Team Apotheosis — Season Review
Roster: Simbelmyne (1/3), Madsen © (1/2), Deluxaran (3/4), Elpie (2/4), Dani (5), Omegasaw (Coach)
This is the first team I’ve drafted without a single player at a higher MMR than myself, and there’s the possibility that I might need to take the helm with shotcalling and drafting in the team, which I’m somewhat scaredly excited for.
This, uh, aged poorly. The top 4 prediction aged even worse.
For the first time, a team of mine has failed to get through to playoffs. To be completely honest, I’m pretty bummed about it — we went out on strength of schedule, and the team that we needed to not get a 2–0 got a forfeit win. I don’t feel particularly wronged or cheated by that in and of itself, though; I’m mostly sad that we couldn’t manage to claw our way in since things were looking up (in some ways — but I’ll get into that later) after I did a role swap, and we tied every series since that. The early losses ended up costing us a bit too much, but it is what it is…and what it is, is a pretty weird season, all things considered.
Draft Review
Preparing the draft was pretty rough — as it always seems to be for me in SUN. I was well aware of the fact that I had no chance of getting any particularly high MMR players, but I had come to terms with that pretty early on. Those of you who’ve kept up with my previous season and draft reviews know that I generally aim to get a high impact player with my first pick since I’m an underwhelming core overall. So, my focus then shifted on drafting high-value players in order to establish a really solid tri-core so that I could have stable lanes overall. This, uh, didn’t quite work out, but I’ll get into the eventual role swap in a bit.
I think the only higher MMR option I deemed somewhat realistic in the lead-up to the draft was ElNino, and I would’ve loved to grab him since I’ve been wanting to play with him for a while now, but as I talked to people I realized pretty quickly that he’d also be snatched up before I got to pick. This didn’t matter though, because I had the strat — just first pick Elpie! I stewed on this for a while, and it made a lot of sense. At a laughable 4.3k MMR on sheet, Elpie was still one of the best mid players in the pool that I had a shot at getting, he’s a great guy who I’d been looking at in numerous previous drafts, and to top it all off, that same low sheet MMR would let me plan a second pick in the high 4k to flat/low 5k bracket, which would fit in perfectly with my idea of having a stable, value tri-core. Make no mistake, despite the early exit, if I was put in the same place in the draft ten times over, I’d still pick Elpie all ten times. I think he plays easily anywhere from 500–800 MMR above the 4.3k on the sheet — and him recently getting 5k confirms as much.
After that, I had been looking at a number of options. The idea was to get an offlaner, so I was looking at Muffinsan, Gonzo, Dolemite, and Simbelmyne. I was most keen on picking up Muffinsan, but my pre-draft conversations with Crispy Bacon confirmed that he was intent on picking Muffin up first phase. Either way, once I got to my turn, I was looking at Simb, Polarbear, Dolemite and SwagMander, but having talked to Simbel pre-draft, I was set on grabbing him. In these private convos, he’d told me that offlane wasn’t necessarily his preferred role, but he’d still be okay to play it, and with some annoying heroes on his Dotabuff and a solid 5k MMR, I deemed this the best pick to round out the stable tricore I envisioned.
At this point, a second pick 5k somewhat undid the favorable draft position I put myself into by first picking Elpie, but I was confident that I could get a solid support, which I managed in Dani, who was a part of the draft plans I’d conceived prior. He ended up being another pretty high MMR pickup for my draft position at the time at 3.9k on the sheet, so paired with a nice looking Dotabuff for a 5 I snatched him up.
With Dani in hand, though, my draft position became significantly worse, and I was down to 14th pick in the final round. When my turn came up, I opted for deluxaran, who I’d heard decent things about for his MMR.
The idea, then, was that I would safelane — since I was very convinced that I didn’t want to play anything else this season after multiple mediocre stints in the midlane — with Elpie mid, Simb offlane, Delu playing the 4 and Dani taking up position 5. After some brief discussion, we’d also decided that I would be the drafter and to some extent the shotcaller of the team, with no one else particularly willing to take up the reigns.
To help alleviate my drafting troubles, I asked Omegasaw to coach us — but specifically to help me prepare drafts, and it was great to have him to bounce ideas off of and get some extra insight.
As always, shoutout to some of the players I wanted to pick but couldn’t quite get — Anstar, KTZ, ElNino, Gonzo, Muffinsan, Zakke, Kimer, Oxygen, Laika.
A Short Note on the Role Swap
For additional context before going into the player reviews, I wanted to quickly go over the role swap I called for midway through the groupstage. We played with the setup I described above for about three weeks, and with that setup we lost two series and tied one.
After a loss to Diego’s team, I spent some time reflecting on what we could do to change up the dynamics and help us improve. I felt like there was too much pressure on our lanes to do well, which wasn’t often the case, and that would result in Elpie and myself usually being quite behind and therefore unable to have significant impact — which, obviously, is not the situation you want your cores to be in.
Elpie had expressed that he was playing more 4 than mid before the season, but was willing to commit to a core role for the team and trusted my decision to roll with that at the start. This was a familiar situation, and rang some Thunderdyne-shaped bells, so I looked at the preferences of the rest of the team, and eventually made the call to swap:
- Elpie from 2 to 4;
- Deluxaran from 4 to 3;
- Simb from 3 to 1;
- Myself from 1 to 2.
I’m not gonna lie, I was pretty proud of this decision. Essentially, the new role setup had everyone except myself in their preferred position, and in theory, would solve some of our issues, since Elpie could become more of a playmaker from the 4 role and generally direct the game while I was busy dealing with my lane as a core. Looking back, I think I could’ve put more thought into perhaps having Dani on 4 with Delu on 5, but I decided to stick with this, and I genuinely believe it was a pretty big improvement. Unfortunately, I made this decision a bit too late — which at this point is becoming a trend I guess. On to the player reviews.
Player Reviews
Elpie — Elpie was, for all intents and purposes, the second-in-command in the team. I spent a lot of time bouncing ideas off of him and trying to figure out what we could do to improve the situation. I don’t blame him for being somewhat hesitant when I first approached him with the idea of first picking him (especially now), but he was very quick to accept it and try to figure things out. I regard Elpie pretty highly, since I think he’s much better than his MMR would suggest, but he’s also an incredibly chill guy and someone who I sorta knew before this team, which is always nice. I think I put him under a lot of pressure to perform in both role setups, especially considering that both as a mid and as a 4 I didn’t spend enough time enabling his game and quite often picked his hero early in the draft. I was happy to see him more excited to play once we had him on support, and he put in a series of great performances on Rubick and Mirana. His hero pool for both roles is quite wide, and I regret not making more use of that, especially on 4, since his potential when enabled is massive. He’s always pretty fun to play with, and always offered me a place to vent when I felt bad about games which I massively appreciated — though I hate that I had to take him up on that as often as I did in some ways. The only slight grievances I could possibly mention for Elpie are that he has a weird fucking schedule (but I’m the last person who could possibly complain about that) and in the earlier part of the season always cut it extremely close with coming online for games, which is always a worry for captains, but he had his reasons and it got a lot better eventually. I think he also sometimes struggled to provide specific ideas on how to enable certain heroes of his, but it’s not really necessarily his duty to do so — that’s moreso a grievance that I had being an inexperienced drafter, which, paired with our team’s limited hero pools as a whole, made consistently providing Elpie with a good game pretty difficult. Still, like I said, I’d pick Elpie again in a heartbeat, and he’s an extremely enjoyable person to play with. Seems to have the worst of luck in RD2L, though.
Simbelmyne — I’ll preface this by stating right away that Simb is essentially the only player that I’ve had a direct conflict with within a team I’ve captained (that one SK player that I had to ban not included), but I bear no ill will in hindsight with our season concluded. I think there’s a couple of things that play a part in this, but be mindful that this is only my side and my take on the issue, so you’re not getting the whole story. The underlying element to the drama is, in my opinion, the fact that we fundamentally disagree on some Dota related things, and have vastly different approaches to communication. As such, my draft or play style didn’t necessarily complement Simb, and he might’ve been able to do a lot better on a different team, or perhaps a team that he was at the helm of. My understanding of Dota is heavily influenced by the metagame, and as such I’m not as liable to consider far-out ideas too seriously, which might’ve been a put-off for Simb. I didn’t specifically mind this too much, especially considering he was very clear about being fine playing whatever he’s given and doing his best on those heroes, even if he might disagree, which is super positive and I don’t think that’s a mindset that many players have. What I did mind, though, was what I felt was a pretty regular passive-aggressive and condescending tone — even before the ‘big’ issue that sparked the apex of the conflict. The most memorable instances of this were in communication with his lane partners, and I felt that oftentimes Simb would point out mistakes Delu and later Dani would make, rather than acknowledging them and making a suggestion on what to do instead. Again, this might just be my interpretation, and it’s entirely possible that this wasn’t conscious or malicious. Things boiled over during a game where Simb ignored a call I made, stating eventually that he didn’t hear it, despite explaining why he disagreed with it at the time (though, again, it might’ve just been a miscommunication). This resulted in a long argument about how I drown out people in comms and am too defensive (amongst other things — which very well might be true, but I find it hard to believe that any earnest attempt at addressing an issue includes the line “you seem to be easily agitated by things that are not your own personal style of dota”). Some back and forth later, Simb talked to Elpie as well, and came back offering to leave the team, presumably less dismissive of what I was saying. Make of that what you will, I guess? Either way, that was his call to make, and he decided to stay on — which I’m honestly glad about. Despite the conflict, I still picked Simb, and I fully intend to stick with the people I pick. He still managed to have some standout games, including an early showing on Furion as well as some great Drow games later on. I genuinely don’t think Simb is a bad guy, and I think I could’ve done a great deal more to enable him and his ideas about Dota, considering I didn’t know what to exactly make of his hero pool. I also don’t think my approach to the issue was much more productive than Simb’s, which looking back on it isn’t good, since the onus is on me as the captain to be level-headed and smooth things over. Overall, I’d agree with his final take in our back and forth that “we are very different people with different communication styles”, and it might’ve just been unfortunate that I ended up being the captain to pick him. I’d say Simb should definitely give captaining a shot himself, though, since that might help alleviate some of the issues we had.
Dani — Dani’s your classic 5. He has his favorite heroes, but he was always willing to pick up stuff I particularly liked. I tried to play more around the heroes everyone liked and establish a drafting style with that, though, which meant we got to see some dope Dani Dazzle. He’s a very quiet guy, but he ticks off some of the boxes you really want from your 5 — for the most part, he’d have wards and smokes on hand (though we did sometimes have to wait a tiny bit for the crow to bring out a smoke), and he was generally pretty consistent with his warding. One thing I really appreciated is that we’d be able to get down wards when we had good opportunities, and Dani would be pretty swift in responding to those suggestions, which meant that when we were ahead, we tended to have solid vision that enabled us to keep that advantage. My one big gripe with Dani was that he’d be pretty slow to respond to other calls, though, especially in terms of positioning. His map awareness is somewhat poor, so he’d often get picked off despite calls to fall back — but map awareness is a hard thing to develop and requires significant experience. He’s a chill guy, but very quiet, both in the server and in voice comms, though I appreciated the fact that he’d always contribute in prep and in drafts regarding his own heroes and what he felt good on. Overall, Dani’s a solid support, albeit with occasionally questionable positioning, but I think he has a lot of room to grow and can achieve that pretty easily.
deluxaran — As our lowest MMR player, delu was tasked with some pretty challenging roles as a 4 and eventually an offlaner. His offlane performance was pretty feast or famine — either he’d feed the enemy carry relentlessly, or he’d get a massive advantage in the lane with Elpie, outlaning players thousands of MMR above him (see: his Axe game). There are a couple things I think Delu could and should work on, though, that could help him gain a bunch of MMR. He’s often very slow to respond to calls, and even going full EE ‘dropyerstick’ would still be met with a significant delay on the Ravage or Blink-Call. I think this might mainly be a concentration issue, but it’s understandable considering that voice comms get hectic sometimes and there’s a lot of pressure. His itemization was sometimes quite poor, but I highly appreciate that Delu took my advice early on regarding his items, and after a while, started accepting item suggestions and developed the great habit of asking the team what we thought should be his next item. Delu would also often comment a lot during the draft, usually doubting ideas or picks, which I didn’t really always appreciate since most of the suggestions that followed weren’t extremely viable, likely partly caused by a somewhat shallow hero pool. This occasionally wasted some time, but I really do think that it’s an earnest effort at trying to help out, and I think that sums up Delu quite well overall — he’s an incredibly nice guy and he’s very positive and wholesome, lifting the atmosphere and giving out sage advice.
Madsen — Oof, ouch, self-reflection time. Where do I start? First of all, I think we make playoffs with no issues if I just started with the roles we swapped to. Drafting for the first time was pretty daunting, and I got outdrafted almost every game. I tried to do a lot of prep work and planning for the drafts, but I think I just plainly lack the experience and game knowledge to draft very well. I could — and should — have handled any and all internal issues a lot better as the captain. There’s a massive number of things I could’ve done a lot better, especially as the captain of the team. I think I put my own self under a lot of pressure, trying to draft, shotcall, captain two teams and still try to put in the kind of performance the highest MMR core on the team should. That last bit went kind of okay — overall it ended up being about a 50/50 regarding how many games I did exceedingly well in, and that’s not really a number I’m quite content with. Playing mid was pretty fun, and I got to play some of my favorite heroes (when they weren’t banned, ugh), but I did get outlaned pretty commonly. I tried to make up for that in the midgame, and while I think I did decently at that, I didn’t make the calls we needed to actually take control of games, which resulted in a couple of very avoidable throws. All in all, I did quite poorly as a captain, very badly as a drafter, and okay as a player, and that’s not what I want to be at. All of this combined resulted in my first season not making playoffs as a captain, which is pretty sad, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t learn a lot from this season, and I’m thankful for that. I still managed to have fun, and really do hope that, despite the result and some of the drama, my team did as well.
Coach Omegasaw — Lest we forget! I asked Omegasaw to help me draft since I know he did a lot of preparation with waterfalls in our mini team, and it was a massive help to me, even though I didn’t end up applying all the advice Omega provided me. He helped me find establish a direction to move towards in our drafts, and I’m sure my drafts would’ve managed to be even worse had we not had Omegasaw.
For the moment, that’s all I can think to say. I’m sure there’s some things I wanted to say that escaped me, but that’s neither here nor there. I welcome any of my teammates, as always, to write a review of their own if they want to do so.
Thanks for reading, and thanks to Elpie, Simbelmyne, Dani, Deluxaran, as well as our coach Omegasaw, and our standins, Dazza and Boxer.
