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When Evil Geniuses are feeling themselves, there aren’t many Dota 2 teams that can stop them. That’s exactly what led to them defeating Invictus Gaming today and moving into the top four at the DreamLeague Season 13 Major.
It came down to a clash of Abed Yusop against IG’s frontline of Jin “flyfly”‘ Zhiyi and Zhou “Emo” Yi. But the aggressiveness of Abed and the support from his team ended up being too much for the Chinese team.
Game one was the perfect example of EG’s aggressive style working out in their favor. Roman “RAMZES666” Kushnarev went wild early on Timbersaw and Abed’s Outworld Devourer crushed the competition. The confidence was there early and EG built a lead that IG were barely able to cut into.
Emo’s Storm Spirit didn’t get to do anything and flyfly’s Slark was the main focus of EG’s offensives, meaning it was taken out before it got anything going for it. By the time EG were ready to approach the high ground, there was nothing the Chinese team could do but watch Abed seal the first game.
With EG rolling, IG had to get creative in working around their next draft, which ended up with the squad picking a strong Arc Warden and a surprising Clinkz with the last two picks of their draft. That took the commentators and EG by surprise since the lineup IG had was going to require a lot of map control to work, which was also something they failed to secure in game one.
But Emo and flyfly made it work and crushed EG, starting with RAMZES666’s Abaddon and Andreas “Cr1t-” Nielsen’s Doom, which were supposed to hold up the team until Artour “Arteezy” Babaev was ready to jump in with a fully farmed Anti-Mage. IG faced little resistance and had complete control of the game until Arteezy showed up out of the jungle and helped his team turn things around and teamwipe the Chinese squad, pulling off an 11,000 gold swing and bringing the game back slightly.
But that one play wasn’t enough to change the course of the match. IG quickly rebounded and removed Arteezy from the equation to even up the series on some clutch late plays from Hu “Kaka” Liangzhi’s Rubick.
EG went back to the basics in game three, drafting a Doom-Lifestealer early core and then pairing it with Chen and handing Abed a dangerous Storm Spirit. But IG got a free Monkey King that the NA team didn’t ban along with their own Anti-Mage and things looked bad for them because of it.
The first 14 minutes were fairly even with EG holding a slight lead thanks to the absence of flyfly’s AM due to him farming up, but IG had to think fast about their approach once Abed started getting hot early. By 20 minutes, EG started racking up the kills and took the middle racks thanks to the sustain Arteezy and Tal “Fly” Aizik brought to the table.
Thiay “JT-” Jun Wen tried to get something going for his team while flyfly was preparing for the jump, but he couldn’t do enough damage on his own to stop EG. After nearly seven minutes of EG securing picks and wasting IG’s buybacks, the two sides clashed, leading to EG wiping the entire enemy team even with flyfly in the mix.
That fight provided EG with every opportunity to position themselves on the map, which led to another fight once IG respawned and saw EG wre going for the Roshan. But EG secured an Aegis for Abed and crushed another teamfight, only losing their Doom and leaving just flyfly alive for IG.
Winning that second fight and having an Aegis prompted EG to push the high ground again and clean up the game from there. Without room to operate, IG were helpless to stop the assault while Abed dove the backlines and left most of their team dead without buybacks.
EG will now face the winner of Alliance and Team Liquid after moving into the top four of the Dream League Major. Whoever survives that series will advance to the lower bracket finals to play the loser of Team Secret and Vici Gaming.
