Duck and Goose 1 2 3 suffered a tough series sweep last Sunday against the seemingly indomitable Surge Slark Slam, captained by the ever-growing Supra.

In season 10 it wasn’t until W4 that Les Champignons figured it all out, and while it is optimistic to shoot for another 19-1 post W3 record, I do think we can put a good season together – I believe failure would not be for lack of talent. The puzzle to solve with a new team is really this: what are we good at?

Mushroom-stack was all about map control, tower diving, forcing enemy rotations; creating a situation where the opponent just doesn’t have options and is punished from all angles. But that’s not a natural playstyle for the DAG#. So the task is to suss out what is. Let’s look at a couple drafts.

We got Meepo’d in game 1. The draft was pretty interesting – we threw a little wrinkle at them with Team DK support Jugg and looked to control the tempo with a carry Bloodseeker. But a few ganks on A-Real’s geomancer ended unfavorably, and we lost our ability to pressure them. In an effort to keep up in farm we spread across the map, but this played into the hands of their strong roamers, Riki and Slark.

I think our team has a mix of tempo controllers and ricers. We don’t tend to lane super well off the bat, so I think we should play-test some jungling to get the most out of the early-game, and use pseudo-pos-3 heroes on both side lanes to not go overboard on greed.

In the mid-game we have a tendency towards splitting up and performing small objectives in different areas. Not sure if this is more a play-style feature or just a leadership issue. Either way I think it would serve us well to have individual space creators that are tough kills, chew up enemy resources, possibly good bait heroes along with counter-initiators.

Game 2 definitely went better in some respects, I sort of fed from the safelane, but we successfully rotated supports around the map. I don’t think it serves us to have greedy position-4s without dedicated farming time, even though I like potentially masking core picks. While I am keeping the jungle in mind, I also think utilizing two early-impact supports could give us a similar boost.

In terms of pick order, we moved carry up a spot in order to give us more context for USS’s hero. I think our best option is actually to hide his hero, picking up two or three potential offlaners to not only offer lane ambiguity, but also provide our players with options on preferred heroes – we are growing our hero pools after all.

Overall I feel confident about the draft plan heading into W3. There is a new balance patch to play-test, and maybe we’ll see some Rooftrellen action. Remember, don’t next level yourself with more support Jugg picks (feel like I try to make it work every year).

-gg worst captain ever.