Europe’s last hope in the playoffs stage at the AniMajor, Team Nigma got knocked out of the contention by Evil Geniuses.
WePlay AniMajor represented Team Nigma’s last chance to secure a spot at The International 10 via Dota Pro Circuit points. However, they needed to reach the grand finals for that and unfortunately, after a strong showing in the group stage and a clean start in the lower bracket, they hit a wall when pitted against PSG.LGD and got dropped to the elimination matches where Evil Geniuses were waiting for them.
EG are the first team to have claimed a spot at TI10 on the back of their clean run through both DPC seasons and came into the series versus Nigma with no pressure on their shoulders, thus playing fearless and on a high tempo, forcing their opponents to commit small errors to capitalize on.
Team Nigma
vs
Evil Geniuses
In game one, Team Nigma looked to hit push timings with a Death Prophet, Troll Warlord and Dragon Knight trio core, that was supposed to excel at objective taking Dota, but their game plan was shut down with perfect lane rotations from EG, who offset the tempo and were able to stay on top in the team fights with Tal "Fly" Aizik top notch Witch Doctor casks and ultimates. Given the high team fight control they had, EG were able to protect their carry Medusa and created the perfect frame for Artour "Arteezy" Babaev to snowball out of control.
RTZ’s perfect first game forced Nigma to split their bans in the second game between him and Daryl Koh "iceiceice" Pei Xiang, and while they tried to secure a line-up that would give them a strong early game presence with an Ember Spirit and the late game scenario with Morphling, EG had one objective in mind.
They reverted to Arteezy’s Nature’s Prophet and played extremely fast, preventing Nigma from securing key items on any of their heroes. The series went down 2-0 with Evil Geniuses advancing to top 4 at the WePlay AniMajor.
For Nigma unfortunately, the top 6 finish is far from locking them for TI10 and will now have to join the Europe 14 team line-up in the closed qualifiers for the biggest tournament of the year.
headline image: WePlay Holding
