Scrim Time! Judging new picks

(pictured above: epic rampage-deny kill-steal with a single gyro auto by yours truly)

Last week we ran a couple super fun, high octane scrims against the up-and-coming Echo League NA-B team, Majestic Space Bees, and their star mid player, Dihy. Echo League’s group stage starts this week, and it turns out MSB was assigned to the same group as us, so the below drafts are potentially a preview to our contest in week 4.

We experimented with a number of new picks and set to work evaluating the heroes as potential candidates for future drafts. It’s easy to look at it as it’s-good-we-won or it’s-bad-we-lost, and sometimes that is all the assessment needed (eg. offlane Winter Wyvern), but here are a few considerations that often come up in the chats after our matches:

7.06c Answer Lancer

We’ve been experimenting with Phantom Lancer lately.

Kimahri got some really substantial buffs in the big 7.06 release, which has seen his winrate rise almost three points to a now serviceable 45.7%.

Pinktops from my Echo League stack, Five Potatoes, inexplicably plays this hero very well, and holds it in high regard. So he may not be pleased that I’m disrobing the cat’s pajamas here, but I’ll throw him a bone and offer this caveat: PL is probably not worth drafting outside pretty favorable conditions.

I felt similarly about Viper in 7.05, and now the hero is top tier (somehow buffed again in 7.06c). Just happened to be a good meta for the drake. Maybe in a patch or two PL will shine, but for now I think we’re just seeing great PL games; teams just aren’t drafting much AOE and leave themselves vulnerable to getting marched over.

Let’s take a look at some drafts:

Disburg Disblog Disband

Found this awesome draft blog a few weeks back by one of our favorite RD2Lers from PST-SUN, Danny. It’s pretty fresh and cuts through a lot of the exposition you might find here, gets to the meat of each draft and definitive reasoning behind each pick, whether the selection was a eureka moment or more of a sure, why not.

Here’s the link: https://medium.com/@vieubabiurbehats/

Draft Quickie: Lane Order and Good Stuff

The experimentation continues as our Battle Cup stack Viper Potatoes builds out a draft portfolio. In this unfortunate first round exit we playtested an opener that I’m pretty excited about: Silencer, Viper.

7.06 and Preparing for Echo League S2

Gameplay Update 7.06 has been out for about a week now, so my new stack Five Potatoes (5pot) has been theory-crafting and brainstorming relentlessly for days. At time of writing 7.06b is already out, pulling Sven back to earth and throwing a bone to Broodmom and Wukong, who we’ll still likely avoid.

Preparations for the new season of Echo League have involved trying to leapfrog the 7.06 meta as well as connecting its winners to the hero pools of our new squad. There were a lot of big changes in both the patch and our roster, so I believe it warrants an equal change to how we approach the draft.

Echo League Grand Finals: Tilt or Tilt Trying

Link to the vod: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/140906444

My posse Thanks for Breastsfast played against the juggernauts BRB Buying Abyssal in the Echo League Grand Finals. I won’t talk about the results until after the break; the series is a good watch (albeit long), and the production team does a terrific job. So please enjoy it if you’re interested.

BBA rolled through the group stage and playoffs, entering the grand finals with a convincing 15-2 record (to our 12-3). We seemed to be underdogs from discord chat during hype-week, however the generous pregame panel believed their advantage to be small. Twitch chat strawpoll actually had us as slight favorites.

Coming into the series we’d garnered some recognition for unpredictable drafting, and for the farm speed and play-making of our star offlaner, Verve. BBA had a star of its own, their pos-1 captain, Excasand, who they played around and gave space until the late game was his alone to dictate. Opponents could not navigate the clean execution of their high-tempo four-protect-one dota style. For me the task was clear: get these guys to make some goddam mistakes, get them playing Boobs dota.

Echo League Quarterfinals: We Need Pudge

Last weekend my team Thanks for Breastsfast faced off against the controversial Wards in Base in the Echo League Quarterfinals. A fun series with many different strategies – I think 28 total heroes played over three games. Our big takeaway from the series is that we should tailor our draft plans towards what the enemy team likes to do, rather than brainstorm primarily around what we think would be groovy to play.

Our plan against Wards in Base was essentially to ban split-push counters or preempt them (eg. Silencer to prevent Storm pick), then finish drafts off with some variation of building hitters like Anti Mage, Arc Warden or TA, Morphling. Not much of a theme for this post, but I think the individual drafts are pretty interesting, so let’s break them down:

Echo League Sweet 16: Scenario Scoping

My boys in Thanks for Breastsfast move on to the Echo League quarterfinals after a close 2-0 victory over Nicky Cage Fan Club.

We were MMR underdogs this series, so I wanted to put together a pretty comprehensive strategy. Our draft plan centaured¹ around setting up an offlane Chaos Knight to force grouping and boost the output of a carry Morphling or Anti Mage. We felt that this line transitioned well from our initial bans as well as from NCFC’s anticipated initial bans.

Before I break down the individual drafts I thought that it would be mighty swell to do a little show-and-tell, so here is a link to my draft plan for this match. I’m using a new style that we’re going to formally term as Scenario Scoping to sound cool; it’s really just a scratch pad. It utilizes a stream of consciousness that gets as much hero matchup information into text as possible so that we can look for “rug heroes” that tie a draft together. Then we build around those heroes for our Plan A.

On to the drafts:

RD2L W3: 7.05 and the Nature of Guys

Last week saw the DAG# trying to find its way after a difficult and convincing series, now here in week three I think we’ve sorted out the direction for the team, including a position swap. From here out we’ll do a lot of playtesting and smaller improvements, but the biggest changes should be in effect for week four.

This week’s match Duck and Goose 1 2 3 went up against Can He Even Carry and split the series evenly 1-1. Let’s do some draft rundowns and then talk about the path forward.