Shanghai Major - Day 3 Recap

Preparing for civil war

After the surprising elimination of the last of the Chinese teams yesterday, it has become clear that you cannot base your predictions entirely off of history. 6.86 has really turned the scene on it's head, brought back some great teams such as Alliance, and given fans of Dota a whole new region to cheer for/worry about.

Upper Bracket - Europe Prevails

Up until today the upper bracket of the Shanghai majors was fairly balanced, featuring teams from Europe, SEA and North America. Today that changed with both European teams vanquishing their opponents and claiming the Upper Bracket finals solely for Europe.

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Today started with a bang in the first match between Team Liquid and MVP Phoenix. Liquid's captain Kuroky had a simply brilliant performance on Treant Protector as he refused to let his teammates die, and helped the team accelerate past the Koreans in game 1. The most impressive part about game 1 is perhaps not it’s short duration, but rather how Liquid, almost like EG in TI5, managed to see through the breakout team’s strategy and counter it ruthlessly. We can’t help but notice that both EG at TI5 and Liquid at Shanghai had none other than Sam "BuLba" Sosale as their coach. Game 2 was a much more difficult affair as Liquid once again tried to surprise MVPP with their drafting. Liquid picked Phoenix in the 2nd phase, getting their offlane hero (or so many thought). Instead that hero was reserved for Jerax as a position 4 support, and Liquid last-picked offlane Gyrocopter for Mind_Control, which up until now had been somewhat of a signature hero for Matumbaman. But the strat worked; Matumbaman managed to get the farm he needed on his Ursa, while Mind_Control was not far behind with his gyro. This allowed Liquid to take the series 2-0 and advance to the Winner’s bracket finals.

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After that fairly short affair, it was time to go into the most hyped up match of the day if not the tournament: Team Secret vs Evil Geniuses. While the two teams may not have a lot of history behind them, after Secret shuffle, there's plenty of history between the teams. During Secret's 2015 domination, EG was the team that seemed to lose out the most to Puppey and co., so now every match between the teams has the familiarity of a rivalry. In this series Secret came out of top, in large part to the support play of PieLieDie. PLD plays an extremely unregarded role in Secrets lineup; he really is the space creating support. He can do everything from just running around invis as a Bounty Hunter for 10 minutes looking for the perfect moment to strike, to feeding himself to the entire enemy team on one side of the map so that his team can secure Roshan on the other side. Even though PLD had a stellar performance in all three games Secret played today, he was not once crowned the MVP by the viewers, which is a tragedy in my eyes. PLD may just be the best support we have on the scene today; it’s time to show him some love.

Lower Bracket - Day of the (under)dogs

The lower bracket has now advanced into the third round of play which means that we, from now on, will only see best of 3's here as well. Usually this spells trouble for the lesser known teams as there's a bigger chance for upsets in a best of 1. During the 3rd day of the playoffs in Shanghai we've instead seen the opposite. The "underdogs" in compLexity and Fnatic, if you can even call them underdogs anymore, crushed the “established” teams they faced off against; Alliance and OG.

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In the first lower bracket match compLexity was in dire straights right off the bat, as Alliance managed to win the first game. After the game, though, you could see the confidence oozing out of coL when they left their booth. They had seen something and felt like they could make corrections to outmanoeuvre Alliance, and outmanoeuvre them they did. In game 2 coL allowed Alliance to draft Akke’s Chen, a hero that almost single-handily destroyed them in game 1, but this time they had a plan. Don't ask me how but suddenly they seemed to just... know what was going to happen, almost like ascending to a new level. While Akke was roaming to the midlane, Chessie went to the bottom lane and got himself a kill. When Chen later tried to smoke together with the rest of Alliance, compLexity just knew and backed off with perfect timing. Suddenly Alliance didn't just look beatable, they looked weak! In game three everything was about the magnetic arrows from Zfreek. At first it was just abuse of the OD imprisonment combined with the Mirana max-range arrow, mainly on poor S4 in the mid lane, but as the game progressed Zfreek showed that he didn’t need setup to hit some absolutely sick arrows. Zfreek's Mirana allowed coL to win yet another early game and even though it looked like Alliance was on the verge of coming back, coL walked away with the final GG.

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Fnatic came into the third round of the lower bracket looking for revenge. After losing to EG in the first round of the upper bracket in an almost embarrassing way, they had a warmup game against Newbee in the 2nd round of the lower bracket. But this was it, their time to shine in the spotlight or, once again, fade away before their time. The reigning Major champions OG were in the booth right across them, the team that eliminated them in Frankfurt. Not only that, the players themselves had something to prove to the world after the embarrassing loss to EG, in a match where mainly Mushi and Miduan were picked apart by the Americans. And they took that opportunity. Miduan played a brilliant Invoker in game 1 and simply dominated as OD in game 3, all while buying time for Mushi's farm heavy core selections (Medusa and Spectre) to come online. While there was some hope for OG fans after game 2, Fnatic was not going to let this go and simply demolished OG in their last game, showing absolutely no respect.

Day 4 Preview - Civil War(s)

Tomorrow should prove to be one of the most interesting days of Dota in quite some time. We're now down to the top 6 teams, and as fate would have it not only do we have 2 teams from each region (except China) represented; the first three games tomorrow will be intra-regional affairs. So after tomorrow we will not only know who will be our top 3 teams, we will also know what team can crown themselves the kings of each region.

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In the first matchup of the day Europe takes hold of the scene. We see Team Liquid go up against Team Secret in a battle of former teammates: Kuroky vs. Puppey. The two played together under the old Na`Vi flag and later Kuroky was one of the first players to join the Team Secret that came to dominate the scene during most of 2015. Even though the two may have separated, their fates are still intertwined in many ways. Both teams have shown us some great performances, but have also started to stumble as the major drew close, often giving fans cause for worry. No matter what the outcome of tomorrow's match is, both teams (and captains) have proven at this tournament that they are forces to be reckoned with.

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After Europe settles its internal dispute, we will move on to the 2nd coming of the North American civil war as we have a match between Evil Geniuses and compLexity Gaming. Unlike at TI5, coL have not had the luxury of starting off in the upper bracket of the tournament. With coL, the saying "What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger" cannot be more true. As the bracket stage has progressed it now seems fully possible for the team to live up to the hype Kyle "swindlemelonzz" Freedman created when in the analyst's couch, he declared that NA will come out of this major looking like the strongest region. But the road to the top goes through EG, the most feared team in NA. That doesn't scare coL though, as they have won a game against EG in the group stages. Tomorrow, they’ll be looking for a repeat performance.

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Last, but definitely not least, we'll get to see MVP Phoenix vs. Fnatic. These two teams, together with compLexity, have given us maybe the greatest underdog storylines we've ever seen on the Dota scene. The SEA teams have risen but it's time for one of them to leave the pound. Both teams have performed as never before and with that the entire SEA region has suddenly step out of shadows into the spotlight, showing us their potential. But tomorrow it's time for one of them to go home. Fnatic has seemingly had the easier group, and critics have said they've been lucky in the brackets, but their win over OG definitely brought them legitimacy. On the other side, we see MVP Phoenix, the team who went undefeated for such a long time, before finally falling to Team Liquid with a very weak performance. The only thing we can say for sure is that this match will be intense, and something you don't want to miss.