Clash of titans - Cloud9 vs Empire

The recently top performing Team Empire will go up against Cloud9 in a best of five series tonight. The winner qualifies for the grand final of Dota 2 Champions League, season 2 where Natus Vincere is waiting.

The semi finals of DotA2 Champions League's second season started two days ago, with the familiar match-up between Allliance and Na`Vi. The second semi will be played tonight. If the former is a classic match-up, the incoming match between Empire and Cloud9 can be seen as an encounter between two recently arisen teams. Both teams joined the top tier during the last couple of months, Cloud9 (previously Speed Gaming) did so as they won MLG Columbus and Empire have slowly but surely been getting better and better since the team's roster reformation following The International last year.

Unfortunately, the particular match-up will be slightly crippled by the server advantages swung by the teams as Cloud9 often favour playing matches on USeast due to EternalEnvy and Aui_2000 being located on west coast America. Naturally it would affect Empire as their players are all from Russia and Ukraine who in turn prefer European servers, which would slightly affect the American players of Cloud9.

Disregarding that aspect, it is still a clash of titans. Both teams have been refining their strategies and are seeing much success in the recent patch. Empire seems to have embraced it fully whereas Cloud9 currently are a bit shadowed by the recently re-emerged Evil Geniuses. Empire currently rotate amongst a steady set of heroes, but teams have not yet found out how to counter or ban them out, they seem to have a back-up for everything as of yet. Cloud9 on the other hand are more of an open book, they have been seen with all sorts of strategies and are not afraid to change their roles around.

The previous head-to-head encounters between the two teams favour Empire even if the most recent one was won by Cloud9. When adding that to the current dominating shape of the Russian/Ukrainian mix, most would hold Empire as favourites going into the match, although not by a landslide of any sort. It will be a trial for both teams especially due to them being hungry for major victories and achievements in order for Valve's spotlight to fall upon them when the invites for The International are handed out. It would not be unreasonable of any fan to expect the match to push the full five games, just like the first semi final did.

For further comparision between the teams, check out the official D2CL infograph of the ten players here.

The match between Cloud9 and Empire will take place today at 19:30 CEST. Live broadcasting will be provided on Dailymotion by joinDOTA in English and Aren 'VeRsuta' Zarubyan in Russian.