Welcome to the International! The first day of games were played today, so without further adue, let’s jump into it
Fun
I didn’t actually see any fun or innovative picks today. There were a ton of extremely fun to watch games and the like, but I don’t have any specifically to talk about right now.
Interesting
1. Drow Ranger part 2
Now that the groups proper have started, Drow Ranger has leapt back on the P/B rates chart. Now sitting at 67.3% P/B rate, it is most certainly not the case that Drow got figured out over the last week, rather that none of the teams in the wildcard played Drow much. Again reinforcing the idea that Drow is only scary when a team knows how to run it, LGD first banned Drow and Io in both their games against OG, while not using the same two bans in any of their games.
2. Mirana
The Priestess of the Moon is proving to be an extremely popular pick at TI. Core Mirana with the Aghs-Blink build kind of fell out of the meta after a couple of brutal games at Manila where it was shown that her damage was rather pitiful against the then in vogue strength core. In particular, she did almost nothing against Huskar cheeses. Compared to then, players seem to be skipping Midas and upgrading their boots, rather than holding on till BoTs. In addition, they seem to be building utility earlier with items such as BKB, Diffusal and Ethereal Blade, rather than trying to build Dagon levels.
Standings
By and large, today’s games were rather close, with many split series. OG look less dominant than I would have expected them to be this early in the tournament. We shall see if they can bounce back to have a better rest of the group stage, but they are looking like a solid upper bracket team more than a dominant title seeker. Fnatic has had an awful start to the series. Losing 0-2 to both DC and EHOME has pretty much killed their hope of an easy run into the upper bracket. I highly doubt that they will be able to take series of Newbee, Secret or TL, and I think they will most probably split their Bo2s with VG.R and MVP. Wings too looks weaker than expected. Wings lost 0-2 to TNC and split their series against EG 1-1. Coming off their win at the Summit, looking this shaky in their first day of games does not bode well for their tournament prospects. If they can make it into the upper bracket, I still think they can do very well, but it’s far from certain that they will make it that far
Doter Dotar 