General DiscussionMirana + Pudge humilating LGD china

Dondi best player NA

OPPA
The hook. The hook. Arrow! ohhhhh!!

troll draft ?

game right after navi/lgd retarded russian picks pudge mid gets raped
5min gg

next game again pudge trash picke with 1+k wins gg in 7minutes
fuckin dendi i hope he dies in rl

actually Natus Vincere wins almost every time when Dendi gets his hands on Pudge and it's not a troll draft, people don't know how underrated Pudge is when Dendi is playing it

Honestly, It wasn't all dendi. Mirana did most of the work to bait out the escapes from their heros, such as Sand king and puck. Sure dendi had to LAND the hooks, but that's pretty much all he had to do.

was the mirana ancients that made it a troll draft.

credit goes to whole navi, everyone played exceptional (xboct taking towers, funn1k hitting arrows, kuro+puppey pushing and owning too)

I seem to remember Dendi's Pudge destroying a team at the last International as well, so much so it was banned in their next couple of matches, or at least a few times after anyway.

It's such a cool thing to be able to force your enemies to even consider having to ban Pudge, opens up all sorts of other heroes and strats. Clever stuff from Na'Vi.

funn1k did that multiple towers on ancients with mirana and windruner

Navi understands how to make pudge work at a pro level. Other teams just don't, and don't have the balls to practice it enough to try to figure it out.

Every hero can be put into some kind of lineup that functions well enough to beat top pro teams if you have a top pro team playing the strategy...practiced on it...etc. And every strategy will eventually have counter strategies that beat it as well...but such things take time to figure out.

I'm sure LGD has spent absolutely no time practicing or even thinking about how to beat Mirrana+ Pudge and this is what it looks like when you run a "pocket strat" and do it well. Maybe the 3rd or 4th time they do this someone will have figured out how to beat it...maybe it would take more like 10 times. Its high risk because you don't know when the fun times will end and the next game it won't work.

Most teams like to use strategies that have been tried many times by many teams and are simply hard to counter. This carries a low risk that someone will play a lineup that you just can't defeat. Navi is not "trolling' they are just playing a higher risk strategy. They clearly had thought this particular draft out and practiced it for TI3. It's not just the core, but the ward spots and the item progression...Xboct antimage being aggressive early to force everyone out of his lane so he could split push with no items and no protection. LGD had no resources to stop AM at all because they were entirely focused on not dieing to Pudge+Mirrana.

Navi and Liquid both have extremely powerful SWM solo mid based strats they have 100% win using and have just shelved for over a month...but at some point I would expect to see those in the next few days when the draft looks good for them. Several teams have been working on Ursa-wisp strats...but wisp has been banned to much to use them often. Several teams had plans to use Bloodseekers...but they are not working out well. We have not seen even one Brewmaster or NS pick yet but those heroes are still as excellent as they were at TI2.

There are huge number of things that could work that are not being done just because teams have not prepared for them.

the wall

has arrived