Starting the European qualifiers as a favorite in many people’s eyes, Vega Squadron rise to the expectation and after a shaky run in the group stage, the Russian power horse eliminated in the playoffs the last two remaining Scandinavian teams and they secured a trip for Seattle, if it will be a wild card participation or a direct spot into the main event is still to be determined later today.
4Anchors + Sea Captain, not exactly a favorite on paper surprised many of us by winning their group and making it quite far into this year’s TI5 qualifiers. After losing the winner bracket final with a 1:2 score against Na’Vi, today they had to face yet another CIS team well known for their aggressiveness and determination.
For the first game of the day, Vega showed some respect to 4Anchor’s confortable combo of heroes as Keeper of the Light was the first ban fallowed shortly after by Phantom Lancer. Mirroring perfectly what they did throughout the entire qualifiers, Vega lost entirely the laning phase and the first Roshan fight, allowing 4ASC to get the control of the game. With a debatable item choice on Trixi’s Viper who opted for a Midas over a Mekansm, 4 Anchors started to crumble in team fights losing the entire game after 49 minutes.
Almost the same story goes for the second game, 4ASC having a good start but with a weaker draft that slowly faded towards the mid-late stage of the game they lost in front of more powerful teamfight potential from Vega Squadron. For this second game Solo was the key factor for the win, having a perfect run on his Enigma hero and setting the tone right from the start with successful ganks and constant map presence, thus ending 4 Anchors + Sea Captain The International 5 journey.
The professional gaming organization Vega Squadron is mostly known for their StarCraft II team but in October last year they decide to expand and as a result they created their first DotA 2 team. Without any impressive results in their first year of existence Vega Squadron start to shine once they brought into the team the former captain of team Empire, Andrey "Mag" Chipenko and the famous support Alexei "Solo" Berezin. Benefitting from Mag’s talent and experience they elevated the CIS aggressive style producing chaos in all the tournaments they played pre TI5 qualifiers. The only task now remain to be achieved would be a surprising win in the last best of five grand finals of the day, against the Champions Natus Vincere, to claim the direct spot into this year International.
