The last day of the Shanghai Major group stage is halfway over with Evil Geniuses claiming the first upper bracket seed from group D.
Game One:
Starting on the Dire side Evil Geniuses secured a good pushing draft with an Ursa safe lane carry for Artour 'Arteezy' Babaev who spammed the Roshan kills for the entire match. The early game was quiet, EG safely farming their Beastmaster in the woods without getting contested at all while Silent was also free farming in his safe lane.
The first aggressive move made by Virtus.Pro came with the third Roshan spawn when Artsiom 'FNG' Barshack reached a perfect timed Swap and snatched the Aegis from Ursa’s claws and VP manged to team wipe EG in the pit. However, they were not capable to snowball from that point on even though Sven got pretty beefy and his crits were really hurting EG in team fights.
With the fifth Roshan - Aegis plus Cheese that went once again uncontested to Evil Geniuses the blue boys were able to close the hostilities at the 51 minute mark, after a very dominant late game.
Game Two:
For the second game of the series both teams stuck with their game play strategy, VP drafting a heavy team fight oriented line - up with Enigma, Earthshaker, Gyrocopter and Zeus to deliver huge damage output and to control the fights at the same time, while EG pushed out a classic Drow Ranger - Visage combo on top of a Nature’s Prophet first pick.
The laning phase ended fast courtesy of Nature’s Prophet who was already creep skipping at the five minute mark which forced VP to react and rotate a lot of their heroes to defend, including Enigma. Only nine minutes into the game, EG was able to get an extremely fast Roshan kill, placed the aegis on Arteezy’s Drow and kept being extremely aggressive. With the second Roshan kill they forced the issue on high ground but Alexander 'DkPhobos' Kucheria found a very good Fissure - Echo Slam initiation and VP managed to kill both Drow and Brewmaster and repelled EG’s push.
Ten minutes later when roshan was up again, Virtus.Pro did not allow EG to get yet another easy Aegis and managed to eliminate three key heroes for EG. Nevertheless, EG used all the three buybacks, marched to VP ‘s base knowing that all the ultimates are on cooldown and left VP with only one ranged barracks away from mega creeps but lost four of their heroes in the process.
From there on, the last minutes of the game became extremely tense; EG was with the buyback option still on CD and only Drow was up, which allowed Virtus.Pro to try a crazy all in push through mid lane. But they couldn’t quite achieve the objective as Sergey 'G' Bragin had to come back and solo defend his tier four towers against Drow and the Brewmaster. Few moments later, when the entire EG was up again, the TI 5 champions sealed the deal, finishing their group stage run on the first place. VirtusPro has a last chance at an upper bracket start in the main event by taking the victory in the decider series versus Team Liquid.
