What a rush. It might seem silly that I feel really emotional about winning this for fun no prize pool league but it just feels great. Grand finals was an amazing 3 game series against really good opponents, and I had a ton of fun. This is going to be a really long post so people bored at work hopefully I’ll be able to give you a good amount of entertainment. For anybody who wanted light reading sorry, I think I have too many thoughts to do that. In this review I’m first going to cover my individual thoughts on captaining RD2L and just some rambly feelings I had on this season. After that I’m going to do a short recap of my teams season and then a draft review of the grand finals. Finally I’ll do the actual player review.

Mat’s Rambling Thoughts

So I started playing way back in Season 7 in EST-Saturday. I saw a post for the league on Reddit and thought it seemed fun. I was actually still in high school at the time. I got put on a meh team that made playoffs and lost immediately (it was actually the weird group stage playoffs if anybody remembers that season). I made some really good friends though who I still hang out and play dota with and who I met up with at TI7 a few years ago, so I immediately grew to love the league for the people I could meet.

I wasn’t really trying to win back then I was 4k flat and not that great at Dota (As Aesir, my first captain, liked to tell me in every match we played). After that season I decided to captain because I wanted to pick my friends and prevent myself from playing with anybody who was too uh, toxic. I’ve captained every season since. For the first couple seasons I didn’t really care about winning the league, there were so many teams and I wasn’t great I was just trying to have fun. I didn’t make playoffs again until I think S10 when I made it with my EST-Thurs team. We lost first round to a Kstigs team that had 5 players who were all higher mmr than the highest mmr player on my team. Which was fun. I had some okay seasons after that making decent runs into top 8 with two separate teams (Xag/Bort/Villain/Hug/Econ) (Dembe/Doobs/Sexysteve/Hug/Ripley).

After those seasons I actually felt like I could win the league and started drafting to win instead of just picking friends. The season right after that was when I drafted Polo (best duo core in the league) and embarassingly lost first round after feeling really confident. I went on to lose first round of playoffs for three seasons after that (people started saying I was cursed). It wasn’t until last season (S17) that I actually made it past first round of playoffs and made a run to Semis. That loss was pretty demoralizing and I honestly didn’t think I’d have a chance to get a better team than the one I drafted that season so I went into S18 with fairly low expectations.

I didn’t have a plan in the S18 draft except that I wanted to first pick Jacoby and I knew I wanted to pick my boy SPACEDUDE360000. Jacoby ended up getting taken before my first pick and he PMed me “pick Sickboy that guy carries me in pubs” and so, knowing nothing about him, I picked Sickboy and ended up drafting a pretty good team.

Playoffs Run & Season Overview

Final EST-Sun group stage Standings

I like to experiment a lot in group stage, I think it’s pretty easy to make playoffs in general and seeds don’t matter too much. If you want to win the whole thing you need to be able to beat any team anyway. I draft a lot of dumb stuff, I role swap, I try and figure out what my team is good at doing and what we’re not good at doing. I was pretty happen to finish in the 4th seed but more importantly than that I felt like I figured out what my team is good at. We do well when I pick Sickboy a dumb hero that he can run around the map gooning at our opponents. I need to pick my other 3 players heroes that can follow Sickboy and prevent him from feeding. I pick myself a hero that farms until 20 minutes then we run down buildings and enemies as a team. Almost all of our wins followed this approach. If we lost lanes and weren’t able to do this, our games got hard. None of our wins in group stage were comeback wins, we just snowballed and ended games. Going into playoffs that’s what I planned to have us keep doing.

Our quadrant of the bracket (Top 64-Top 8)

Playoffs went pretty smoothly, our first matchup was vs Cruncher team. We just won our lanes and won the game. Week 2 vs Woof was the same. Sharingan was our hardest opponent, we came close to losing both games, they didn’t let us just snowball and end but we had I think stronger drafts and were able to win late game both times. Clare drafted Medusa/Meepo duo core so we won those games in 20 minutes as well. Semifinals against Forthethrills was actually a pretty tough series, we almost dropped game 1 but we out executed our opponents in team fights and then Game 2 was quite a bit easier. In the later half of playoffs especially I started picking myself Lone druid a lot which really fit our style well. I would basically always win/draw my lane and then when I had that 20 minute radiance/mom we would just win games normally. We had a clean 10–0 run going into finals when we faced what was likely the best team in the whole league, Cev’s Majesticle Testicles.

Grand Finals

All right I’m going to actually go in depth for this section. I consider myself a really good RD2L drafter (but a pretty bad drafter aside from that). RD2L is weird, a lot of meta heroes you can safely ignore because there’s a decent chance your opponents don’t know how to play them. Many players have small hero pools and targeted bans is really powerful. Drafting your own heroes is more about making sure your players are on heroes they’re comfortable with, more so than on meta stuff. I think I’m really good at understanding my team and analyzing opponents in an RD2L context. In high mmr battlecups or even Div 1 mini I think my drafting gets pretty bad cause a lot of these tactics I’m mentioning go out the window, but I feel really confident in regular RD2L drafts.

Going into this series my main goal was to make sure my team was able to play our style: Win/draw lanes, have a lineup that allows Sickboy to lead the rest of the squad around the map gooning while I farm until we can win the game.

Game 1 Draft

Going into this draft I was certain I wanted to ban Tiny/Underlord first phase. Tiny is just broken and their carry player is VERY comfortable on it, Underlord is similar. I had some ideas for how to counter an early underlord pick but honestly their 3 player JD seems to do best when he’s just on a farming offlaner that can’t lose the lane, like underlord. It would also be really annoying for me to play LD into which I planned to pick. We lost the coin flip and Cev chose FP so I banned the Treant third as I think the hero is just too strong to give up and there weren’t any other heroes I felt it necessary to ban. I considered banning NP/Warlock/LD. They’ve done really well on NP in the past and it’s a pretty annoying hero but I felt like if I got LD or PL I could deal with an NP in lane and since their 4 and 5 don’t really play traditional initiating 4s, if they picked NP they would just have no team fight and probably lose the game. I decided they were unlikely to pick it. Warlock is often banned against them and they I think were undefeated on the hero before this series but the hero is just so bad right now that I wasn’t worried about it, and I figured if they picked it I would have a pretty free offlane for Clean to farm in. LD I considered banning because I thought there was a chance they would first pick it, but I knew if they did that JD would be playing it and I felt confident I could counterpick an offlane LD and shut him down in lane, so I left the hero in.

I was expecting their bans to be some combination of Doom/SK/Venge/Disruptor, likely with them banning the Doom/SK/Disruptor and taking the Venge themself, which I was okay with. They ended up surprising me by banning two SPACEDUDE heroes, Sky and SB. In group stage most teams banned our Spacedude heroes banning Sky/SB/BH because we just always won our offlane with those heroes, but most recently in playoffs teams had been more worried about LD/Puck/Clean hero puddle. They took the Doom first overall which surprised me since I didn’t think JD was comfortable on the hero. I responded with Disruptor, who I think is one of the best supports right now especially in RD2L because the hero makes it really easy to just win your lane. I took LD as well, it fits our team playstyle perfectly and its a carry that really doesn’t care about being doomed. Infernal can be a bit annoying in lane but I figured I’d still be fine. They took Jakiro afterwards which was expected, its one of their most comfortable heroes.

Phase 2 I banned out Cevs best heroes, Pango and Arc Warden, I honestly felt if he got either of those he could just win the game on his own. They responded with a Puck ban (expected, Sickboys best hero even after the nerfs) and Centaur ban (really surprising, they should’ve banned SK here, we don’t run centaur really). We took Lion which we ran in Semis and felt it worked really well as a 4 for Spacedude. They took Lich which was also fairly expected with Venge/Treant out of the pool. I thought they might Warlock but Lich was definitely a stronger pick for them. We took SK which is one of the 3 heroes we really felt good running in the offlane (the others being Doom/DarkSeer). They took Drow which was a solid pick with their draft but I felt we could run the hero over pretty early with our LD push. They banned Riki last which I knew Cev really didn’t want to play against, Sickboy Riki is a menace. We banned out OD mostly because Sickboy hates playing against that hero. I was pretty unsure on the last ban, I think the Kunkka would have actually been a better ban but it kind of slipped my mind. They took the Kunkka and with us running out of draft time Sickboy just asked me to pick him Bloodseeker. I thought it was a solid hero, would be able to farm well vs the Kunkka mid and fits our playstyle well, I’ve also grown to trust Sickboy so I locked it in for him.

I think we finished with a much stronger overall draft here, we had comfort heroes on everybody except Sickboy, but Sickboy is Sickboy so it was fine. Our game basically went according to plan, lanes went fine, we started running them over and got outer towers early and a T3 pretty early into the game. We almost got a really early raks as well but we got overconfident and Lion/SK killed themselves diving T4s to try and kill Cev. We were in control for basically the whole game still and weren’t really in danger of losing, slowly extending our gold/exp lead and taking buildings where we could. Eventually we finally were able to end it.

Game 2 Draft

We had choice this game and I chose Dire over taking pick priority. Sickboy is much more comfortable playing mid on dire and getting him the best lane vs Cev was one of my highest priorities. They chose first pick again but that wasn’t an issue last game so I wasn’t too worried. We did same bans they changed significantly, banning the disruptor/LD from last game and taking the Doom out themselves so Clean couldn’t have it. I was picking comfort heroes again here but the major mistake that I made was not realizing Cev could take his Pango at 4 pick and then ban out Bloodseeker. In hindsight this was probably a pretty obvious draft plan by Cev but I wasn’t prepared for it, assuming he’d save his hero for later. I ended up being a bit overconfident this game as well, I ran the SB/DarkSeer that we’d had such success with this season even though it wasn’t really great this game and it was a major mistake. Our draft was severely lacking lockdown and we gave up Zeus/SK who some of our only losses this season have been to that hero combo. They also took the core Riki for themselves instead of banning it. Our draft here was bad, we didn’t have the control or the burst to deal with Riki/Pango and their lineup was better in these longer fights. I think this game was winnable if we played fights a bit better, Riki got away a few times because we were late in buying a gem, we fed a lot of unnecessary kills cause invis OP in RD2L. Overall though I think the blame for the loss is on my in the draft. We finished with a Pheonix pick which was actually my suggestion. We were 0–2 with it this season but its one of Sickboys best heroes and I felt with them having no egg killers and Pheonix being (probably) a good matchup vs Pango mid it would be okay. I think Pheonix would have done fine this game if I had picked a different 3/4 though.

This was our first loss in playoffs but I think we were able to shake it off pretty effectively, we were all pretty hyped to play a game 3 grand finals and moved on to the next one.

Game 3 Draft

Honestly we had a really clutch coin flip win this game that let us take first pick. I realized we needed to ban the 4 Zeus because we just have always been bad vs that hero, it makes it hard for us to control the map like we like to and our ganks seem to just always get spotted out by Zeus ult. I think half our losses this season were to Zeus. I took FP so I could move the Treant ban to a Zeus ban and either force them to ban Tree or give it to us. They chose to ban the LD/Doom/Disr again which let us take Treant, debatably Spacedudes best hero. They responded with Venge/SK, Cev seemed to realize how important SK was to both our team and theirs, I was hoping to get it 4th but unfortunately it wasn’t an option. We weren’t feeling confident in Jakiro after G2 and chose to swap to Lich, which we hadn’t run before but which Sickboy insisted we pick. Another advantage of us having first pick is they couldn’t go for the Pango because we could respond with Bloodseeker before the bans.

2nd phase we banned Pango/Arc again, they took out Puck/Centaur again, mirroring Game 1. They took the Warlock that had been untouched this series, we were pretty happy with this as we felt it would give us a laning advantage. We chose to take the Riki early, we were really paranoid that they would take the Riki again themselves which we had a lot of issues dealing with. We had the option to flex it between Sickboy or me in mid or safe depending on what we needed as well. They responded with Bloodseeker, which wasn’t too surprising but was a really strong pick for them this game. Our hero options were a bit limited, I didn’t feel confident in Dark Seer anymore and Cleans SK/Doom weren’t options. We chose to take Axe because I thought it was the best offlaner to take on BS in lane and deal with him past the lane.

They banned out my PL 11 which was unsurprising and we were stuck debating between an OD or a Timber ban. I knew from scouting that Cev was a MUCH stronger Timber player than OD, and I was fairly sure if they got Timber this game we would just lose immediately, especially with the WK pick I was planning on. We weren’t sure if they would take OD despite it being an OD game, but we felt we could actually deal with that hero whereas Timber would just win the game outright. We took WK because its one of our best heroes, it fits the farm until run them over playstyle that we like and its pretty good vs Bloodseeker in general. They took the OD which was concerning but we felt we could deal with it if we didn’t lose our lanes horribly.

Lanes actually went really bad this game, they chose to put the BS in the offlane vs my WK which I wasn’t expected. We had made a 5 man smoke rotation top to kill the OD for first blood and then Axe TPed bottom, making it difficult for us to rotate lanes. I chose to have the Treant go top instead and have us trilane the BS with our WK/Lich/Tree lane which I felt would be able to win the lane easily. Unfortunately, we had some uh, significant issues. We didn’t get a pull off for 10 minutes and the lane was constantly at their tower, making it hard for us to ever pressure them and making it really easy for them to just out CS me. Mid went a bit bad as expected in a Riki/OD matchup and Axe/SK was just a trading farm lane. One of my teams biggest issues this season was coming back from a deficit. We do really well at winning our lanes and playing from ahead without throwing, but historically in our losses we lose lanes and then just can’t come back.

This game, fortunately, we managed to hold it together. We ended up going down by 10k networth but managed to continue to find farm on Riki and I. We also managed to stop their pushes because Treant/Lich is absolutely ridiculous to push into. We would be a couple heroes down but their BS/OD just couldn’t kill buildings. We managed to punish some pushes and punish them when they would try and TP to deal with our split push, catching some heroes on the retreat. It wasn’t until around the 50 minute mark that we finally were getting even on farm and ready to fight. We ended up winning a big Rosh fight and getting Roshan, at the cost of most of our buybacks. That aegis let us win another fight which got their SK dead without buyback at the cost of our Aegis. We killed their whole team except for OD who we managed to jump with our double abyssal and kill. OD and the rest of his team aside from SK immediately boughtback, forcing us to leave the base. I called for us to immediately smoke and wait for a chance to jump the OD again while SK was still dead without BB. My Rapier arrived we caught the OD out and Venge wasn’t in position to save him and the game was over. There was a lot of shouting and excitement.

I felt like we had the better draft G3 though I’ve heard many of my higher mmr friends tell me they felt my draft was bad and WK/Axe were bad picks, but its RD2L, comfort matters and OP heroes don’t matter as much. I made a lot of mistakes this finals which I want to blame on nerves but we ended up executing late game teamfights this game 3 really well, jumping who we needed to and winning the fights that mattered. Really proud of the work my whole team showed here and really honored that we got to play against Cev’s team in this really fun series.

Player Review

Well it took a while but we finally made it to this part of the review.

First pick — Sickboy

As I mentioned earlier I had no idea who Sickboy was before the draft. I knew I wanted a mid player this season instead of playing mid myself like I always do. Jacoby mentioned Sickboy to me as an option and I decided to trust his opinion and picked him up. Sickboy was great, he rarely tilted, he helped me significantly with in game leadership, especially later on in the season. He had a pretty massive hero pool and we were able to surprise many opponents with new and unexpected last picks for him. I think that Sickboy and I really just complement each other well as a duo core, all he wants to do is fight like a goon and all I want to do is farm. I think most successful RD2L teams should try and have a core like this it works pretty well.

I don’t really have anything negative to say about him, he played from EU so he slept through some scrims and was really tired some officials and would tell me to pick him braindead heroes cause he was half asleep. Before playoffs he told me “During important matches I’m going to tell you what heroes to pick, and I’m going to be 100% confident that I’m right but you need to ignore me I’m dumb”. Most of the time I still ended up picking him whatever he asked for and it worked just fine though. Really skilled mid player, really good attitude, nothing bad to say about the dude 10/10 player 10/10 personality.

Second pick — Mr. Clean

I knew I wanted a solid offlaner with my second pick this time around. When I saw Clean was still in the pool it was a quick decision on my part. Clean is super motivated, all he wanted to do was finally win an RD2L season. He was willing to put in the work to do whatever I asked him to improve on, and he didn’t hesitate to uh, point out flaws in some of our other teammates gameplay.

At the start of each season I captain I lay out two rules for my team. 1) Don’t be toxic. 2) If I make a call listen to it. I get tilted otherwise. Clean had some issues early on where he didn’t think he needed to listen to all my calls or there would be games where I would tell him to go an item and he would go another item. After some uh, explaining of my unhappiness with that Clean agreed to just fully trust my calls and in playoffs he really shined. I honestly really appreciated how willing he was to just fully trust what Sickboy/Me told him to do.

He was our initiator and honestly he just owned most games. Sometimes we would put him on his Timber and he would just take over the game on his own, sometimes we would put him on his SK and he would win the late game teamfights for us with his intiations. He had a really good attitude and his motivation to win really helped our team, especially in Grand finals when he kept reminding us that the game was winnable and to stay focused. Gonna give him a 10/10 player and 10/10 personality.

Third pick — SPACEGOD360000

Spacedude and I actually met when I was in College and became best friends and ended up rooming together as well for three years. I got him into Dota and taught him the game, and then I also got him to start playing RD2L. I knew this season I wanted to play with my boy, I’d done a couple seasons with him before, though I’d never had him play 4 and I don’t think he really played the role much either. He shined though, he carried us most of group stage and demanded respect bans from most teams. Several series had opponents first three bans being BH/SB/Sky just because Spacedude would just win the offlane otherwise. He threw himself into the 4 role and started getting really comfortable on the hero.

People who know Spacedude know he’s pretty chill, he doesn’t get excited, doesn’t yell, but he also rarely gets upset. He was just a solid rock for us throughout the season. Showed up, did his owning, checked out. It took him and Clean some time to get comfortable laning together but I think they mostly figured it out by the end of the season. As I think Purge said in the finals, this Treant owns, carried the team. Player 10/10 Personality 100/10 what a guy so happy that my championship was with my bro.

Fourth Pick — Tactic

Last picks in RD2L are always a bit of a crapshoot, especially when you’re a higher mmr captain. You only have a couple people to choose from and they’re all Archon or lower and mostly play core. I find player comments to be the most useful element in picking players. Tactics comment was “Core player here who knows that I’m probably going to be forced to play support, happy to just play bane and fiends grip and try and learn”. I saw that player comment, instant pick, could not ask for a better comment honestly. This was Tactics first season after learning about the league from watching Purge cast last seasons Grand Finals.

He was incredibly motivated, he wanted to learn and he wanted to win. Any hero I asked him to play he would jump into pubs and learn. Anytime he made mistakes and learned about them he would adapt and do better. Great example, in these grand finals game 2, we’re laning together me and his Jakiro, going on their support Zeus. He tries to TP out but my jakiro has ice path at level 4, we yelled at him about it earlier in the season. Zeus wasn’t ready for an RD2L jakiro to have ice path, easy kill.

I could make some minor complaints, he never really learned when to pull and if a pull didn’t work out he would kind of give up on it. Sometimes he would get overzealous in lane and end up out of position and die. Sometimes he would be a jakiro with massive cast range and run up close to cast his spells in fights. Honestly though he was incredibly value for a last pick, he had the right attitude, he actually played team fights really well, and he went in with the attitude that he wanted to learn and he wanted to win. You can’t ask for anything else. Player 10/10 Personality 10/10.

Captain — Me, Matieu

It’s sort of weird to write about myself. I knew this season I just wanted to play carry and afk farm while my team made space and most of the time I drafted around that. Honestly my team was so good that many games I would just come out of the jungle at 20 minutes with my midas radiance and we’re up 15 kills and we just ran down a lane and won. So many games I just kind of was irrelevant but you know, I was there, I had my items.

I feel like in just about every series I was really well prepared and our drafts were better than our opponents and we won. I think I handled the captain part really well, and in games where we actually went late, like the grand finals for instance, I actually got a chance to contribute and do well.

Final Thoughts

I think it’s pretty clear that I’m not a Lala/Riles player. I have it in me to take over RD2L games and win, and there were times where I got to go 30–0 and look like a good player. But we were just a really well rounded team, we finished with an immortal, two divines, and two legends, and we played together really well. We knew what made our team work, everybody was unselfish and played the role that was needed to win games. We won the finals off of playing teamfights better I think and that came down to everybody executing right. I’m really happy that this was the group I won with, I’m really happy that we really felt like a team by the end. I think often the captain of winning teams is the one remembered, but we all contributed equally to this team and to this victory.

To Sickboy, Clean, Spacedude, & Tactic: Thank you, I can’t express enough how fun it was to play with you all. Sitting in voice chat last night and just relaxing knowing that after all these months we did it, we climbed the mountain. It was a great feeling. Thanks for sharing this with me and thanks for carrying me.