The Greeks from Ad Finem got drawn in the so called “group of death” and haven’t been able to secure an upper bracket seed for the playoffs. Today they got eliminated by Team Empire after a really hard fought best-of-three series.
Day one at the WePlay LAN playoffs has started with a slight delay and has already reached very late hours in the night without all the game series being played. The first two matchups of the day featured the teams from the upper bracket while the evening presented us with lower bracket games where two teams will have to end their journey in Kiev.
First to exit the tournament are Ad Finem after an extremely intense best-of-three where the Greeks had a phenomenal 64 minutes game one. They punished the Russians who drafted a line-up with no disables and started to be extremely aggressive from the minute zero of the game to the end.
However, Ad Finem draft had its downsides, not being able to make an early high ground push because of their four melee cores which allowed Team Empire to still recover during the mid game stage. A few key items on Phantom Lancer, a Gem of Truesight on the Night Stalker and an Orchid for Queen of Pain made things even harder for Ad Finem who were slowly losing the map control and started to get picked off. But a five man wipe at the 40 minute mark re-established their lead and with an Aegis, Cheese on their side they managed to get mid lane barracks from Empire.
The game went all wild when Dimitrios 'ThuG' Plivouris - Ember Spirit decided to buy a Divine Rapier and lost it in Empire’s base during a tremendous defensive effort from the Russians. With the rapier in the hands of Roman 'Ramzes' Kushnarev - Phantom Lancer, Empire were able to counter push and secure the mega creeps but with huge costs. They’ve also lost the Rapier, spent a couple of buybacks and couldn’t take the throne down. Once all the Ad Finem heroes were up again, they marched towards the enemy base and took the victory at the end of a hard fought 64 minutes duel.
For the second game Empire surprised the Greeks with an Alchemist pick for Roman 'Scandal' Sadotenkov. Ad Finem still had an explosive early game, continuously ganking the Alchemist and forcing a lot of rotations from Empire. Eleven kills were drawn across both teams in the first five minutes of the game, Ad Finem being the ones in the lead. The turnaround for Empire came with a perfectly landed Static Storm from their Disruptor in a team fight where the track kills put Scandal on top of the net worth graph. With the Alchemist spreading Aghanim's Scepters to his team in the span of ten minutes, Empire became unstoppable and pushed the series to a decisive game three.
The last game between these two teams was a total different story. Empire were the ones dominating from the start to the end. Their perfect laning phase ended with a team wipe on Ad Finem only nine minutes into the game and the matchup closed at the 20 minute mark with a 26 to 4 final kill score in favor of the Russians.
Team Empire will open tomorrow’s games with another elimination series, this time against Natus Vincere who got knocked down into the lower bracket by MVP Phoenix.
