Group stages for the Bucharest Major have begun and in OG’s first match, support player Jesse “Jerax” Vainikka pulled some serious mind games.
One of Jerax’s best-known heroes is his Earth Spirit, a warrior of stone that has a lot of mobility and some tricky abilities. During a lull in the action in OG’s match against Natus Vincere, Jerax decided to use the enemy’s expectations to his advantage.
Jerax rolls into the base and blinks out, which might look like a ward attempt to the enemy team. Wards grant crucial vision, and one planted squarely where Jerax rolled to would let OG know which heroes were lurking around the walls of the Radiant base.
Wards are also invisible, and so to remove them, Na’Vi would need to guess the location and drop an invisibility-breaking blue ward to see and destroy the sight-giving yellow ward.
Except Jerax didn’t plant any wards. He simply rolled in and used his blink dagger to pop back out, making it look like he did. And so Na’Vi spend the next few moments baffled, dropping blue wards to try and find the yellow they think Jerax planted.
At 100 gold a pop, it’s not a cheap investment, and you can see Na’Vi queuing up and dropping blues, rotating heroes to scour the landscape.
With one little play, Jerax tricked the opposing team into wasting hundreds of gold in wards and precious time for Na’Vi’s heroes to farm resources. OG would win the match, their first of the round-robin stage.
If you missed the games from Bucharest, you can catch a re-run or browse the VODs over at PGL’s Twitch channel.
Comments
4 responses to “Dota Pro Goes Galaxy Brain On Opposing Team”
I haven’t played Dota in 2 years or so, but it’s plays like this that make it a fun game to watch still. Easily my fav esport.
Same, I don’t really like any esports but watching Dota 2 at a very high level is always great.
Oh yeah. I am playing less Dota now than I have at any point in the past 12 years, but I still love watching pro games.
The same depth which gives Pro-DOTA2 its excitement also runs detriment to playing it as a pleb.