picture courtesy of Mars Media
OG and TNC secured their first Dota Pro Circuit points this weekend at MDL Macau.
Hungry for a Minor tile this season, the two teams reached the grand finals and dueled in a best-of-three matchup this morning with OG prevailing 2-0 over TNC.
Game One:
In the first game, TNC focused to avoid the early push shenanigans by banning Shadow Shaman, Shadow Demon and Broodmother while preparing a Terrorblade four protect one sort of strategy for themselves. On the other hand, OG denied TNC some of the strongest early gankers and banned Night Stalker, Nyx Assassin along with Ancient Apparition as they picked an offlane Omniknight for Gustav "s4" Magnusson and let Roman "Resolut1on" Fominok to carry out the game on a mid Morphling. The game action started with a 5 vs 5 fight bottom lane way before the first rune spawn, both teams trying to secure the first bounty rune. It was TNC who scored the first blood, on Tal "Fly" Aizik’s Bane and the Filipino team continued to dominate the laning stage by finding a second kill two minutes into the game on S4, and applying pressure on Johan "N0tail" Sundstein’s safe lane Tiny. But while all the action was happening in the side lanes, Jerax was constantly stacking the jungle while Resolution dominated the mid lane.
N0tail took down the first tier one tower at the 10 minute mark and started to rotate around the map immediately after, setting up the game tempo. With Resolution finding the farm for an 18 minute Linken’s Sphere and 23 minutes Ethereal Blade, OG took the full map control and secured a Roshan at the 30 minute mark, which was the go signal for the high ground assault. TNC were severely underfarmed compared to OG who were close to a 10K gold lead, and couldn’t defend their base.
Game Two:
A game away from losing the MDL Macau Grand Finals, TNC decided to ban out the Morphling but they ended up playing against a powerful Tiny-Shadow Demon duo into an Invoker Sun Strike combo. On top of that, OG prioritized Jesse "JerAx" Vainikka’s Earth Spirit with their first pick to completely annihilated TNC’s laning stage. As expected, JerAx was all over the map from minute one and secured the early advantage for all the OG lanes, while the Tiny-SD Disruption into Avalanche into Sun Strike allowed OG to snowball towards victory.
OG had also the Alacrity buff for Brewmaster Primal Split which made the high ground extremely easy and by the 40 minute mark they forced out the GG call, thus securing their first Dota Pro Circuit points and the MDL Macau trophy.
MDL Macau prize pool and Dota Pro Circuit Points (DPC) distribution:
1st place: $130,000 + 150 DPC - OG
2nd place: $65,000 + 90 DPC - TNC
3rd-4th place: $30,000 + 30 DPC - Na’Vi / Virtus.pro (22.5 DPC - for playing with a stand-in)
5th-9th place: $9,000 - EHOME / LFY / Infamous / LGD Gaming / VGJ.Storm
