Team washed up boomers — Season Review
Roster: Madsen (1), eXceL (2), Haraway © (3), Schuffi (4), Dazza (5), Snow (Kinda)
In all honesty, I was somewhat reluctant to write this review, partially because this whole apocalypse thing stops my usual routine of writing stuff at a random cozy cafe, partially because the season was a bit of a rollercoaster and I was sure I’d forget things I wanted to include. Shoutout to my past self who thought “Oh, this is a thing I want to mention in the season review. Should I write it down somewhere? Nah, I’ll remember this I’m sure.”
Only thing I remember is that exact thought process. Whoops.
Similarly to my season 5 review, I’ll mention a couple general team things and save some other bits for my own review.
Not going to lie, this was a pretty weird team. I got dragged into a haraway stack (I make it sound a lot more negative than it really is, but I’ll get into that in a second), which is pretty okay as far as this mini goes, considering some of the other teams I could’ve ended up on, especially considering that haraway let me essentially pick our last player (since he was obviously going to go Schuffi+Snow after drafting me). I was the first pick, and the first DM I sent him was:
I don’t remember if, at this point, I just forgot he had his boys in the pool or if I was trying to steer away from that, but given that he told me to just pick a mid player since Schuffi and Snow would be super cheap, I told him to grab Excel since he’s the best mid player in that bunch — I believe the plan was Zasa, but I was unconvinced that he’d be able to shake off rust fast enough, and knew from prior experience that Excel is very good, has an annoying hero pool and is very chill.
Now, as far as me being unhappy with the team I was drafted into, that was somewhat true, but there’s a bit more to that. I was a bit concerned about the core of the team, ie haraway+schuffi+Snow+myself, being very, uh, rusty, but more than that, I think I was mostly just expecting to go through to div 3, since the pool of core players — and specifically, better core players than myself, was massive. I guess in hindsight I just would’ve appreciated a DM beforehand or something. This is more or less an identical situation to season 5, where I also ended up seeming displeased with the team itself moreso than just feeling like I’d be out of my depth (which, despite being finalists, I still sometimes felt like).
Our team comms were, uh…notable. I think haraway gave a pretty fair and succinct description of that so I won’t dwell too much on it, but it was an interesting dynamic that I hadn’t really encountered before, since it’s kind of the opposite of the issue you’d normally get with people not talking enough. In the end I think we suffered most from not having a dedicated shotcaller — not due to lack of options, but moreso due to having too many. Between Excel and mine’s tendencies to become more vocal if we’re having a good game, Haraway generally being used to playing tempo setting heroes and calling the shots as a result, Schuffi playing active rotating heroes which oftentimes were how we start fights, and Dazza’s propensity to call for smokes or for general map movement, we ended up having a lot of clutter, which wasn’t helped by somewhat common idle chatter (a lot of which I was admittedly personally responsible for).
On a final note before I move over to individual players, I will say again that this season was definitely a bit of a rollercoaster. There was a point at which we played an awful scrim, and I swear that just carried over into our next official which went just as badly. Thankfully, around this point, Schuffi just yelled at us and we sort of reset and refocused and went on a 6–0 run from there going into finals. Pretty dank. Anyway, I’ll skip myself at the start of the player reviews since I use my own section to blog more often than not so I’ll save that wall of text for the end.
2 | Excel
I’d already played with Excel in Franchise, and was generally a fan, since his hero pool was always very disruptive when I’d played against him. He’s also super competitive but able to have a laugh, which is kind of my ideal teammate.
Excel is a very aggressive player, both in lane and as the game develops. He’s also not the strongest of laners in terms of the mid 1v1, but he’s probably better than most at catching up and salvaging losing games — I’d consider Excel more of a general ‘core’ player than a mid player specifically, since he prefers safelane (or at least used to; he told me that in the same conversation as he told me he’s a “4 player at heart”, so who knows!). His farming patterns are super solid, and he spots these tiny openings to make plays that go right over my head. He’s not always the best at vocalizing these plays, but I can’t blame him since those are always such an intuitive and reactionary thing in a game of Dota.
Excel also has a somewhat unique approach to the game, and stresses some aspects of the game that not many others do — he’s acutely aware of neutral item drop timings, he’s got a great understanding of how the heroes he’s great at exist on the map in a given game and he’s always super willing to pick up new heroes for the team (and does so frighteningly fast), which is very nice since after your first two weeks on a team with him, playing games in which he soaks up anywhere from 3–5 bans, you’ll likely need to ask him to pick up one of the more traditional mids which he doesn’t play as much.
Very lovely guy who doesn’t afraid of anything, really.
3 | Haraway
If you’ve ever played with haraway, you’ll know the classic harawayclap_NICE.mp3. It does a pretty good job of summing up the guy. You’ll have a lot of fun when things are going well, except for the bit where he’ll pierce and eardrum or two. All is forgiven though, because usually when someone adds a “when things are going well” qualifier, it’s going to go downhill fast — not with haraway, though. He’s a very mentally resilient person, and on my list of superpowers I’d like to borrow, his inability to ever go emo in a game of Dota ranks pretty high.
As with myself, I think, Haraway struggled to maintain consistency after coming back from a break, but unlike myself, when he was doing well, it was kind of impossible to play against him. He’d randomly pop the fuck off on a Timber or Dazzle or SK and the game would be over from there. I’ll be honest with saying that I was sometimes annoyed at his decision to go for a less ideal but more comfortable pick over a hero that might fit better in drafts, but looking back it worked out more often than not, so I can’t blame him.
Past a certain point, Haraway and my views on Dota diverge a bit, which might’ve added to the, uh, chaotic-good energy at play in the Discord. I think he sort of hit the nail on the head with saying we just didn’t really gel as a team in terms of Dota itself. Still, he’s a great captain who’s very committed to his teams — and, I mean, when’s the last time you saw a Haraway team do badly?
4 | Schuffi
I think it’d be fair to say that Schuffi was the player, if any on our team, who would make the standout plays. He’s a very aggressive player who sometimes seemed to have an eagle-eye perspective of the fights we’d enter — see the Rosh Terrorize in the best-of channel.
As with everyone on our team really, Schuffi is a very vocal person, but what sets him apart from the rest of us is his willingness to be the ‘bad guy’ and actually call people out on their shit, which more often than not helped us reset and refocus, which is something I’d attribute a lot of our run to the finals to. I feel like he comes into lanes with a gameplan, and when it works, it’s top tier, but when it doesn’t, I feel he might sometimes have issues readjusting to the shift in lane dynamics that come as a result.
Still, more often than not, his play would be the catalyst that makes sure we don’t sit on our laurels and actually take fights. Sometimes these fights were great, sometimes they were less than ideal, but I think the general idea was mostly correct. Much like with Haraway, I think Schuffi and myself have somewhat differing views on Dota, and I’m not good enough to really adjust to being on the same wavelength as him and Haraway — which makes sense, they’ve played a lot together and were able to get to know each other’s play.
Schuffi’s always super bubbly and fun and as a result is generally a great teammate to have, both in terms of playing together and just to chat with. Don’t let anyone know but he’s probably better on Rubick than he is on even Willow.
5 | Dazza
I think it took about 4 seconds between the time I found out we’d need to look for an FA for Snow and the time I slid into Dazza’s DMs to check if he’s around. Dazza’s a mid 5k player stuck on a mid 4k player’s account. This isn’t me jerking him off because I like him, I genuinely believe that this is 100% true. He’s easily one of the best sub-6k support players in the community, probably like, top 3. Don’t catch me complaining about this massive sandbag, though, because that let us snatch him up with 0 complaints from admins.
Dazza would do a massive, detailed scouting writeup for every single team we’d play, re-do parts of it for team’s we were playing a second time, gave us a list of heroes to expect, suggestions for bans, gameplans to deal with whatever anyone could throw at us.
I think I legitimately cannot overstate how valuable Dazza is to have on a team, and I think I’m gonna leave it at that. Excellent player, excellent teammate, massive part of why we got as far as we did. Sorry about G1 of finals.
? | Snow
Our first games with Snow were pretty rough. I went a bit emo and then felt really bad when Snow had to leave because we didn’t get a chance to play a good game together — vindication came relatively soon after, when he stood in for Dazza and we won a 2–1 with Snow’s Wyvern. My reservations about his play (considering he hadn’t played Dota in about half a year) vanished pretty quickly after that series, because he definitely showed many glimpses of the high 5k peak. I think, had we not gotten Dazza, there would’ve been a 0% chance we’d find anyone as good as Snow at his signup MMR, which was something silly like 4.7k.
1 | Madsen
Alright, uh, by the time I got here I’ve sort of said a lot of what I wanted to say and have forgotten the rest. I played ok in the games we would’ve won anyway, was pretty dogshit in most of the rest. Pretty unfortunate. I think, looking back, one of the things I can notice about all events I’ve actually won is that I had a couple of really big standout heroes and was then able to put in an okay shift on a couple others if those were banned (this is all a really convoluted way to say that I was pretty good at like Tiny, then Razor); this time around, I felt like I had a massive massive hero pool of heroes I felt decently comfortable on, but I had nothing I would have this massive, unconditional impact on. I think I detracted from the quality of our comms a decent bit, though when I did have a good game I think I did well to take the lead based on that. I genuinely thought for a second at the start of the mini that I was improving a fair bit, going up to 5.6k from the 5.2k on sheet (Excel did the same, so we got a total of 800 team MMR in a week) — but as it turned out, I was just playing Wraith King. Live and learn?
I think that’s about everything I can think of right now. I’ve probably missed a bunch of shit I wanted to say, but I cba to come back to this so I’ll leave it at that. I think we’re all a bit sadder than most would be about getting 2nd, and in an objective sense I’m decently proud of getting there. This was a learning experience for sure. Thanks for the season everyone, was pretty fun for the most part and it was cool to play with new people. And Excel.
