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TI10 Fantasy Guide: Day One, by a washed up 8k player

EsportsHeaven 2021-10-06 03:32:50
  TI10 Fantasy Guide is finally here! Hi folks. Valve has waited until the last moment to release the group stage draw for TI10. That doesn’t leave much time to make predictions, but we’ll do our best and help you out to win some legit TI10 fantasy points. FIRST LOOK This might be the busiest first day in the history of first days, given it's TI10, so the first step is working out what teams we can write-off (mostly) for consideration – that’s any team with less than 3 series on the first day. There’s a whole lot of teams with a full 3-series day, so that’s our pool to make our choices. Given that teams are given breaks between series – only the first teams to play tomorrow may have 3 games, and the exceptions are Aster and T1, so we’ll discount those from the running for day one. My feasible options are EG, IG, VP, OG, Undying, and Alliance. This is where it gets tricky. A quick rundown of each team’s path to get here may help – EG dominated all but one team in the NA DPC (which we’ll talk about on later days), making it to the final of the last two majors, with a FULL lower bracket run at the AniMajor. IG are the Singapore Major Champions, also with a dominant showing in the first season of the Chinese DPC, though with a disappointing performance in the AniMajor, after a fourth place in DPC S2. VP have crushed each DPC season with ease, and it didn’t look close at all, but these successes haven’t translated well to majors, with top six placements eluding them thus far. OG haven’t made it to a Major and they haven’t done particularly well in either DPC season but ran the difficult qualifier gauntlet to make it here. Undying have consistent strong showings in NA DPC – but haven’t quite made it to a major thus far, with a dominant showing over a weaker field. Alliance have been second and then first in the EU DPC – purportedly the most difficult region, but with a failure to break into the top 8 at Majors. A compilation of data from OpenDota and datdota done by u/hawkie74 on reddit will be helpful here. The primary takeaways from it from their breakdown seem to be this: pick winning players, pick players that play longer, and choose carry players for core roles, and hard-support players for support roles.

Choices, Choices.

I can’t speak to the possible length of some of these games, it’s a new patch and it’s a wild west out here, but a look at the matchups for each team is a good place to start.  I’m going to go ahead and say that Undying’s day one looks horrendous – with the strongest average opponents (in my view), so I won’t be picking them. IG’s opening day could be better, but not much worse, with two of the top three of the AniMajor standing in the way – I’d not recommend picking IG players here. EG look to have a very contentious first outing so expect at least a couple dropped games here – if you’re optimistic, take a chance on an Arteezy or a Cr1t. VP will either blitz or crumble against two of the top EU teams and Undying. If you’re feeling lucky, put it all on red and take core players here. OG may have DPC flashbacks against Alliance – it’s the VP matchup that scares me here. I’d possibly take Sumail here given his INSANE tower stats. Alliance has a scary day one, but they’ve proved themselves against OG online, and they are a stable team in group stages historically. As for my actual picks – I’ve got Sumail and Arteezy on cores, with both averaging highly thus far even despite potential losses. I’d also consider taking Nikobaby due to his high average game length and typical 4 protect 1 style. For mid, it’s got to be GPK for me, I’m rolling the dice a bit here. Safer picks might be Abed, or Topson. Last but not least, my support choices are Fly and N0tail, happily sitting side by side. I’m choosing position 5 players as they average higher by almost 10% compared to position 4 players. If you’re a gambling man – Kingslayer may serve you well. Fng may also be a safe pick given game length.

Summary

  • Cores: Sumail, Arteezy.
  • Mid: GPK.
  • Supports: Fly, N0tail.
These card choices can be seen at the top of the article – please forgive my less than ideal card qualities, it’s a struggle out here. Honourable mentions but didn’t quite make my day one cut:
  • Cores: Nikobaby, Nightfall.
  • Mid: Abed, Topson.
  • Supports: Kingslayer, Fng.
While choosing cards be aware that not all statistics are created equal, and some are, on average, better than others. So for your lovely gold and silver cards, be sure for cores to prioritize kills, deaths and towers. For supports, wards placed and camps stacked are your friends, but in the coming days if the stack meta is gone entirely, then I recommend teamfight as the next best thing. For these predictions I’ve used the following: Fantasy Dota has been extremely useful for analyzing if carries or offlaners are better – and for reference for DPC performance. I’ll keep coming back to this for matchups I’m not too familiar with. Both OpenDota and Dotabuff are going to be VERY useful for keeping up to date with matches, and for in-depth looks at player performance over time. For this article I’ve been doing some dives into DPC performances, so these sites have been a lifesaver. I won’t be using much more than these, so I’m quite possibly being prehistoric with the way I’m doing these predictions, so forgive me. Good luck!
Article written by guest editor Rime. If you want to see more of these guides then follow them on Twitter . Check out other sections at Esports Heaven.
 

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