jump to the orb
Did not jump to the orb. Blinks away
Back to the timbersaw. Timbersaw making a run for it. He also gets out
But now you've got 50 seconds with no Windranger.
Go back for Roche.
No, you end the game.
Put that center on the front line.
What are you going to do?
Mickey got his little 25.
He went for his favorite town, the Adelands Cool Down one.
Very good in this game.
Hell yeah, especially if you hooked it there.
there.
All right, let's see if Liquid does end the game here if they go back for Roche, he's
super safe.
Oh, Roche even does anything.
I mean, no one's dying.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Number spirit has 4,000 HP.
What's the thing about this lineup?
They're all so dante-y.
There is no easy target.
In that sense, I think it's a pretty bad winger game.
Yeah, but there was maybe a potential to do his thing, but I don't know what to do with
him.
I don't know what to do with him.
I don't know what to do with him.
I don't know what to do with him.
I don't know what to do with him.
I don't know what to do with him.
I don't know what to do with him.
Yeah, but there was maybe potential to do his thing, but when you're playing against these really tanky lineup center is a bad matchup
Tiny's kind of a bad matchup to be honest like it can go both ways
But it's like you don't run out of damage to kill tiny, but it also kind of takes too long to guess
I mean at the point where you're killing me so you're probably just doing anybody in the game
I think tiny is a better chance of causing you issues
He forces your BKB early to because he either starts the fight from a shadow play position in this or he's avalanche
And then you have to pop BKB or you're just getting changed on 100, zero like we saw in that fight.
Right.
Well the timing creates an issue for you.
And I think that's pretty damn nice.
High ground report, Vera starts it on Ace.
And Ace is going, wait a minute, why am I turning?
I've got 6600 HP.
Stampede goes out to get Tofu away to safety.
They just chumped the Jikiro for Kippori man.
Every fight.
Coil on two.
Oh, the old Scepter stopped at the Timbersaw.
He was just about to get on top of these heroes instead. He's gonna be almost into an arrow and killed
No pie available
Chainsaw around Aurora are gonna call the GG. They will take the loss against liquid at that male
Just lost them top spot in this group B
That was a game they're gonna look back on just ask what the hell happened here
Because I don't think that is how that game progresses clearly from the draft
Maybe liquid understood that game better than all we all did
But I honestly think that is severely outplayed in there.
They turned it up, Misha had a perfect game, 14-0, 18 on this Ember.
Maybe another conclusion is that Ember Spirit is just broken.
I think he's already...
Dude, Ember Spirit looks broken.
I mean, teams are not respecting him, right?
And the thing about this hero is that his biggest weakness is the mid-lane matchup if
he gets cheesed.
If he does not get cheesed, he's always a powerhouse of a hero on the map.
He enables your support through his shut-down enemy supports, it just gives you such huge
advantage.
got this pluck ember trade, that's why I really like that first exchange, like I almost take
liquid in that draft based on the plucked first ember, based on what we've seen in this tournament,
regardless of the other picks, because I think it just sets you up so well, and we saw the damage
inflicted here. Teams need to respect what this hero's doing in terms of the supports on supports,
bringing these duos into the game. He is just decimating backwands. Well, liquid, apparently
they told NICMA Galaxy, don't worry, we'll take a game off of Rarar, and after that game won,
I was starting I was like really are you sure you're gonna be able to do that well they prove
They won't say absolutely the case they do have the power to do so and
Nick McAleksie a believer looking good to get first in their group and help their boys out right big fans of that team
I think there's also a necessary win for liquid just from a morale standpoint
if you got
Two oh yesterday two oh today in the fashion they did or so those games just fell
Really lackluster. I think your hopes to go deep in this tournament to window pretty quickly
You just don't you're not gonna have the confidence going into the next stage here
You win that game you win it in a stylistic fashion as top team. You should outplay him
We can win with any draft to me. That's like a draft independent one
Not that the drafts bad, but it's like we just make good moves. We play fast
We connect that this is what the liquid you want to see right make a involved in these fights
We should have in a perfect game. That's what we want to see from this court
All right. Well
Beautiful game from liquid in game two and we could talk about it with slacks on stage with boxy
Okay, thank you so much Cap. Yes, I am here with Boxxy. Boxxy, you got to feel a little
bad about that game. I mean, your spirit going in, just ignoring Timbersaw, just attacking
the supports. Do you feel any kind of guilt about what you just transpired against Team
Aurora?
My start was so bad this game, but I don't know. I was like happy when I got to farm for
10 minutes. Thank you, my team. That was really nice. And once I had my DKB, I was like,
Okay guys, I'm ready to fight. I'll grab the mic.
Give me, I'll hold the mic.
Okay, go ahead. No, no, no.
There you go. What are you asking?
Okay, okay. Thank you very much.
Ember Spirit, should anyone get this hero again?
I saw you guys gave Makoto one of his favorite heroes
and give him punk just for the Ember,
and the Ember goes absolutely bonkers.
Did you do that trade on purpose?
Is that what you're hoping to do?
I'm not too involved in the draft process,
but I think we were like, okay, we first pick Ember,
and I was like, yeah, Ember is good.
That sounds good, you know.
I guess we also lost to Ember last game. Ember is pretty good.
You guys are very famous for doing kind of decent in the early group stage, then learning lessons and going forward.
Who is really doing that? Is that your guys' experiences in the game? Is that bullets? Who's making that process happen for you guys?
I think everyone just gives their inputs on what they think is good, what is good.
Obviously Blitz and Tofu does the drafting, but they also ask like, you know, it can't be like two people and five people don't give any opinions, that's not a team.
So everyone.
I've heard of teams like that before. There have been teams where they just, I'm gonna take it back to you, where they just ignore people and just get their opinions out of that, you know, pot.
Is that you? Do you ever make suggestions? They say like, shut up Boxing. No, are you highly respected on this team?
I think leadership is kind of about ignoring a lot of suggestions and like making sure
that everyone, like everyone that brings suggestions that the ones that go together work because
I don't have any idea maybe what other people are suggesting.
Alright, Boxie, well you did an absolutely fantastic series.
It's really good to see you again.
I haven't given this opportunity to anybody yet but now that we have seen Liquid back,
any words to the fans watching?
I mean, we've been waiting to see a big success like this in the entirety of the group stage.
Yeah, I mean, thanks for watching and supporting us.
It's still the group stage, you know, we'll be better for the playoffs, so don't lose hope.
I'm feeling it.
I'm feeling it, baby! Alright, David.
Oh, my boy right there! That is it!
Thank you so much, Boxing for an incredible interview, incredible series.
We'll go back to our incredible panel to talk to you all about it.
Thank you very much Slax and of course Boxxy as Team Liquid is the second team to take
a game off of Aurora here on stage just now.
There's a lot to break down at the same time, there is still also a game going on that might
still also have impact on Aurora's future here.
But of course this game, I am just wanting to update you guys that Ember Spirit has a
63% win rate whereas puck has a now 28% win rate and this was an overall first pick puck and
I
Don't know why that's don't like your they don't stats on play stats never lie
Yeah, I mean for a good reason coming into this tournament
I think people did expect embersburg to be highly contested
But it's doing much better than people would kind of also expect
Especially because he buys Sprint as a he shots down quite a lot of these heroes like these
Necrophosies that are super imbalanced, you know that we talked about the healing reduction like the heal strat that a lot of teams are bringing to the
Table and Nisha he was set up for a perfect game
Like I don't think we're gonna ask for any team better than this
We talked about the Nisha being also in his prime again because he looked even in the games that the electric was losing
He still looks like a menace. He still looks like on top of his game
He's ready to carry team liquid and rest the team this time around. They really stepped it up
They did really step it up
I think this was the first time when we saw the power that team like it has to offering this tournament
Yeah, and honestly, I I don't think their drafts was very convincing in a way
I like I don't think they won out of like
I think this was an outplay more than an out drafts or I think you just played better
They click the buttons better like as you know, I think like the plays were faster more impactful like
This was just you liquid showing that we are we're a bunch of really really good players and it doesn't really matter like
The strategy or what happens in the lanes like remember that this was like a reminder of like hey
This this can always happen to you when you play against us
So it kind of keeps you guessing like keeps you wondering what happens if they have a better trust
Let's say, or it's pretty scary.
And what happens if there's Lacoste in the not playoff stage yet?
Because they have to go through the survival stage first.
But what happens when there's best of threes?
Because maybe there, that's an even scarier team liquid.
Yeah, for sure. This is the team.
Let's say this is a BO3.
I would even give a slight edge to the team liquid,
especially if they lose game one, then win game two,
and then they come to the third game.
They would definitely, at least in my opinion,
would have an upper hand because this team knows
knows how to adjust. This was straight up outplay. I mean, if you look at the scoreboard,
there's one guy that stands out the most. That's going to be Nisha with 14-0 and 18.
It's just insane what he could do, but I'm also really glad that the rest of the team
also played around him. And it feels like a lot of the times you see them put a lot of
trust in each other. That's like this team was so successful. Ace, however, varies the
guy to Bill coming out from him with the double heart. You see Windranger just straight up
killing herself with the focus fire, which was funny to watch.
Yeah, we have, of course, selected Nisha as the MVP because this was a Vasa class, it was very enjoyable.
I'm not complaining about seeing so much Ember Spirit and seeing him do well because he is such a fun hero to watch
and a hero that if played at the highest level, everywhere. He's everywhere.
Yeah, and it's a fun hero to watch and it's a really hard hero to play, like very hard to master.
I think what Nisha is able to do on this hero is absolutely incredible.
Like, it's 4-class. I mean, there's a reason for why this guy has been dominating every
single season with Dota with this Ember Spirit. And I think he showcased once again that he
is a menace on the hero. And if the hero is meta, then Liquid is in a good state. You know,
like Nisha Ember is an absolute classic. Like, he really... What a statement, you know,
because they just lost to Ember. He lost to Ember also. Like, I think he had a really rough
lane. And now he kind of showcased that, yeah, you know, I'm not impressed. You're just playing
a broken hero this work and do with it. Yeah we heard SPG say this this morning before the series
even started he is like one of the main questions he had going into this which Nisha is going to
share what because we know he has an incredibly high ceiling but not every game he is able to hit
that. This game though we saw why we have such high expectations of him. Yeah I think even though
they lost a couple of games like this or isn't the greatest for Team Liquid probably expected a
a better result overall, like Nisha in every single game that we've seen him play, he looked
very very stable like he did perform and every single time Nisha does well, the rest of the team
also does extremely well. Yeah they really do and we're not done talking about Nisha yet I think
because I think you know something the show was regarding him. Yeah I mean I think there were moments
of the game that were absolutely amazing, I really want to show the sequence because this is like
To me, this is almost unheard of. The Wizard rune is coming. It's a pretty rough early game for Liquid as you can see.
Nisha has decided to contest the rune by himself. He has an arcane rune, of course.
His team is nowhere to help him because they're making their own play on the Winter Ranger and they get the kill.
At the same time, Nisha gets to kill the Huzwing and now he's not trying to get the wisdom.
Since Ora got the memo that they're not ready to help him, this guy is actually alone. We have Aegis.
They start contesting. Look at Nisha. His team is not there. They just went away.
He's taking the fight 1v2, 1v3 and this is what's amazing about this guy is that he's in the zone.
This takes the highest level of focus. Nobody's talking to him, you can be sure.
He's just full quiet doing his thing on the map, battling it out, versus 3 heroes, gets 2 kills.
He's gonna get rid of the Aegis, get 2 kills, force TPs, get out.
It's like, what else do you need? Do you need coffee?
Like, how can I help you, Team Liquid?
Like, he's just doing so much with so little at this point, you know?
Like, they lost the laning phase, he has no teammate to connect.
This is the kind of over-performance that you expect from a work class there, like Nisha.
And you give that kind of space to the Mikkeis, the Aces, you know, the Tophus of the world.
Well, all of a sudden, you secured yourself a map win.
Yeah, for Team Liquid, of course, this game, very good.
I think it was very needed as well for a boost going into the survival stage,
but they do have to go into the survival stage because they needed this to be a 2-0.
If they wanted to have a shot at the tiebreakers to see if they could force out the first place for themselves in Group B.
They don't do so, but they are, I think, very happy with this result either way.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, this group looked extremely strong.
Like people talked about, you know, being maybe the group D being the group of that because you have one that we have the index
LGD a lot of strong teams, but after seeing how it unfolded
I would say this was the strongest group because enigma galaxy they showed up to their full potential like this is the team that
Maybe not everybody expected to be so back like they're definitely back and they're back in very convincing fashion because of the
the strategy that they've been bringing to the table, the gameplay, and of course the
lovable turns that we kind of like to see back on the top.
Yeah, and I don't know if you guys heard it, but while you were talking, there was also
a cheer happening on my right, because that's where the B stage is.
I've got a great vantage point here where, spoiler alert, I did just see who won the
game between Nygma Galaxy and P-Time, and that was, of course, Nygma Galaxy.
They two out that series and therefore the only one game that they have dropped this
entire group stage as Seb said the biggest surprise of the group stage to be able to
keep consistent at that top level.
The only game that dropped was against Aurora but this is Nick my Galaxy peak time and it's
super impressive and we know they can take games off the best of them.
They just haven't shown us this year that they can do so consistently.
Yeah, but what are the times to do so?
I mean, if this is the timing, it's the only thing that matters.
If you want to peak, if you want to find your form,
this is the best time and the only time of the year to do so.
So I'm just really happy for them.
If you're a Nigma fan, you're probably vibing.
Don't get carried away.
Don't get yourself carried away.
Remember the years of pain and suffering, fingers snap,
and we're back there.
So let's just take it one step at a time.
Winning the group, very nice, very impressive.
One step at a time, please.
They didn't want to play tie-breakers, so you know, they, and maybe it was a tie-breaker.
Fine by me, but one step at a time.
One step at a time, but they do skip that survival stage step.
So congratulations to them. It does mean that we have Group B sorted out without any tie-breakers lacrosse.
Is that a surprise to not have any tie-breakers on this entire day?
Definitely. It looked like the Group B had a lot of chances to have tie-breakers, a lot of limitations as well.
It's it didn't happen again, but let's see what happened in this game. She were all alone
I'm gonna just wait it out because I saw the draft and
It looked dirty and then this is like
Kind of alliance type of the draft back like and longer. That's a lot of push
It's a it's a lot of dirtiness combined together and the Nygma Galaxy
I got to say that they have impressed me the most with the drafts that they did have like you saw quite a lot of healing
They'll bring back the alchemist to bring out some dazzle as well keeper of the light a lot of lichens and
Cooking with the drafts like this is a draft man
Not many other teams are willing to pick and also execute because this type of a draft needs high-level execution
That's one way to shut down a draw ranger when like a 20 minutes in you have like a profit the lichen in the laundry
You know knocking at your base is like what are you gonna do? It's almost illegal. I have to say like I think this is a
You know you want to send the door a police on this because it's too much like too too much too much zoo too
many summons. Not cool. Not cool. Probably something that we might see more often. Because
if it works, come on, you're gonna still pick it. I would also have some final thoughts
on Aurora that we just saw on stage because obviously we can say high prices for Team
Liquid. But Aurora coming second in this group definitely also has to put some respect there.
How come it didn't work out for them this game? Is it just the cost you feel like they
got a little bit figured out in the drafts also with the puck or were there other issues
Maybe it's the bucky shoot, the hero just doesn't feel as strong compared to two, three months ago
where the hero, like, you could straight up first phase it and the hero would dominate the game.
The meta did shift, it shifted like multiple times, but it seems like maybe Team Liquid also overperforming.
Like, they definitely didn't have the better draft, but they had overall better gameplay
and they, like, everything jumped together for them and seems like they were just in the zone
and it didn't feel like that for Aurora in the second game.
I think WS got baited.
Like, he gave an interview and he said,
you know, I went back to C and I'm playing Timber and I'm owning and I come back to Europe and then it doesn't work.
And next thing you know, he's like just winning every game in the group.
So you're like, you know what? I think this is the Timber game and then he lost.
But I think that's it. He's like, well, sorry, my bad guys, you know, I should have learned my lesson.
He probably didn't write it down on his notes.
And now, so I think the draft was like so optimal in a sense.
I mean, it was cool. Like there were cool ideas.
like it made sense why they would pick these heroes but as I said these are
non meta heroes for a reason perhaps so probably something to to go back on and
then reconsider your hero priority but they played really well nonetheless I
think very dominant performance from them in the group stage and a well-deserved
second place yeah and second place means that they go to the survival stage but
not the first day of it but the second day they get to skip one round there
let's take a look at what happened today because we got group A and group B
finished up today. Two series were shown. We have a 2-0 all across the board
actually for day for group A in our first series of the day. And yeah we have
Aurora Liquid with the tie and we have Nigma Galaxy with the 2-0 on the
B-String. We also today LaCosta are first keys crushed. Yeah it's always
devastating like it's a really fun factor that we added and you can
definitely tell that you know some some were enjoying it more especially the
winners are gonna be enjoying it more but also the fact that you can also take
some of the keys like and the three of them I believe so maybe some grudges from
the pub matches and stuff like that maybe in some arch nemesis that you do
have something that you lost in some big tournaments and you're gonna be having
extra eye on those keys yeah we're gonna have an eye on a key that will no
longer be key very soon they all they all crush a little bit different as well
And there's like all these little things as well, but I mean it's a good thing that there's like one of the safety things around there
Because that's a golden your eye. I don't think that's what you want. I didn't look at it
I didn't look at it too painful. It was too recent too painful. It's like million ten years
All right, let's take a look at some group standings then as we are going for group A first
that was the first group to be solved and
And here it is, we got two teams eliminated in Gamer Legion and poor Rangers.
Falcon's top in the group with only dropping that one game.
And we keep bringing up, it was the one game that they were meant to lose in order to rise to the top
because it was the very first game of the tournament without fail.
They dropped that game to BB Team who came second.
We got Runeo's in extreme there also.
And the third, fourth that we will see again in the survival stage as we're going to take a look at Group B,
the one that just got solved just a second ago.
Make my galaxy.
So I know that you never doubted this for a second.
Yes. Yes.
That is that statement is entirely true.
But I have been impressed as soon as I got to see them play here
with their level.
And as Lacoste mentioned, also the drafting, which I think is very innovative.
I mean, compared to what the other teams are doing, I think it's quite disruptive.
And it's it's really paying off.
So, good of them. If they can draft these kind of strategies and execute them the way they are executing them,
I think this team is really a menace.
And especially in a single-a-limb tournament, I think it's very scary to go up against TIGMA for anyone, really.
Even for the most accomplished, dominating teams of the scene.
I mean, P-10 was about to win Game 1 and they were able to claw back and you don't want to give them any opening cost.
No, I mean I covered their series in TI qualifiers and I was like I'm pretty impressed
I don't know if this is some honeymoon phase
I don't know like if things are clicking for them because they definitely were because they looked like I'm like
I've never seen this nickname and then I've seen in the scene like that for a really long time
I got the hopes up every single time I get disappointed
It's just a roller coaster keeps going keeps going
But I think they found stability and that's what really matters for them. Yeah, this roller coaster goes just a little bit higher than the rest
and maybe with a little bit more of a longer one way there at the top.
But that is group A and group B done.
There is one day of group stages left, of course, and tomorrow we can take a look at
what's coming your way because that is when group C and D will be solved.
We will start the day with P-Vision versus Team Spirit.
Now I'll be already spoiling you guys.
That is group C and in group C there is no chance for a tiebreaker.
P-Vision and Team Spirit are basically fighting for who comes out on top of their group with
P-Vision right now in the Lito Spirit, needs to 2-0 them in order to kick them from their first
place. And then the last series of the day, 1-W and Yandex, and it's very simple. We need a clear
winner. If they tie, it's not enough. We need one of these two teams to 2-0, and if they tie,
they will go again instead. I mean, these two matches could be grand finals. This is how
good all of these four teams are right now, it's going to be two bangers, honestly, it's really
hard to predict who's going to come out on top. I think we've seen all these teams kind of dominate
the rest of the competition so far, and it kind of keeps you wondering who's better. I think that's
just the discussion. The 1WU is better than Yandex, now Yandex is better than P-Vision. Tomorrow
all these questions are going to start getting answered, because it is still group stage. I think
they're also at a stage of determination where they could be deciding to hold back a little bit.
I'm not going to fall into the hiding strategy kind of thing, but you could decide to not show
everything you get to show, especially in single-elimpt tournament. I think it makes a lot of
sense. So we'll have to see how they approach this series. Yeah, and it is very important to come
first place though, because then you skip a whole stage and you're instantly top 8. So there's a
lot on the line for those series. Final thoughts for you, Lacoste. Very impressed by Dota that we
have seen, because day one we haven't only seen anything too spicy, day two and three,
I think thanks to Nigma Galaxy and thanks to some other teams as well.
We are seeing new ideas coming in and some teams also talked about in the interviews that,
you know, maybe they, the meta changed like they prepared certain stuff.
So it's going to be again about the teams who can adapt the quickly and like the fastest current meta.
And that's what I'm about to see.
Well, just good Dota and so far been very impressed.
Yeah, it is promising to have some good Dota coming your way tomorrow as well as you already heard from the guys.
Thank you so much for your thoughts, gentlemen.
This was it for today.
We had two great series, and of course,
tomorrow can only be greater with what's on the menu.
If you missed any of today's action, though,
I mean, this was it for us,
but we are not going to leave Ram to hand it.
We'll be back tomorrow, but for now,
here are the SEC recap.
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