TNC Predator stopped the winning streak of Team Nigma at the WePlay AniMajor with superb comebacks in both of the two-game series.
Ahead of their confrontation with TNC Predator on the second day of the group stage matches, Team Nigma were undefeated at the AniMajor. They climbed to the group stage from the wild card and continued to assert dominance with Amer "Miracle-" Al-Barkawi’s signature Invoker. Up to the match up with TNC, Miracle was 6-0 on Invoker, which forced his adversaries to focus on him in the first game draft.
TNC denied him the opportunity to play pretty much all his most powerful heroes by picking Puck for themselves and banning Invoker, Morphling, Shadow Fiend and even Lina, while they aligned for themselves a perfect mix of initiation tools, team fight control and minus armour.
With Miracle- targeted so hard by TNC, Nigma chose to go with a last pick Beastmaster for him and were net superior during the laning stage given their survivability with Faceless Void, Mars and an Enchantress. They also dominated the mid game stage, but playing on a high tempo with early BKBs on their cores meant that the longer the game was dragging, the better it was for TNC, who kept on repelling Nigma on the high ground. Once the BKBs duration were in the six seconds range, TNC were able to spin the game on its head with their magic damage output from Viper, Puck and a Wraith King Radiance.
Game two was played almost identically, with the only difference that Miracle- was allowed to play his Invoker. However, what looked to be his seventh win on the hero at the AniMajor turned into a disaster in the last minutes of the game, when Nigma went from a 6K gold advantage to a deficit of 13K in the span of five minutes. The turnaround moment was once again registered on the high ground defense with perfectly landed Reverse Polarity by Kim "Gabbi" Villafuerte on his carry Magnus.
Today’s 0-2 loss to TNC is Nigma’s first defeat at the Major, and drops them to the third place in the group stage rankings.
In the meantime, PSG.LGD took the lead courtesy of a 2-0 victory over Team Liquid. Unfortunately for the Team Liquid fans, the AniMajor has just become a battle for survival as their team is currently sitting on the last place in the group with one draw and three losses. The good news, however, is that the group stage is far from over and Team Liquid still have three more series ahead in which they can make one of their special “lower bracket runs” and make a full comeback.
