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Day one at the Manila Major group stage ended with dramatic results in Group B where Team Secret finished last while Digital Chaos managed to bounce back in the decider series against Wings Gaming to secure the upper bracket spot for the main event.
Wings Gaming and Digital Chaos clashed twice today and both times DC came out on top with well rounded drafts and impressive team coordination. Although many hoped for a Team Secret - Digital Chaos face off, that didn’t happen as Puppey’s team got knocked down in the first round by NA’VI and then later out by Wings Gaming.
Despite a very good showing against Secret, Wings seemed a bit unprepared for DC, with an obsessive Meepo ban in all four games played against the NA team that eventually came to haunt them in the decider series.
Game One
Drafting stage for the first game of the series closed with a support Riki pick for Rasmus 'MiSeRy' Filipsen, who was able to provide a lot of map information for his team in order to put them ahead despite losing his life a couple of times at the beginning of the game. Wings were not allowed to safely farm either their jungle Enchantress or the mid lane Dragon Knight and Aliwi 'w33' Omar was leading the charts only ten minutes into the game with an unstoppable kill streak.
However, Li 'iceice' Peng found the resources to finish a very early Blink Dagger which kept Wings’s hope alive for a perfect initiation scenario where they potentially could have turned the the game around. Unfortunately for them that moment never came and without a Gem of Truesight to spot Riki’s aggressive positioning they lost map control entirely and were forced to admit their defeat shortly after the 25 minute mark.
Game Two
The second game of the series was once more lost from the drafting stage for Wings who found themselves playing a pushing oriented line up against a quadruple core stack. A fourth pick Timbersaw from DC created the confusion and Wings responded with an Invoker to match the mid lane. But DC out-drafted the Chinese with a last pick Phantom Lancer for the mid lane and sent Timber in his traditional offlane spot.
Despite having to deal with two great late cores, Gyrocopter and PL, Wings focused their laning phase on shutting down Timbersaw to make sure DC would not snowball through the mid stage of the game, a strategy that worked to some extent. Lycan got his fairly early Necronomicon Book and started to apply pressure on DC’s towers but an accidentally spotted Roshan attempt 24 minutes into the game ended up with three heroes down for Wings and gave DC the much needed gold injection.
Once the BKB came online for Roman'Resolut1on' Fominok’s Gyrocopter the successful pickoffs from Wings were not possible anymore and the Chinese team was pushed back into their own base with every team fight. Although the late game was clearly not favouring them, Wings were able to defend the base with great efforts from Zhou 'bLink' Yang’s Invoker. At the same time DC displayed huge discipline and started to push the high ground only with the Aegis secured on either Gyrocopter or Phantom Lancer. The game finally closed at the 52 minute mark with Digital chaos emerging victorious.
Wings Gaming and Team Secret are the bottom two teams from Group B and will have to give everything in order to survive the do or die best-of-one first round in the main event lower bracket.
Day two at the Manila Major group stage will commence tomorrow, June 4th at 04:00 CEST with group C and D matches.
headline and banner image from DC’s Twitter account
