To start with, let me just be clear that this event has 16 teams and all of them are top tier teams with most of them having a realistic chance of winning the whole event. The title of this article isn’t ‘the only four teams worth watching’ or ‘the only four good teams’ or anything like that and that’s deliberate. I just think there’s good reason to zoom in on these four in particular and I’ll motivate for each one of them below. (They happen to all be in different groups too which is coincidental but kinda cool)

OG

OG won two of the three Majors that took place in the TI6 season, placing top 8 in the other one. They stumbled at TI6 itself but we don’t have much reason to expect that to be a sign of things to come.

Why? Two reasons. First, they’ve had more recent results that show their form is in a good place right now. Second, since they’ve excelled so much at Majors before, there’s no reason to see their TI6 result as a sign of struggling under pressure or any other thing that might rear its head again this time round.

If anything, what we might infer from OG’s weaker results at the Shanghai Major and TI6 is that they might have a bit of a weakness or blind spot when it comes to SEA teams. After all, it was Fnatic who knocked them out in Shanghai, and MVP & TNC who knocked them out of TI6. The good news for OG here is that they have no SEA teams in their group and that one of the SEA teams that was meant to attend this event failed to make it due to visa problems.

One of the more impressive things that OG have done at the beginning of the TI7 season is to manage their roster changes exceptionally well. Miracle is obviously a difficult player to replace, but so far Ana has made a pretty strong case for himself in the team, with N0tail also picking up some more superstar space than he was previously allowed. Most importantly, their system was not too fundamentally altered and the way the team approaches Dota maintained a kind of continuity that wasn’t disrupted by their roster changes.

In truth this goes down more to the other change they made. Cr1t was actually the most important player in OG last year, despite Miracle being the best player in the world at the time. Cr1t fundamentally enabled their playstyle, and OG managed to pick up JerAx to replace him, literally the only other player in the world who could effortlessly fit into a similar role. So they did some really good business, and so far they look to be pretty well off for it. (compare Liquid, who were in a similar position having to replace JerAx himself, and showed clear signs of failing to do so early in the season. No hate on Bulba, but he’s an entirely different player to JerAx and that team has felt the loss of not having a JerAx.)

With that said, there are only three teams who have been Major finalists so far and of those three OG are the only one attending the Boston Major. Yes, I know, having made the finals before is by no means an indication that they will make it again. But the point is that if there’s any team entering Boston with the belief that ‘Major Champion’ is a title that belongs to them it’s OG. And such belief can be very, very powerful.