Divisional Dota 2 events have been all the rage throughout 2020. The EPIC League is the most recent example of a two-stage tournament where a team drops down from Division One and takes the Division Two title.
As one of the final teams to be relegated from the upper-division into Division Two, Alliance didn’t have a lot of momentum going for them. But their powerhouse of a roster was more than enough to make up for that as they cleaned up the playoffs and took home the EPIC League Division Two title.
Up until the lower-bracket finals, Alliance faced little to no pressure, sweeping Winstrike team, Spider Pigzs, and the newly formed CIS super-stack Just Error. Gambit Esports gave them fits right before the grand finals, but an incredible closeout game centered around Nikolay “Nikobaby” Nikolov’s 13/4/20 Spectre pushed them past Danial “XSvamp1Re” Alibaev and his crew.
Live to Win, a stack of CIS veterans anchored by Akbar “SoNNeikO” Butaev, were the early Division Two favorites after just missing the cut for a Division One spot, only dropping a single series throughout the entire tournament up until the grand finals.
Against Alliance, they were the clear underdogs. But after dropping a quick first game, LTW fell back on strong meta picks and actually put the tier-one roster’s backs against the wall for the first time in their Division Two run. That was done with a strong usage of heroes like Snapfire, Spectre, and Void Spirit.
LTW had a chance to put the series on ice early in game four, but Alliance dragged an early disadvantage out long enough to turn things around behind another insane Nikobaby Spectre performance. Even paired with Linus “Limmp” Blomdin going 18/2/11 on Mirana for 48,100 damage, LTW still nearly pulled it back in the final few minutes, but it wasn’t quite enough to save the game.
With that win Alliance simply outplayed LTW in nearly every way to close out the series 3-2 after forcing the decisive game five. With Gustav “s4” Magnusson controlling the tempo on Mars along with Nikobaby’s Teoll Warlord, it opened up things for Limmp to crush LTW with his Razor and help his team take home the win.
It might not be the Division One title that the team was gunning for at the start of EPIC League, but s4 and his crew made the best of their relegation, taking home a trophy and $20,000.
