While the ESL One Stockholm Major 2022 champions OG had a lot of tricks up their sleeve, one of their strong points was their versatility in farm distribution amongst cores.
OG took the Dota 2 world by storm by winning the ESL One Stockholm Major with an extremely young squad. They went down to the lower bracket early in the playoffs, but managed an amazing lower bracket run to take home the trophy.
OG won the EU DPC League, but when it came to playing in front of a crowd, it was a novel experience for some of the team members. For three of the players, it was their first LAN event ever. Sebastian “Ceb” Debs and Tommy “Taiga” Le have been to more than a few LAN events in their careers, but for Artem “Yuragi” Golubiev, Bozhidar “bzm” Bogdanov and Ammar “ATF” Assaf, it was the first time they had been on the big stage with tier 1 teams. Additionally, OG didn’t have their full roster in place, and Ceb was playing as a standin. So the initial misstep was not too big a surprise, but once they found their footing, there was no stopping them.
While OG had the drive to win and the experience of veterans like Ceb and Johan “n0tail” Sundstein, there was (and still is) something that not many other teams can easily do – the ability to effortlessly shift farm priority amongst cores. All three of their cores – who happen to be the young blood of the team – can switch roles as the draft and game require. Here’s a look at the farm distribution (based on GPM) for the top eight teams of the Major.
*Farm distribution calculated based on GPM doesn’t necessarily give the most accurate details, but it is good enough to paint a broad picture.
The figures show that OG’s carry, Yuragi, had the least farm priority amongst all carries in the top eight teams, and yet, they came out on top. The difference is, what Yuragi lost in farm was picked up by either bzm or ATF or both, depending on how the game was going. Here is a look at the farm distribution for OG in the four games of the grand finals of the Stockholm Major.
The graph shows that even though Yuragi is the position 1 player in most games, it isn’t so in all games. In game 3, it was bzm’s Invoker that had the highest farm in the team. There have been times when bzm has played extremely sacrificial roles on heroes like Dragon Knight and let the other two farm.
ATF is a very interesting player, and unlike most offlaners. In game 3, where his farm priority is the lowest of all games, he played the Dragon Knight as an initiator and frontliner, making items like Octarine Core and Force Staff. But in game 4, he stepped it up to rack up the farm on his Mars. In fact, ATF’s standout factor has been playing position 3 heroes in a more attack minded way rather than the typical defensive team fight item build way. In multiple games, ATF played as the position 1 player from the offlane on heroes like Bloodseeker, Razor and Timbersaw.
This ability to switch farm makes it difficult to draft against OG and plan on how to play the game. A lot of teams are used to cookie cutter builds, and OGs cookies are anything but the traditional shapes! It is a bit reminiscent of the old Alliance with Henrik “AdmiralBulldog” Ahnberg and the iteration of Mineski with Daryl Koh “iceiceice” Pei Xiang, when they used to frequently play position 1 from the offlane. Both those teams were quite successful, with Alliance winning The International 2013 (TI3) and Mineski winning the Dota 2 Asia Championships 2018, which was a Major back then.
The new OG roster has shown that they are up to the task when playing against the global elites of Dota 2. They haven’t yet faced the best from China, but hopefully, that will happen soon in the PGL Arlington Major.
With the final DPC season of the year coming up, it will be interesting to see if teams are able to figure out how to draft and play against OG or if they will continue to play mind games and dominate their opponents.
