Tundra Esports secured their first top 3 placement at a LAN tournament in nine months.
It's been a hot minute since we saw Tundra Esports in the finals of a tournament, let alone winning it all. Their last championship title dates from The International 2022 when they claimed the Aegis of Champions in what can be regarded as one of the most dominant TI runs done by a team.
Since the epic victory in Singapore in 2022, Tundra landed a top 3 finish at a LAN tournament only once, at Bali Major 2023, when they still had their TI winning roster. A lot has changed after Bali. Tundra’s lineup is completely different today. None of the TI11 champions are with the organisation anymore. Through the past year, Tundra has undergone several roster changes and for now, they play with Ivan "Pure" Moskalenko coming to the team on a loan agreement with BetBoom Team.
Pure came to Tundra in November last year and played all the qualifiers from the first part of 2024 with the team, securing a spot at three out of four tournaments they competed for. Tundra also received a direct invite to the recently concluded Elite League, but neither that nor DreamLeague Season 22 were successful for them. Quite the opposite, some can say, as the team finished top 8 at Elite League and 9-10th at DreamLeague Season 22.
DreamLeague S22 debuted with quite some drama for Tundra, who went on to replace Ivan "MinD_ContRoL" Ivanov after their first day in the tournament. They swapped between two stand-ins until they got eliminated and faced a lot of backlash from the community.
- Read more: Tundra announce a disciplinary investigation while MinD_ContRoL gives insights into his departure
Pure domination in Birmingham
With all the drama behind them and with Pure taking the captain role, Tundra Esports are now one series away from their first grand finals since The International 2022.
They didn’t have a clean and smooth group stage performance in Birmingham. They won just one series, tying in three and losing 0:2 to Xtreme Gaming. However, the three draw scores were just enough to give Tundra another shot at making it to the playoffs upper bracket via tiebreakers.
Pure outclassed his counterpart carries in the tiebreakers and Tundra won all their tiebreaker matches, including a boost of morale victory over the recent Elite League champions Xtreme Gaming, which Pure singly handled with a deathless carry Meepo show, sending Wang "Ame" Chunyu to the lower bracket.
Tundra Esports vs Team Falcons/New Tundra vs Old Tundra
ESL One Birmingham 2024 playoffs opened with an interesting best-of-three between the current Tundra Esports line-up and three of their TI11 champions, including coach Kurtis "Aui_2000" Ling. Their confrontation featured top notch plays from both sides and a masterclass carry performance from Pure, who is now leading the charts in several categories making a strong case for himself for becoming the tournament MVP.
The series started with Tundra taking game 1, as Pure on Luna managed to have nearly double the networth of Oliver "skiter" Lepko’s Juggernaut. Nonetheless, Falcons pushed the series to a game 3 giving the Dota 2 fans the full experience. While they’ve been doing all the small things right to establish and hold onto their lead in the second game, game 3 was a different story despite both teams running the same trio core in game 2 and game 3.
“The gold difference was too big for us to be able to recover from that,” said Pure in the post game interview for the English stream.
All that Tundra needed to do was to identify the key aspects of game 2 that allowed Falcons to take charge. They changed the support duo, while for the cores everything remained the same, including the itemization.
Tundra stole both supports from Falcons, Disruptor and Hoodwink, and made perfect use of those tools that beat them in the previous game. The difference was made by the initiation, chase and lockdown power between Hoodwink and Disruptor with a rushed Aghnaim’s Scepter that countered Falcons’ BkBs on all three cores.
Besides that, Pure added a Satanic in his item build for game 3, which helped him end the battle with a 12/1/10 kill/death/assistance performance and nearly 32K net worth.
Pure stats at ESL One Birmingham 2024
Pure is not the only Tundra player with incredible stats at ESL One Birmingham so far. His teammates are leading the charts in the other categories as well. Tundra’s mid laner, Topias "Topson" Taavitsainen has the highest hero damage dealt per minute and also the highest value of lane efficiency.
According to spectralstats.gg, Tundra’s support duo has also the highest values when it comes to neutral camps stacked and kill assists. Edgar "9Class" Naltakian is the player who stacked neutral camps the most so far at ESL One Birmingham, while Matthew "Whitemon" Filemon has the highest kill assists value of all players in the tournament.
Looking at their overall stats, is safe to say that Tundra Esports excel at controlling the map, farming patterns and team fight coordination. The question is if anyone will be able to break their patterns and disrupt their gameplay.
Tundra Esports
vs
BetBoom Team
ESL One Birmingham 2024 reached the arena days. Starting today, April 26 the top 8 teams left in the competition move to the Resorts World Arena where they will be playing in front of a live audience.
Courtesy of their victory yesterday in the semifinals, Tundra Esports have a day to prepare for the upper bracket finals. But so do their opponents, none other than the organisation where Pure is coming on loan from, BetBoom Team.
From all the competitors at ESL One Birmingham 2024, BetBoom Team should know the best what to expect from Tundra and how to prepare against Pure. Tundra EsportsvsBetBoom Team should be an extremely interesting series to watch on Saturday, but until then, ESL One Birmingham 2024 resumes today with three lower bracket series scheduled as follows:
Friday, April 26, 2024
- 13:00 CEST - Team Liquid
vs
Heroic - 16:30 CEST - Xtreme Gaming
vs
G2 x iG - 20:00 CEST - Team Falcons vs TBD (winner of Liquid vs Heroic)
ESL One Birmingham 2024 Prize Pool
$1,000,000 Prize Pool and 26,640 EPT Points are spread among the participants as seen below:
- 1st place $300,000/ 6,400 EPT Points
- 2nd place $175,000/ 4,800 EPT Points
- 3rd place $120,000/ 4,000 EPT Points
- 4th place $85,000/ 3,200 EPT Points
- 5th-6th place $57,500/ 2,240 EPT Points
- 7th-8th place $47,500/ 1,040 EPT Points
- 9th-10th place $30,000/ 560 EPT Points
Team Spirit /
Talon Esports - 11th-12th place $25,000/ 280 EPT Points
Gaimin Gladiators/
Shopify Rebellion
headline picture credits: Adam Lakomy | ESL One
