Pretty Good Dota Team Season 7 Review

This isn’t the easiest review to write. Our team started the group stage pretty strong, going 1–1 against the team that ended up winning the tournament. We had come off of a strong prior season, but had to drop Naratheen, pick up Epii, and rotate positions in order to stay under the MMR cap. Mid-season we lost Ctrl due to some real-life issues, and had to take a penalty to our MMR budget, and we picked up Zea.

Now, I think Zea was a value, and I don’t think this MMR penalty doomed our team by any means. The real issue, as I see it, was that we had spent half of the season learning how to play Dota together, and had to relearn with a new squad. As good as Zea is at Dota, his style is much different than Ctrl, and it truly changed the dynamic of our team.

5 Zea

I am going to go in reverse order, so that I don’t have to start with myself. Zea joined us mid-season after Ctrl departed. We had other options, some considerably higher in MMR. We chose Zea because he showed a true interest in improving his play, and the potential to achieve that improvement. Zea is humble, easy to get along with, and showed improvement week after week. Despite our poor results on tournament day, I don’t think we made the wrong choice here. It was a pleasure laning with Zea, and having him on the team.

4 Epii

Epii is relatively new to the 4 role, but has an incredible thirst to learn and improve. I played the 4 role last season, and climbed to Divine 3 while doing it. Still, Epii was able to teach me many things about the role. She has a wealth of knowledge, and it’s hard for me to understand why her MMR isn’t closer to mine. If I had to speculate, it may be her struggle to apply this knowledge in the moment. Sometimes it feels like Epii is trying to check all the boxes, but doesn’t always prioritize those boxes correctly.

It seems like I am being overly critical though. Epii is an exceptional Dota player, and has the precise mentality of what I look for in a teammate. She is consistently learning, improving, and sharing that knowledge with the team. I know that she will continue to improve. I hope that I can continue playing Dota with her in the future.

3 Pierce

I know that Pierce is a fantastic Dota player, because he has been on my team for half(?) the seasons of MD2L. There were a few things that needed to happen for us to succeed against some of the extremely impressive teams we faced this season, and unfortunately, none of them did. One of those things was that we needed Pierce to exceed expectations on tournament day, which he has done consistently in the past. Playing on only 2 hours of sleep, Pierce was just not able to play at his best. Our team has relied on Pierce’s PMA to amp up our team, and it just wasn’t there on tournament day.

2 Mad Dog

Mad Dog has the most knowledge, best game sense, and is the highest skilled player on our team. We don’t rely on him to win his lane and carry the game, but we do rely on him to guide our early game so that our pos 1 can come online. Mad Dog consistently plays well; however, carrying such a large amount of our MMR budget, he needed to do more than that. Mad Dog played just fine, and I can’t point to any flaws, but we just needed more than that, and it wasn’t there.

1 TShear (me)

Similar to Mad Dog, I think I played fine this season, but being the 2nd highest MMR on the team, I needed to do better than that for us to win games against the better teams in the league. I had a terrible start in lane game 1 against two players much lower MMR. I needed to win the lane, and I just spectacularly underperformed. Between Pierce, Mad Dog, and me, we needed someone to step it up and play extremely well on tournament day.

Going 0–2 on tournament day is freshest in my mind, so I was probably unfairly critical in this review. We did have some really great games along with the bad ones. We 2–0'd Plupo’s full squad (with Joe standing in for us) one week ahead of the tournament, which gave me a ton of optimism. I believe we had the potential to perform, and we did perform to an extent. Jon’s team just performed better. Their team deserves credit more than my team deserves criticism. I love this team and appreciate each of you. I hope to play more Dota together in the future.