First day of Esportal League opened with the group A matches featuring two best of three series: Virtus.Pro vs mYinsanity and Vega Squadron vs Power Rangers.
What theoretically should have been an easy run for VP turned to be exactly the opposite as the Swiss team mYi had an impressive first game. Although VP have made their homework and opened their bans in both games that were played with Meepo, a very used support by the Swiss, they didn’t expect cores like Huskar or Tiny who dragged the match into late game well past 50 minutes.
The meeting between these two teams was defined by frequent five men teamfights in which kills were traded all the time and breaching high ground was not an easy task for VP. At the end of the day the much more experienced Russian squad maneuvered arround mYinsanity's resilience and they emerged victorious with a 2-0 score.
The second game from group A had Vega Squadron facing Power Rangers, two teams that recently met in the grand finals of Mountain Trail Challenge. For their first series in Esportal League, Vega had to play without their captain CemaTheSlayeR but they couldn’t have had a better stand in, as Na’Vi’s new shining star Akbar "SoNNeikO" Butaev, which happens to be also a former PR member, jumped in to help Vega fight his former team.
Going for a different tactic for their starting series, Vega chose to play a very late game strategy, with an extremely defensive line-up that included a heavy healings support duo (Omniknight and Dazzle) to protect their Anti-Mage carry. The turtle DotA was real and for the first game we actually witnessed a 20 minutes continuous farm session with only two kills on the scoreboard.
Mirroring the results from their last week meeting in Mountain Trail Challenge Vega took game one but they lost the second one and they’ve been forced to go for a decisive game three. In the last game of day one PR snatched Anti-Mage for themselves but Vega had a strong set-up to stop him with a roaming Bane. Nightmare into Centaur Warruner’s stomp or Leshrac’s stun made the teamfights go in favour of Vega Squadron who defeated PR in 50 minutes.
In the second day of Esportal League Group B will take over and the two games scheduled for today are Team Empire vs 4Clovers & Lepricon at 17:00 CET and Hellraisers vs 4 Anchors at 20:00 CET. Both games will be covered by Beyond the Summit, on the Esportal dedicated twitch channel.
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