The European region has only one team left in the WePlay AniMajor playoffs after Alliance’s run was ended in the first lower bracket run by Team Spirit.
The young CIS team is writing its own anime story in the playoffs lower bracket rounds of AniMajor. Coming to this event as CIS second seed team and thus starting the tournament from the group stage, Team Spirit are now in the top eight after a battle for survival against Europe’ seed #1 team, Alliance.
For most of the Team Spirit players, this marks their Major debut, but they don’t look affected by that so far and seem to enjoy their time in the WePlay arena. From the stage entrance, they showed to be in good spirits and not intimidated at all by the fact that they were about to face off against much more experienced opponents.
Alliance
vs
Team Spirit
Team Spirit kicked off the series with plenty of lockdown spells, coming pretty much from all their five heroes, and kept Alliance under control throughout the game. Their superiority on the map even triggered rather big personal mistakes from the Alliance veterans, and that led to team wipes that shouldn’t have happened, giving them even more room to start the series on the right foot.
Nonetheless, Alliance struck back with the Magnus-Winter Wyvern duo that seems to have become the AniMajor playoffs staple. Much like Spirit in game one, Alliance secured for the second game a lot of control spells to mess up with team Spirit’s aggressive stance and the coordination between Linus "Limmp" Blomdin on Leshrac with his team allowed them to press the issue on high ground and end the match early. But, the perfect Alliance coordination went completely out the window in the decider game. They were playing with an Ursa in the frontline, who was supposed to counter Team Spirit’s Troll Warlord. At the same time, both teams were playing around Roshan timers and the game ended up being decided in the pit.
Alliance seemed to feel the pressure more and took a few early fights before having any key items. They lost the early game and tried to outmanoeuvre Spirit with Roshan kills, but as they became more disconnected with each other as the game progressed, Alliance ended up chain feeding even when they had the Aegis on their side. The 25-2 kill score in favour of Team Spirit does reflect the story of the match and, unfortunately for the Alliance fans, it means that their team is now eliminated from the WePlay AniMajor.
Much like Team Aster, who had been eliminated earlier today, Alliance hold at the end of the season 800 Dota Pro Circuit points and although they are currently in the top 10 DPC rankings, their spot at The International 10 via DPC points is not guaranteed just yet. They will need for the WePlay AniMajor to come to an end before knowing if their presence at TI10, which will be held in their home country, is secured or if they have to take the regional closed qualifiers road.
headline image credits: WePlay Holding
