The OG Meta

Everybody describes OG’s strategy as utilizing the buy back, picking a late game carry for ana to win the game after 45 minutes. Yes, this is the first glance of value, but how do they achieve it? Is it just because Spectre with the 60% pub win rate is OP? Some teams tried to copy it, like the loser’s bracket finals, both EG and LGD tried Spectre, but LGD won with it just because they snowballed hard, and EG failed with the strategy. What is the difference?

LGD vs EG, Game 1 of loser’s bracket finals, LGD at the dire side starts snowballing at 20 min, and the comback around 35 — 38 min does not stop it, from dotabuff.com

Split pushing hard, with Pos 5 support

compare the performance of pos 5 supports of the top 3 teams in main event, GPM and Tower Damage of n0tail is impressive

The stats of n0tail are exactly why very few people think that he is as good as other top-tier supports. He died a lot, standing at the top of the list with an average 10.31 deaths per game. But we are here to appreciate how much he did in the game and what the difference is. Apart from dying a lot, he had a much higher last hit than other pos 5 support and eventually giving him the highest GPM, he also doubled the tower damage. That is because he picks supports like Chen and Nature’s Prophet, which split pushing a lot, and helped farming even the hero himself was dead. They also created lots of space for the cores to farm up even he lose the lane, and also caused enemies hard to take objective even taking the lead, which extends the game length for OG’s favor.

On the other hand, since the support buys a lot of low cost consumables, dying does not hurt their reliable gold too much, and they can spam buyback due to low net worth. And as mentioned above, if he picked Chen or Nature’s Prophet, dying did not stop him from farming or split push, and the gold he earned are mainly invested to consumables, especially sentry wards, giving OG better resources to control vision even losing the map control.

OG vs LGD, Game 4 of grand finals, LGD is buying extra sentry wards to counter Invoker and Axe, but OG keep up the similar number of wards even losing the map control, n0tail can even single-handedly afford all smoke purchase, from dotabuff.com

Game 1 of OG vs EG in winner’s bracket, Both pos 5 support died a lot, but n0tail with Nature’s Prophet have a much higher impact with 2.7k building dmg, from dotabuff.com

Get everybody to the team fight, across the map

Top 15 picked heroes of OG in the main stage

This is another amazing drafting strategy from OG, they have lots of heroes with a global presence. God Tier is Io which brings any other allies with Relocate. Top tier is the heroes that can travel globally, which is Spectre, Nature’s Prophet, Arc Warden(with Boots of Travel as core item) and Ember Spirit. Second tier is those can contribute damage to the fight, like Invoker, Zeus and Chen(by controlled creeps). Third tier is those gives minor contribution, which is Chen’s Hand of God, Silencer’s Global Silence and Treant Protector’s Living Armor.

Travelling is always an important part of the game, e.g Yasha is a good farming item not just because of the damage and attack speed but also because faster movement speed equals to less traveling time, and that is why these “get rid of traveling” heroes are so strong when used with a specific strategy.

It also enables some small but impactful in-game moves like:

Use traveling skills to get a bounty rune even not controlling map, especially enemy is distracted by other things, or even deny the rune by summons

Nature’s Prophet teleports into enemy base to ward before pushing

teleports into enemy base to ward before pushing Fake gank by topson Invoker to bait enemy heroes, which turned into an Io relocate RAT for mega creep

to bait enemy heroes, which turned into an Io relocate RAT for mega creep Io Relocated to Phantom Lancer pretends to be a GG push and bait out buybacks then bring Phantom Lancer back to base

Relocated to pretends to be a GG push and bait out buybacks then bring back to base Delay pushes with Treant Protector and Arc Warden

Game 1 of OG vs EG in winner’s bracket, Nature’s Prophet teleport to get bounty runes, all of them are before OG leading the game at 25 min, from dotabuff.com

Utilize Buyback, and getting back to battle in 3 seconds

This is exactly why OG’s buyback is so impactful, they have multiple ways to join the battle after buyback within seconds, this makes the enemy team facing like 6 or even 7 heroes in a fight. On top of that, OG also picks cores that tank up tons of damage, once you invested too many mana and cooldowns on it, you are doomed in the buyback fights. Of course, OG also manages buyback so well that they always prepared to buyback(even selling items before death, wp ana), and they tried hard to not wasting any of them, which their enemy don’t seems on par.

Pick late game hard carries, with double save

compare the performance of supports of the top 3 teams in main event, OG does extra amount of heal

As I have mentioned in the previous article, ana’s hero were always the ones with strong survivability, because with OG’s strong healing line up, once the core escaped, they could heal him up quickly to fight again, it is a similar case to buyback. Combo includes Chen and Winter Wyvern heal shield mixture, double damage reduction with Io and Centaur Warrunner, double shield from Winter Wyvern and Treant Protector, and double + boosted heal from Chen and Io.

Picking non BKB carry, to adsorb the CC and burst

On the other hand, since ana’s hero does not buy Black King Bar, enemy team liked to focus on him and tried to kill him first, but with the double save, these efforts were usually wasted, and this is why we saw a number of OG’s teamfights last more than minute. Also a side effect that by tanking, it created lots of space for teammates to do their job.

Don’t pick the right-click core off lane, pick the strong CC off lane

Hero list of Ceb in main event

First of all, Ceb played a huge variety of heroes, but the ones he won, 5 out of 9 have a CC skills that goes through BKB, and Enchantress does not CC but the damage goes through BKB, which means he was always the one to control the enemy’s carry, and once he got on them, BKB became a wasted slot for enemy carry. These heroes are also very good team fight hero, which helped OG to stop or delay the snowball of the enemy since their pick are always weaker at the early stage of game.

They also pick heroes with long CD but very strong ultimate, and manage them extremely well, this is also how they defend the push even lacking behind.

Winning with a full game plan

Having listed many shattered reasons for how OG wins the series, OG gathered these little pieces, put them together and linked them up to make a full game plan, finally executed the plan good enough for them to win the game. The most interesting thing is how they came up with a totally different understanding of the patch, and created another set of meta. LGD and EG tried to learn from it, but they did not “go full retard”, they tried to do it by just picking Spectre, but not other combo heroes to work with, which finally became another thing, maybe some great minds can find a mixture or hybrid of meta, but that did not happen in this TI.