Team Liquid to sweep Evil Geniuses in the group stage!!!

First day of the MDL Chengdu Major group ends past midnight in China
with Evil Geniuses and Team Liquid face off for a spot into the playoffs
upper bracket.

EG’s run at the Major was held against Team Adroit, who despite losing to NA’s signature position 1 “juggernaut” carry, they did a lot of things right, with their safeplay picks and on point hero bans. However, it can be the same with Team Liquid, who chose to face against upper winners’ series counting for a spot into the upper bracket playoffs. In the first day, they allowed EG to pick their comfort heroes and losing to RTZ’s unstoppable Alchemist. Going into the second game, Liquid respect banned the Alchemist, but EG were still dominant with their Keeper of the light and Kunkka pick, a powerful team fight purposely containing big fights and controling the lane phase while their last pick was Arc Warden. Enough  to make space for their big carry to go online as soon as possible. However, Team Liquid had the overall last pick of the draft and they matched the late game farm potential of Arc Warden with Anti-Mage, which was sent in the offlane to farm with Arc warden and KOTL

Hightlight Clip : https://www.twitch.tv/videos/509010248?t=08h45m42s

EG had theoretically the better draft in the last game of the series, with an offlane Lycan, a safe lane Chaos Knight and Kunkka again. They should have been able to cut through buildings and take the victory, but they got out maneuvered by Boxi on an offlane Puck, who was able to split push the map, take down the first racks of the game, despite playing into a heavy pushing line-up, and disrupt EG’s focus to the point where they made a game losing mistake.

Evil Geniuses felt confident going for the high ground attack with Aegis, Cheese and the Roshan Aghanim’s Blessing on their CK, but misjudged Liquid’s amount of armor on Razor and got wiped out when they chose to dive the EU team past the tier four towers.  They died without buybacks on Chaos Knight and Kunkka and were not able to defend their base when Liquid marched forward and forced the GG call.