On March 9th 2014, Evil Geniuses were able to break the curse that has been haunting them in LAN finals and take down Cloud9 in a best-of-five series to win the tournament. The match was a thriller, with teams going toe-to-toe right until the last game. It was then than EG used a crazy draft that caught their enemies by surprise and won them the tournament. In this feature, we will look back at EG's draft and try to figure out why it was so successful.
Why Lycan?
Lycan used to be one of the strongest heroes in the game, due to his ability to farm extremely fast inside the jungle, his global damage buff and the crazy damage he can deal to towers. During the 6.70-6.72 era, things went out of hand, and Lycan was almost always a first pick/ban in competitive games. His first nerf came with version 6.72b, but it was still not enough to stop the werewolf. Almost three versions later, Icefrog decided to put a stop to his reign, and made his wolves significantly weaker. In fact, they were so weak, that Lycan was forced to have a very slow start if players attempted to jungle, so the Lycan picks were quite limited. The hero fell out of favor and got replaced by other heroes in push-oriented line-ups.
However, the versions following 6.75 were pretty kind towards the furry warrior. We have seen major boosts to the wolves' armor and magic resistance, as well as Lycan's own stats. The latest version, 6.80, included a huge improvement to the wolves, as it reduced the fade time of their invisibility from 3 to 1.7 seconds, added Invisibility to the third level of the Summon Wolves spell, and also added a massive HP regen buff to the wolves. Since the introduction of 6.80, we witnessed many Lycan picks in competitive DotA2 (the first recorded in January by Speed Gaming), but it probably was Vici Gaming that truly showed how strong the hero was.
Evil Geniuses did not just pick Lycan to push and rat their way to victory. The purpose of their selection was pure aggressiveness, with Lycan giving his teammates the power they needed to run over their opponents even before the end of the first quarter of the game. The natural high damage during Shapeshift, as well as the bonus damage provided to Fear's Weaver were too much for the squishy line-up selected by Cloud9. The situation worsened when Arteezy built a fast Necronomicon 3, turning what seemed to be an obscenely difficult team to fight against into a nightmare.
Why Weaver?
Weaver is a very versatile hero, suitable for the hard carry ole, the middle role and offlane. The role this bug takes determines the presence it is going to have during the early, middle and late stages of the game (unless you feed her). For Evil Geniuses, Weaver served as a bloodthirsty early-mid game chaser as well as their back-up plan in case the game lasted longer than they planned.
Skitskurr (yes, this is Weaver's name) fit perfectly in the Evil Geniuses roster for two reasons:
1) The natural mobility of the hero can only be countered by certain crowd-control based heroes. Cloud9's line-up had two of them, Clockwerk and Lion (with Clockwerk being less reliable due to his skillshots). However, the presence of Lycan forced Cloud9 to spend their crowd-control spells on him, allowing Weaver to go mental on Cloud9's squishies.
2) Despite being quite item dependent, Weaver is pretty terrifying during the early game by getting an experience advantage. This is caused by the 6 second cooldown of Shukuchi, and amount of right-click damage he can deal through Geminate Attack. His damage output is multiplied by Lycan's Howl and Necronomicon Archer aura. With these tools, the only thing Weaver needs is teammates that can hold his targets down. The solution? Three supports with high crowd-control potential.
Why a tri-support middle trilane?
For their strategy to work, EG wanted their squishy enemies to get the least significant advantage possible from their early game farm. This also includes the kills coming out of the rotation of pieliedie and Aui_2000. With Cloud9 having a Shadow Demon and Chen among their ranks, the early assault potential is quite high. A few early kills grabbed by DeMoN's Shadow Fiend and SingSing's Clockwerk would provide such an advantage that it would have been almost impossible for EG to survive the middle game.
To ensure that SingSing does not get fed early, they put Weaver against him. Clockwerk works really well against Weaver as the bug is squishy and mana dependent. However, in a 1v1 scenario it is highly unlikely that a careful Weaver player will fall to Clockwerk, even during level 6.
As for DeMoN, they placed the tri-support trilane, a lane that just cannot be ganked without any consequences as their CC and nuke spells are way too dangerous to face, especially if you have to go high ground to finish-off your enemy. Another important factor for the success of the strategy was the ability of Zai's Sand King to farm a fast Blink Dagger despite dying solo a bit after five minutes into the game. This early Blink Dagger was a crucial addition to the arsenal of EG that helped them win the first fight of the game that helped them snowball to victory.
The first teamfight
As much as intelligence drafting aided EG, the strategy would have been impossible to execute without a few early victories against Cloud9. The most decisive teamfight of the game took place under the Dire's bottom tier-one tower. With EternalEnvy's boys attempting to clear the tier-one towers as fast as possible to create more farming space for their carries, it was now or never for Evil Geniuses as they simply could not afford to let Cloud9 have it their way.
It was Sahiil 'Universe' Arora that initiated for Evil Geniuses, forcing Cloud9 to take him down. With Cloud9 distracted, Zai was able to use his Epicenter-Blink combo and heavily damage DeMoN and SingSing. With EternalEnvy being absent from the fight, the damage was just not enough for Cloud9 and caused them to lose two of their solo heroes and one of their supports. Props must be given to Fear, who managed to slither behind Cloud9 and remained unnoticed, helping him start the fight behind Cloud9's supports, devouring them as they tried to walk away.
With Evil Geniuses getting a major experience boost out of Cloud9's mistake, they regained their lost confidence and snatched the map control right out of the Europeans' hands. The first successful fight lead to the first successful gank, the first successful gank led to the first Roshan, and it just went downhill for Cloud9 after this point. With EG building a massive gold and experience lead, it was very difficult for Cloud9 to bounce back into the game.
This is an opinionated article based on the thoughts and experience of the author.
>> Place GosuBets on Dota 2 matches, win Lockless Luckboxes!
