EHOME had their second chance at attending the Epicenter Moscow LAN denied, this time by an extremely well-coordinated and determined Newbee.
EHOME was one of the first teams on the direct invites list for Epicenter, but the organizers have decided to replace them with Team Liquid in the Spring Shuffle window. This forced Zhang 'LaNm' Zhicheng’s team to actually put their new roster to work in the Chinese qualifiers for the LAN event.
Four teams were invited to the Chinese regional qualifiers while two more were added from a pre qualifier process. Newbee had a dominant bracket performance, defeating CDEC Gaming, Vici Gaming Reborn and LGD Gaming to reach the grand finals where they faced EHOME today, in what turned out to be quite a one-sided best of five series.
While Newbee looks hot right now with their two new acquisitions, Damien 'kpii' Chok and Hu 'Kaka' Liangzhi, EHOME still seem to need time to adapt some of their players to their new positions. LaNm has transitioned from the support role to the carry one which is no small feat, as he still is the team captain and has to take care of the calls during the game. Daryl Koh 'iceiceice' Pei Xiang, one of the most prominent offlaners in his five years of playing Dota 2, has now accepted the challenge of switching to position four support for EHOME.
Both of them looked a bit overwhelmed today at the Epicenter Chinese grand finals qualifiers, having a really hard time farming their key items quickly enough to make the difference for their team.
Newbee out drafted and outplayed EHOME in all the three games and made the finals look almost too easy. Kaka’s Earth Spirit in the first two games of the series was the MVP without a shadow of a doubt, being on point with early rotations and finding the right initiation angles in every team fight. He managed to shut down EHOME’s big spells and ultimately created a smooth path to victory for his team.
For the third game, EHOME decided to use the first ban on the Earth Spirit, but Newbee surprised their opponents once again with a last pick Broodmother for kpii, after securing the Death Prophet for Zhang 'Mu' Pan for the third time in the series.
Although Newbee had the heavy push line-up, this last game was actually the one that lasted the longest, 53 minutes, but with the same outcome as the previous two.
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Taking this victory Newbee will make the trip to Moscow in May of this year, but they are not yet qualified for the LAN event. Epicenter will pay all the expenses for the four winners of the regional qualifiers (Europe, America, China and SEA ) to attend a GSL group stage on May 9th where they will play each other behind closed doors. The top two teams at the end of the GSL group stage will advance into the LAN playoffs.
