The third day of the main event of the Sina Cup Supernova Dota 2 Open determined who would face Vici Gaming (VG) in the upper bracket and sent home the second casualty of the tournament. Team DK advances to the upper bracket finals after they emerged victorious over Invictus Gaming (iG) in the upper bracket match. Meanwhile, at the lower bracket, CIS defeated CNB and is once again set to face one of China’s top tier teams, LGD.cn. Check out the updated bracket:
Upper Bracket: Team DK versus iG
Day three began with a match between two of China’s juggernauts Team DK and Invictus Gaming (iG). These two teams have faced each other multiple times and are most notably known for their best of seven grand final in the World E-Sports Professional Classic-Association for Chinese Esports (WPC-ACE) League 2013.
This current iG roster, however, is different from the previous iG that DK had faced last year. The team lost Chen ‘Hao’ Zhihao to Team Newbee and moved Jiao ‘Banana’ Wang out of the main squad. They were replaced by Yinqi ‘Luo’ Luo and Wong Hock ‘ChuaN’ Chuan.
Game 1: pushing power and questionable moves
IG decided on a safe lane trilane and sent their Mirana, Shadow Shaman, and Invoker towards bottom against DK’s offensive trilane of Ancient Apparition, Rubick, and Luna. This left Doom against Elder Titan at top and Templar Assassin against Ember Spirit at mid. After Luna killed the Invoker at 0:48, Invoker switched lanes with Elder Titan.
The laning phase was pretty much equal for both teams, as both the experience and the gold graphs showed negligible difference between the teams. However, as the match went on, DK started making questionable movements across the map as well as bad rotations while iG executed well-coordinated ganks and good pick offs. With the pushing power from Shadow Shaman’s Serpent Wards and Invoker’s Forged Spirits, iG took all of DK’s tier one towers just before 16:00.
The Ember Spirit got his farm and levels and became a pain for DK. Aside from being a total nuisance in fights, he was also picking off heroes and clearing creep waves. This was exhibited well at around 22:00 when DK had so much difficulty defending their tier two mid tower because of Ember Spirit kept spamming Slight of Fist along with Elder Titan’s Astral Spirit. Team DK, on the other hand, managed to get a Black King Bar (BKB) on their Luna, but she was still easily brought down.
By the time the game hit 30:00, iG had racked up leads of 3,000 gold and 5,000 experience. With that advantage, iG took DK’s middle tower and barracks at 32:40 and forced out the GGs 2 minutes later.
Sina Cup 3 Day 2: VG dominates LGD.cn, Team Titan first to drop out of tournament
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