FlyToMoon are the biggest surprise of EPICENTER XL and probably one of the biggest surprises of the entire 2017-2018 Dota Pro Circuit. They’ve been lurking in the shadow since the last shuffle.

FlyToMoon is one of the few CIS teams to keep their roster intact since February 2018, when the last roster lock for TI8 came into play. However, they simply took the scene by storm the last month only. Three weeks ago they were at the StarLadder-ImbaTV Minor and were hyped to get to finally play against teams outside their region. The unknown factor got them as far as top six in Kiev after VG.J Thunder eliminated them.



Today FlyToMoon are the only CIS team standing at the EPICENTER XL Major. They are responsible for Virtus.pro’s elimination from yesterday after sending home OG’s and paiN Gaming. They made the impossible possible. They came to this tournament via Madness qualifiers which were a new concept brought by the tournament organizers. Madness qualifiers were like open qualifiers, only that teams from across the world were able to register regardless of their region. Evil Geniuses, Immortals, Team Kinguin, The Final Tribe, Alliance, Vega Squadron were some of the nearly 100 teams signed up for the Madness Qualifiers and FlyToMoon conquered them all. Now they are top three in the main event after an absolutely remarkable group stage run where they took a game from Liquid, defeated 2-1 Mineksi, 2:0 compLexity and 2:1 Team Empire.

The VTB Ice Palace arena from Moscow was vibrating from all corners as FTM were defeating Virtus.Pro. The CIS fans felt a hard to explain mix of feelings. Most of them wanted VP to reach the grand finals but at the same time, everybody was amazed by FlyToMoon’s resilience. Right after that game, we were extremely fortunate to have a brief talk to the team captain, Alexander “NoFear” Churochkin and we found out that their path to this top 3 in Major was harder than one could imagine. “Nobody wanted to train with us” said NoFear to me. I asked him how does it feel to take down a team like VP and he made me understand that this was a victory they waited for a long time but more important than anything for them right now is that they are finally able to play against top tier teams. “ This is the first time for us when we get to play against all these teams because no one wanted to practice with us. We practiced all this time only with tier two teams from CIS and you can’t improve when you don’t have a tougher opponent”. “StarLadder was our first important experience and now we want to make the best of our presence here.”

The lack of training against the bigger names might actually turned into their favor as times and times again they were able to take their opponents by surprise. Their Windranger became first material ban, but FTM have much more in their pocket to show. I was curious to find out if WR was a hero that they actually practiced or if it’s just something they discovered that was working in the group stages. NoFear explained that they did practice her as it’s clearly one of the recent patch winners. “ When you have the first pick you can play your strategy from the very beginning and it’s important to have a hero who can be used in the offlane, support role or mid. Windranger can fit these three positions super good now, so that’s why we like the hero.”

The first match of the day at EPICENTER XL starts in less than 30 minutes. It will be FlyToMoon versu the two times champions at this tournament, Team Liquid. Kuro and co are on the hunt for their first Major title of this season. For MATUMBAMAN it will be the dream to win his first ever Major at EPICENTER as he told us earlier in the event. So, the lower bracket finals are bound to bring a lot of good dota and a lot of excitement. Make sure you don’t miss it. The English stream can be found at twitch.tv/epicenter_en1 and Russian stream at twitch.tv/epicenter_ru

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