After Rave falling to Evil Geniuses, they claim another victim in Cloud9 as they get their revenge for yesterday's defeat. EG moves on to the playoffs bracket where they should be facing up with the first team of the other group, namely Team Secret.
Day 3 schedule:
18:30-21:00: EG vs Rave
21:00-23:30: iG vs NoT
00:00-02:30: C9 vs EG
02:30-05:00: LGD vs iG
Game 1
Evil Genius Aui_2000 came up with a very unconventional way to play his Keeper of the Light. Going for the Quelling Blade at level one, he farmed the jungle and he was getting uncontested stacks leading to a 12 minutes Aghanim's Scepter. The Scepter purchase at 12 minutes also shattered the fastest Scepter purchase on Keeper of the Light by a whooping 4 minutes and 30 seconds.
With the Scepter in hand, Evil Geniuses heroes stayed in close vicinity to one another and slowly pushed towers. The heal and damage from the Illuminate was too much for Cloud 9 to handle and although C9 tried very hard to bring the fight to EG (deep wards), EG avoided them like kryptonite.
When Clinkz and Leshrac got a little beefy, EG took fights after fights despite C9's good initiation and they did that mostly by outlasting C9 in the battles. With the heal from Illuminate and Mekansm, the Disruption from the Shadow Demon and mana replenish from the Chakra Magic, it was very hard to even damage the EG line up.
Slowly but surely, EG wiped C9 on a battle near the Roshan pit and immediately pushed middle. After taking down the middle barracks and left unscratched, they moved towards the bottom and took the barracks as well. The white flag came soon from C9 came soon after.
Game 2
The early phase of the second game was a back and forth affair between both these teams. From the get-go, C9 had the upperhand after they executed several succesful ganks on EG's cores off n0tail's Night Stalker. During daytime, EG regained momentum as their heroes were able to spread the map a lot better and they started to pull ahead in terms of farm.
However, EG's downfall was due to their own overextension while C9 was calmly waiting for EG to engage onto them. After baiting Shadow Fiend in several occasion, C9 is firmly in the lead and they hatched their master plan to starve EG out. Deep wards were placed immediately and a Gem was picked up to deward EG's wards on top of Darkness to minimize EG's vision.
C9 slowly and steadily pushed towards the bottom lane but they made several questionable decision that cause them to lose battles after battles. One of the battles was where the Night Stalker, Earthshaker and Nature's Prophet dived a little too deep into the base, allowing themselves to be caught in a Black Hole which resulted in the death rather quickly. In that skirmish, C9 lost three heroes on top of their Aegis and Cheese.
From then onwards, C9 made several attempts to push the bottom lane but it was constantly repeled by Faceless Void one-man Chrono to kill the Gyrocopter before he went high ground.
Zeus finally had enough of the Gyrocopter dying so quickly and decided to buy an Ethereal Blade to make sure he doesn't get burst down before the Chrono ends. The Ethereal Blade's debut at 50 minutes won C9 the fight rather convincingly and they ran off with game two.
Game 3
Cloud9 went for the classic counter-Chen in the Bounty Hunter. A pick more or less invented by n0tail in his Fnatic time, which he transitioned into Cloud9. Chen rotated around though, making the Bounty rather passive and out of place. Meanwhile Bone7 had a hard time bottom, and kept dying to Lina.
EG got a good grip of the game, forcing out rotations and deaths from Cloud9 in the midlane. EternalEnvy died two times in a rapid manner due to some sloppy initiating. The early level 6 by Clockwerk helped setting up the kills mid. If EG was the team seemingly without co-ordination in the second game, C9 was definitely that team in game three. The strategy they went for went awry early on and three of their heroes were weak and useless and at this point.
While the English casters seemed somewhat unexcited after a while of the constant onslaught brought upon the C9 squad, the Russian casters could be heard in the background and their voices were arguable louder. EG was just pummeling on a tired Cloud9 and eventually they won the game.
Headline image from BTS flickr.
