It's day number two for the teams of Group A, featuring Na'Vi, Fnatic, 4FC and ONE. The winner of the first match will determinate who gets to book an early ticket to the live finals.
We head into Day 2 with Na'Vi against Fnatic, the winner of which tops the group and moves on to the quarter finals in Katowice, Poland. The loser will have another chance tomorrow by facing the winner of 4FC and ONE for the second spot. The latter two teams of course fell short in each of their matches yesterday and meet today to face potential elimination.
Na'Vi vs Fnatic: Na'Vi strategizes as Fnatic falters
The Ukrainian team picked up where they left off yesterday, and that is by dominating and outsmarting their opponents. With the laning phase in their hands, finding the occasional gank and smartly stealing Fnatic's jungle stacks, Na'Vi solidified their advantage going into the middle stages of Game 1. A 10,000 gold lead by the 16 minutes mark set the pace for the eventual "gg" merely 10 minutes later.
In Game 2 we saw Na'Vi use brain rather than muscle in order to counter Fnatic's Wisp-Morphling-Tinker combo. By going for very early tower kills helped by Puppey's Enchantress, they ensured Fnatic's map control based line up would not get a foot in the door. With only one outside tower left by the 15 minute mark, Fnatic managed to pull off a complete team wipe, though, evening out the total net worth and putting them back into the game. The outlook was good for Fly's team until occasional pick offs set them back too much to fend off Na'vi's final push, ending the game at around 40 minutes.
4FC vs ONE: ONE pull through in clutch match
Given yesterday's performances of these two teams many would have seen ONE in front. Especially since 4FC had to play with two stand-ins (effectively making it 2FC+2), ONE had the advantage more than once when it came to coordination. The failure to identify ONE's aggressive trilane in Game 1 caused 4FC to give up their own aggressive trilane immediately in order to secure farm for Chrillee's Lifestealer. 4FC handled themselves well from here on out, even though their attempt to steal Roshan and the Aegis ended up in an unfavorable 3-4 trade for them. A kill on Lifestealer on the bottom lane prompted ONE to go full steam towards the Dire base, taking out the Melee Barracks in mid, but losing the following team fight. 4FC fail to draw any advantage, though, and it took ONE just another won team fight to savage the opposing base and force Megacreeps, ending the game at 53 minutes in their favor after being behind for 50 of those.
Game 2 went surprisingly similar. Once again, Naga Siren was given up by ONE, despite causing a fair amount of trouble in the previous game. This time around, however, ONE was off to a way better start, shutting out Chrillee's solo top Bounty Hunter almost entirely, causing him to be 40 CS behind their own Dark Seer just 14 minutes into the game. Just like the last game, 4FC used their Naga Siren to try and snatch away the Roshan so kindly prepared by ONE. While the first attempt was successful, but ended in a hefty loss in the following fight, the second one failed miserably and cost strangby's Anti-Mage his life. GordaNN's Weaver, without a single death but a significant net worth at this point (ending the game at 16/0/5), had no trouble tearing apart 4FC's base and heroes, finishing the game at 41 minutes.
Tomorrow we see Fnatic take on ONE to decide who will join Na'Vi in the quarter-finals of the RaidCall EMS One Fall tournament. The match starts at 8 pm CET.
?GosuWiki: RaidCall EMS One Fall
