The Summit 9 is now officially in the books. Those five days in southern California showed us a lot. It showed us that EG fans are going to go into TI8 with a sufficient degree of hype, it showed us some strange and unusual heroes in the pro scene, it showed us some strange and unusual casting combinations, and...it showed us some other things. And I'm not here to talk about any of that. Here were MY takeaways.  

PAIN GAMING'S PYRRHIC VICTORY

You've all heard the term Pyrrhic Victory before, and you probably have a vague idea of what it means. It is "a victory that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it is tantamount to defeat," and it's named for the Greek King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who successfully defeated the Romans (twice!)...but...you know. And that's what happened to paiN Gaming at The Summit 9, at least as far as the fantasy front goes. You see, coming out of the South American Qualifiers, w33 stood out with a dazzling fantasy average of 17.3 FP/game. In my big fantasy guide that I put out a month ago, that made him the third-most prolific fantasy core player within the analyzed sample sets, trailing only Mineski's Moonn and OG's ana. But the one thing that always nagged w33's legitimacy was...I mean, come on. paiN came through the seemingly weakest region of all of them. My boy GranDGrant said it himself when he said "The SA Region was basically just paiN and SG, no offense to anybody else" (I'm paraphrasing). Just HOW would they perform against the vastly elevated level of competition TI8 had to offer? Well...the good news is paiN successfully proved the haters wrong (sort of) when they went 5-5 in group stage at the summit, taking games off of fellow TI participants Fnatic and OpTic in the process. They proved some degree of legitimacy against a harder caliber of opponent, and come TI8, they should be...somewhat OK. But getting back to the whole Pyrrhic Victory premise, they proved themselves at the cost of all shred of legitimacy w33 had as a viable fantasy play. While he had a few of his signature great fantasy performances, he averaged a completely underwhelming 12.7 FP over the course of the 13 games paiN played (make no mistake, 12.7 FP is completely unplayable for a fantasy core). Combine that with his SA Qualifier average of 17.3 FP over 15 games, and you get a new grand total of 15.2 FP/game, which drops him from Top 3 among cores to well outside the Top 10. w33 wasn't even the top fantasy performer among paiN players. That distinction belongs to Kingrd, who averaged 15.4 FP, which is alright, but nothing to write home about either. It's really too bad. It would have felt cool to endorse somebody from the SA scene on the fantasy scene. I certainly would have been ultra pumped to play my w33 card and then watch his games as he racked up points for me. Unfortunately, being flashy as f*** is not a fantasy stat. C'est la vie... paiN wasn't the only team who had poor fantasy outings. In fact, almost everybody at The Summit 9 performed at or below the averages they had coming in from qualifiers and/or the Supermajor. I won't attempt to answer why that was. Maybe it was a reflection of the new meta? Perhaps it was just the nature of the tournament itself, where teams were most likely screwing around and going half-speed with the International right around the corner? The tournament had a 41.3 minute average match duration so...I dunno. At any rate, besides w33, here were some of the other notable fantasy performances to keep an eye on. • PPD has shown steady improvement in fantasy, having averaged 13.6 FP/game at the Supermajor, 14.4 in NA Qualifiers, and now 15.8 at The Summit. I'm still certainly not playing him on day one of TI8, but he shows some promise going forward. • SVG had a poor showing that cost him in the fantasy credibility department, which is a big deal because he figured to be a Top 3 support play at TI8 after a 16.9 FP/game average between the NA Qualifiers and Supermajor. His comparatively paltry average of 14.2 FP/game at The Summit drops him to a cumulative average of 15.9. That's still fine, and that still has him among the Top 10 of support players going into TI8. But I'm not going to be as bullish on him as I would have been. At least not to begin with. • Like PPD, SumaiL had a great tournament by his own standards, performing at a 15.9 FP/G average. That still doesn't make him a particularly viable fantasy option to start TI8 with (he goes into the tournament with a 14.7 average, which is decidedly average), but if EG makes some waves and he continues to post good averages, he's somebody to keep an eye on. • The big winner from The Summit was Universe. The TI5 champ was already a high-end fantasy play based on his work in SEA Qualifiers, but the man was by far the most effective offlaner at The Summit, and that lifts his cumulative average to 12.5 FP/game, which ties him for, well, the best offlaner heading into TI8. For fantasy purposes, at least. I'll be releasing a new, updated list of fantasy averages in a future post (some time after Valve announces groups and a group stage schedule), so keep an eye out for that.  

THE NEW 7.18...UM, I MEAN 7.19 META

The Summit was finished, and we as a community had about three hours to interpret the state of the new meta before Valve went and dropped 7.19 on us and rendered much of what we had just learned meaningless. Well, then... Last week, I put out a couple of guides (Part One and Part Two) on the Predictions section of the TI Compendium. With a brand new tournament worth of data to analyze (as well as a brand new patch), I thought I'd revisit some of the picks I made. Now, the MAJORITY of my picks are remaining unchanged...nothing, in fact, will change for my team picks or for my tournament picks. But for heroes and players, I do have a few revisions. All told, I made 40 picks. I'm changing five of them. MOST PICKED HERO Previous Pick: Beastmaster Beastmaster probably isn't the pick here since he got largely ignored at the Summit, so let's return to the drawing board. I looked at the list of most-contested heroes (pick+ban) at The Summit, and lo and behold, ALL of the top 14 heroes on that list received at least some form of nerf. Not only that, the patch was almost ALL nerfs, and any buffs you may have seen were generally of the more minor variety. But not all nerfs are created equal. And you know what I think? Winter Wyvern, who was the fourth-most popular pick at The Summit (and the 11th-most banned) really didn't get hit THAT hard. 15 extra manacost on Lvl 1 Splinterblast? What even is that? I think the hero remains totally viable, and yet I also don't think it'll get banned enough that this most-picked status gets too threatened. I believe. NEW PICK: Winter Wyvern MOST BANNED HERO Previous Pick: Wisp ...well it's clearly not going to be Wisp, right? The five most-banned heroes at the Summit were Enchantress, PL, Bloodseeker, Crystal Maiden and Drow. They were subsequently nerfed in the following ways: Ench's heal costs 60 (!!!) more mana at level one, PL's base Int dropped by 2 and his illusions are 17% easier to kill, Bloodseeker's Thirst is significantly less effective at early levels, CM's slow is 30 mana more expensive at level 1, and Drow lost one base strength. Drow...lost one strength. One. NEW PICK: Drow Ranger HERO WITH HIGHEST KILL AVG Previous Pick: Bloodseeker In my old post, I mentioned that BS was among the four heroes with the highest kill averages from the Super Major, along with Storm, Shadow Fiend and Morphling. Three of those heroes free-fell off the face of the Earth at The Summit, but one of them hung tough as the second-most prolific hero in the average kills department (Tinker was first by a slim margin, for those interested). NEW PICK: Shadow Fiend HERO WITH HIGHEST ASSIST AVG Previous Pick: Wraith King WK got mostly ignored at The Summit, and he wasn't very good in this category when he did show up. The one hero at this tournament who had gobs of assists AND showed up a good amount (5 games) was Undying, who averaged 28.6 assists. Not only that, he somehow escaped the ever-watchful eye of the nerf-hammer somehow. Sold! NEW PICK: Undying PLAYER THAT PLAYS THE MOST DIFFERENT HEROES Previous Pick: 33 I always feel like you want two things for this pick: A team that legitimately has a large hero pool (duh), and a team likely to go far in the tournament, because a deeper run means more games, and more games means more chances for new heroes to be introduced. And let me tell you, Optic has got me shook right now. The runners-up at ESL Birmingham came out of the Supermajor with people looking at them as the best team in NA and a legit TI contender. Since then, they were the third and final team to get through NA Qualifiers (EG and VGJ.Storm got in before them with superior play, and both Complexity and Immortals very nearly claimed that final spot for themselves) and then finished LAST at The Summit? I have no idea what the future holds, but I'm not feeling great about backing a team that's so cold. Liquid and LGD both have deep hero pools (so does Secret). I'm going with a defending champion midlaner. NEW PICK: Miracle-  

FNATIC, GOING THE EXTRA MILE

Last but not least, I've updated the list of team match-length duration averages to reflect the five teams who participated at The Summit. Here's the new TI8 hierarchy for that particular category (these averages take into account games from the China Supermajor, TI8 Main Qualifiers, and The Summit 9). Avg. Match Duration T1. Vici Gaming - 44.9 T1. Fnatic - 44.9 3. Newbee - 44.0 4. Invictus Gaming - 43.4 5. Secret - 42.3 6. Mineski - 41.8 7. Virtus Pro - 40.9 8. OpTic Gaming - 40.4 T9. LGD.PSG - 40.0 T9. paiN Gaming - 40.0 11. TNC - 39.9 12. VGJ.Thunder - 38.8 13. Evil Geniuses - 38.7 14. Winstrike - 38.4 15. VGJ.Storm - 36.9 16. Serenity - 35.9 17. OG - 32.0 18. Liquid - 31.8 Fnatic came into The Summit averaging a relatively pedestrian 41.4 MPG based off their performance in SEA Qualifiers, which ranked them 7th among all TI8 participants. Thanks to a reasonably absurd, tournament-high 46.9 MPG average at The Summit, they're now tied for first with Vici Gaming for longest games played with their new cumulative average of 44.9 MPG. On the flip side of that, VGJ.Storm played their games on the very fast end of the spectrum during The Summit. VGJ.S blazed through their matches at 33 MPG to set a new cumulative average (between NA Qualis, the Supermajor and The Summit) of 36.9 MPG. That new average puts them among the fastest average match-durations among TI8 participants, though they're still not quite in the same stratosphere as the very fastest teams, OG and Liquid. Last of all, I'm on Twitter now, and if you want to follow me to track my new posts, you can do so @TheDotaScrub Until next time, as always, Happy Gambling. PHOTO CREDITS: Omar "w33" Aliwi of paiN Gaming, at EPICENTER 2017; Undying Wallpaper, by BigGreenPepper; Team Fnatic at ESL One Birmingham