The other night I was playing with a lovely WLD 5 stack. I was playing Bounty, and you can see the rest of our lineup in the picture below (Radiant team). What we didn't count on was the opposing team going all in on a push strat. They laned Nature's Prophet, Lone Druid, and Troll Warlord together. By minute two, we lost our safe-lane tower. At minute three, our tier 2 was down. To our credit, we rallied and made a game of it. We lost a 42 minute game, even though the kill score was 79-23 in our favor. At one point we had a 40,000 gold advantage.

Like any game (Dota related or any other sport), there was no one reason we lost. There were moments where we needed to push and send one person to defend our base, but instead two or three TPed back. There were moments in the early game where a few rotations could have punished their aggression. We could have itemized better to deal with supers and megas. Ultimately, though, it was a really fun game. It was a different type of challenge, and one that I'll learn from. And one that we'll definitely employ come the 24 hour stream. Mostly, though, #gameishard