The very term “NADota” evokes powerful feelings. To some, it’s their proud home. Here, the great American hope Evil Geniuses won TI5, the first International to be taken by a team that wasn’t from Europe or China. But to the rest of the world, NADota represents roster instability, all-chat BM, toxic in-house leagues, and most of all, egos.

Evil Geniuses are the crown jewel of NADota, the one consistently good team that even Europe acknowledges as top tier. It was EG’s second incarnation, formed in 2014 ahead of TI4, that earned them this reputation — a squad formerly known as S A D B O Y S, with Universe, NEL superstar Arteezy, long-time EG alumnus Fear, and seasoned HoN pros PPD and Zai.

Despite their success, the modern EG has sailed on rough waters since its very inception, and it hasn’t been because they’ve faced stiff domestic competition. EG’s wild ride has been a classic story of internal dissent and teammate-on-teammate rivalry, between captain Peter “PPD” Dager, and the (arguably) most famous Dota player of our time, Artour “Arteezy” Babaev.

Two years and three roster changes later, EG is battered but still recognizable. PPD and Arteezy sit on opposite sides at The Manila Major: PPD helms EG, while Arteezy runs with their staunchest rival, Team Secret. From the looks of things so far, both teams are the worse for wear — EG and Secret will start in the Loser’s Bracket at Manila, with just one game standing between them and elimination. It’s hard not to think that all this could have been avoided, if these two players hadn’t found a better way to resolve their differences.

Meet the protagonists

PPD started playing Heroes of Newerth in 2009. He made a name for himself in in-house leagues through 2010 and 2011, skyrocketing to the top of the FRAG in-house league, competing with the best the game had to offer. PPD showed time and time again his utter dedication to mastering the game and its intricate strategies. Yet as his skill increased, so did his confidence in his own abilities.

“When it all started going wrong... We didn’t notice it at first, but [PPD] became more and more passive-aggressive when we started performing poorly,” PPD’s HoN teammate Jeppe “Haxxeren” Jepsen recalled in a 2014 interview. “He would sigh loudly into the mic, and would eventually start telling us how to play our own roles as if he knew them better than we did. It reached a point where I couldn’t be in the same room or the same call as him, he radiated this opinion of superiority to everyone else around him and it became unbearable.” Haxxeren said he was unable to cope with PPD’s new attitude, and eventually left Trademark eSports in large part because of it.

Eventually, PPD made the leap from HoN to Dota 2. He joined a few smaller teams before taking on the captaincy of S A D B O Y S, and from there his story is well known to the Dota community.

Arteezy’s story starts in a pretty similar fashion. He quickly rose to the top tier of play available in in-house leagues, and players like Bulba and s4 chose him as a 1v1 practice partner. However, not everyone was impressed by Arteezy’s skills.

Arteezy got the chance to prove his worth when his former Kaipi teammates on Speed Gaming needed a standin for MLG Columbus in November 2013. With his help, Speed Gaming won the entire tournament, beating Chinese powerhouse Team DK 2-1 in the Grand Finals. (Loda on Alliance placed 5th-9th and 7ckngmad’s team Sigma.int placed 3rd-4th.)

It was after this breakout performance that he was picked up by S A D B O Y S. Three weeks after its formation, the squad was officially acknowledged by Evil Geniuses. They were a team eager to prove themselves to the world.

“Honestly, in my opinion of previous American teams, I don't think they've been hungry enough to compete at the highest level,” PPD told Live on Three a month after the squad were picked up. “I don't think any of them have really wanted to win the way I want to win.”

North American Royalty

Over 49 games tracked by Datdota in their first month, EG won 40 of them, achieving a staggering 81.6 percent win rate. It was quite the upgrade from the old EG Dota 2 fans were used to seeing. Now that EG was taking down top teams regularly at International LANs, it seemed that they couldn’t be stopped — except by themselves.

It was clear from the beginning that PPD and Arteezy were the Captain America and Iron Man of EG: they had the biggest egos, and their opinions tended to dominate every decision the team made. And just like on the Avengers, the conflict between them was as much a part of their story as their success.

Some of their biggest disagreements came after TI4, when Valve dropped patch 6.82. Arteezy and PPD had vastly different ideas on how to approach the new patch. “Universe, Fear and Zai did not have a definite opinion,” Arteezy recalled in a January 2015 Twitch stream. “They had some opinions for their heroes, but no overall game opinion how to play… PPD thought push and stuff was still the best. We had a lot of small arguments. We had discussions how I wanted four-protect-one because it made me look better.”

PPD firmly believed in his own drafts and ideas. Arteezy, true to his pubstar nature, wanted whatever made him shine the brightest. And as PPD and Arteezy argued, the mood on the team turned sour.

At ESL One New York 2014, EG went down to Vici Gaming in a 2-1 Grand Finals. Team morale was at an all-time low as they headed to StarLadder Star Series Season 10 in Ukraine; EG played no games together ahead of the tournament, and hadn’t scrimmed at all. It was in this atmosphere, at the StarLadder Upper Bracket Final, where they met the upstart team that would become their true rival.

There’s Something about Secret

Formed in August, Team Secret was composed of Kuroky, s4, Fly, n0tail and Puppey, a true European powerhouse more than capable of taking games off of EG. The two teams’ first series at StarLadder resulted in a 2-0 for the relatively new Secret. Suddenly, it was as if all of EG’s internal troubles had disappeared into a vacuum. The only thing that mattered was revenge over Secret.

“We got so angry seeing Secret cheering after beating us,” Arteezy explained in his January 2015 stream. “We were incredibly angry. They were throwing headsets and high-fiving. Since we're depressing guys on EG, we looked at those guys and said, ‘We're going to f*****ng beat those f*****s.’ We talked about how to beat their stupid ET Tide opening. We theorycrafted. Then we figured it out. A style to play against Secret.”

It ended up working. When Secret and EG rematched in the final, EG managed to take the series 3-1.

“Winning was probably my second favorite win in my Dota career,” Arteezy recalled. “Beating those guys that were so happy when they won a Winner Bracket match made me feel so good. That was first time I saw Universe yell out. He went crazy. We all shared the same thought about being happy to beat Secret.”

But after that brief respite, post-StarLadder EG was hardly a team at all. They lost the semifinals of The Summit 2 to Cloud9 — a team that EG had helped to get to The Summit in the first place. The 3-2 loss morally crushed EG. To Arteezy, the tournament was already over. EG went into the third place consolation match broken, and Secret 3-0’d them without effort, unseating them from their throne at the top of the Dota world.

After the Summit 2 in late 2014, the Dota world was rocked by roster shuffles. First Fly left Secret, followed by n0tail, much to the chagrin of Secret fans. However everyone was stunned when it was announced that Arteezy and Zai were leaving EG and replacing these two. If Secret looked like a powerhouse before, now they were genuinely unstoppable. EG were left in the dust. They picked up veteran Aui_2000 and 16-year-old prodigy SumaiL, an NEL pubstomper similar to Arteezy with a talent for Storm Spirit.

As the new year rolled around, all eyes were on the Dota Asia Championships, the first Valve-associated event outside The International. How would the new teams fare on this global stage? How well would PPD and EG compete without Arteezy?

Tug of War

DAC saw Secret dominate the group stages. They swept every single team in the tournament, finishing with a 14-0 record, and lived up to every expectation set for them and more.

Despite this strong start, they were taken down by Vici in the first round of the Winner’s Bracket, and sent down to eventually face EG. EG proceeded to knock Secret out of the event, on the back of a world-shocking performance by Sumail’s Tinker, and went on to beat Vici 3-0 in the Grand Finals. Revenge tasted sweet.

The months that followed were filled with ups and downs for Arteezy and Secret. After DAC, it seemed like they lost some of their momentum, especially when they finished a disappointing 7th-8th at StarLadder Star Series Season 12 a few months later. Arteezy struggled with his new team, while EG looked great.

Then in the months leading up to TI5, something clicked for Secret, and they won four LANs in a row. The magic was back for the superstar lineup, and when TI rolled around they were the favorites. When they got there, however, it turned out to be another false hope — EHOME knocked them down from the upper bracket, and not long afterward, Virtus.pro spectacularly knocked them out. Secret was left with 7th-8th place.

On his stream after the dismal finish, Arteezy complained that internal conflict had once again been the source of his woes. “Everyone had fucking egos," he said. “Some of us could not communicate the way we were suppose to communicate. Some of us had a strong distaste for another. I for one knew we were not going to win TI when we entered TI because ... yeah. That's all.”

They never faced EG, who went on to win the entire tournament.

EG(os) Reunited?

After TI5 and the inevitable Secret reshuffle, EG kicked Aui_2000 and shifted Fear to support. Artour made his shocking return, confident that the distrust that had dismantled the team the last time would not rear its head again.

The refurbished EG took things slow and steady. As 2015 neared its end, they ramped up to achieve Top 3 finishes at four straight LANs. All seemed to be going well, on the surface. But they didn’t actually win anything, going 0-8 in Grand Final games for the season. Secret displaced EG to take second at the first Valve Major in Frankfurt, and at the second in Shanghai in spring 2016, they knocked EG out of the Winner’s Bracket again — this time on their way to taking the entire championship.

Then came March 22, 2016, a day that will live in infamy. Three days before the TI6 roster lock, Arteezy announced he would be leaving EG yet again, and once again he would be taking a teammate with him. But this time, it was the always-reliable Universe, a fan favorite for many, the “most underrated” offlaner in an offlane-heavy meta. With 766 career games played in the EG jersey, he was as synonymous with the team as Fear.

Once again EG turned to seemingly permanent second-stringer Aui_2000 to refill their ranks, who brought his teammate Bulba from Digital Chaos. But this wasn’t 2015, and the second time around Arteezy’s departure robbed the team of much more — in the form of Universe — and left them with much less, since Bulba was no SumaiL. In the months after Shanghai, PPD and his squad attended few LANs, and the largest one they did play in, EPICENTER, ended with a humiliating 5th-6th finish after an 0-2 elimination by compLexity, the perennial second-ranked NA team. Fans worried that this time, Arteezy’s disloyalty had broken the team’s back.

More surprising was how much Secret struggled after the roster shuffle. With Arteezy and Universe on board alongside Puppey, EternalEnvy and pieliedie, the Shanghai champions had arguably the most talented lineup in their history. Yet they confounded analysts to take 5th-6th at ESL One Manila and 7th-8th at EPICENTER, behind EG. Their string of poor performances carried them into the Manila Major last week, where they fell to the bottom of their group with only a single game win.

Charlie Yang, former manager of EG, had some strong opinions to share on both teams at the Manila analyst desk. Secret was too greedy, he said; “Big names don’t mean as much anymore” due to the continually closing skill gap between pros. Instead, team cohesion — something that has eluded Arteezy with his constant roster jumping — is way more important to a successful team.

In Yang’s view, EG do have the tools they need to do well at this Major, but PPD is still struggling to make something out of the sum of their parts. They too finished in the Bottom 2 of their group, though they did manage to beat out Mineski, the team lowest-ranked by most analysts heading into the event.

Starting in the Lower Bracket on Tuesday, Secret will face Empire, while EG has been pitted against Vici Gaming Reborn. PPD and Arteezy both have very little time left to pick up the pieces and put together winning teams. But, if they can both somehow make it through the next two rounds, the two players will once again face each other across the stage. Will we see the latest edition of this rivalry for the ages? Or will both teams be dragged down by the weight of their egos and knocked out in the Bottom 8 of the most important tournament before TI?

Corey "CartDota" Hospes is a freelance writer, Dota 2 addict, lover of numbers and techies picker.​ You can follow him on Twitter.