Poor Planet Odd. It’s Epicenter, the biggest Dota 2 LAN of the summer, and all the team wants is a quick pick on Virtus Pro’s support Alexi “Solo” Berezin and his scrumptious, under-farmed and under-leveled Warlock. Think of it as the Dota 2 equivalent of a midnight snack—a little nutritious, but mostly it’s just there. Imagine: You slink into the kitchen, spy this wicked little morsel, reach out to grab the bugger, and then…
Wham! Reverse Polarity to the face, bitch! Also, this happened.
Let’s recount: That’s a four-man Reverse Polarity into a four-man Demonic Offering into a four-man Ghost Ship into a five-man Sonic Wave. All the while, an Empowered Troll Warlord is whaling away on a comatose Planet Odd. Say a prayer for the team, pulverized into space dust by the biggest wombo-combo in recent memory.
It’s hard not to feel a little bad for Planet Odd, the team formerly known as Thunderbirds (and Digital Chaos before that). Thirty minutes into their second game against Virtus Pro, Planet Odd smelled blood. Their lineup was at an especially strong timing—Sven has Black King Bar, Batrider has Eul’s, and Razor’s ultimate is online—and a pickoff would give them the go-ahead to kill Roshan, or maybe even take the high ground, bringing them one step closer to evening the high-stakes series. You can almost forgive their eagerness to chase Solo’s Warlock into the fog of war. Almost.
Pavel “9pasha” Khvastunov’s four-man Reverse Polarity would probably have won Virtus Pro the fight, but it’s the post-RP pile on that elevates this fracas from a one-sided tumble into a conflagration that may claim commentator David “LD” Gorman’s voice too. It’s not even perfect coordination from Virtus Pro—there are some stacked stuns somewhere in that mess‚ but damn if it’s not beautiful anyway.
Planet Odd conceded defeat five minutes later, putting them on the verge of elimination at the Epicenter LAN in Moscow, which continues through next weekend.
