AD2L S47 Voyager League Week 7 Match Reviews

All memes aside, I have written and re-written this section probably half a dozen times at this point. As I’m sure most of the terminally online readers of this series are well aware that this week there was possibly the first and hopefully the last Voyager drama of the season. Player YPeste, who I had previously commended, was apparently account sharing to some degree. So the 4 wins contributed to by him, against Dually and Quasar Dreams respectively, have been overturned, and as such, the final regular season standings have been significantly altered. It is not clear who knew, the extent to which they knew, and what exact action will be taken against the other members of JoJo. They will no longer be covered as they have been eliminated from playoff contention. The current playoff picture, with NO tiebreakers, is as follows:

1. Quasar Dreams
2. Disinformation Campaign
3. SlugPups
4. Boromir’s Buyback
5. My Team Sucks (SUX)
6. Josh A. All Time Low
7. Dually Truck Dumpster Fire
8. The Mittenses

Other than the obvious, the only big surprise this week was SUX drawing vs Dually, knocking them out of tiebreakers for Upper Bracket. I believe due to H2H matchup, Dually is below Josh A. ATL.

JoJo 🕺👻(3–10) vs Quasar Dreams 🏆 💤(13–1) Series overturned upon admin review, 2–0 given to QD.

Dually Truck Dumpster Fire (5–8)🚮🔥vs My Team sucks (SUX) 🎮🧛‍♂️(6–7) Week 7, we got our Avengers Endgame moment, but out of the portals comes not Captain America wielding Mjolnir, but Zyle’s Io…for some reason also with a Mjolnir. Game 1 we saw ResQ’s stack fall to the re-invigorated Dually squad, rallied behind Zyle’s 18 pick Io. A little bit of lane swapping saw Jerm’s Medusa sit offlane and Pollo’s Axe safelane, but an even laning phase gave way to a very quiet midgame. Until Pollo picked up his blademail at 25 mins, this quiet period maintained, but immediately afterwards, the game seemed to totally fall apart. In a single 5 minute period, the Truckers with a 3k lead just started absolutely mowing down buildings with no answer from SUX. With little initiation and a huge reliance on Invoker for teamfight control, SUX just could not kill the Medusa as she took the entire base. Itemization from the supports was on point, with Hazy and Zyle putting on an absolute clinic on 4 protect 1 strat. The Lion mid had its moments, though I still think the harpoon build is an extreme meme lol. Speaking of, I’ll also say that the Meme Hammer build on McLovin’s Injoker did him no favours. I don’t think tower pressure was what was necessarily needed this game and his farm was just way too far behind (despite top fragging/having the best KDA on the team). To me, the draft from SUX was just a little too dependent on crushing lanes and snowballing, and more than a little susceptible to initiation from anti-group up heroes like Axe. To play what was almost the last game of the season, we got a bit of classic Dually: Zyle Santa Claus Alchemist! Arc on carry Venge, Jerm back mid on DK, Pollo on Centaur, and of course Hazy on his legendary KotL, faced up against ResQ’s Ursa, McLovin’s Invoker, Wolfwise’s Tide, OK’s Lion and Neraidaphobia’s Snap. Knowing that this was to be a 65 minute SLOG, I’m sure the itemization would have been different, but outside of Ursa’s Battlefury, we saw no farming items picked up this game. Zyle started farming Aghs 15 minutes in, with only a Spirit Vessel and Arcane Boots to his name. DK and Centaur picked up early blinks to start fighting, but surely and purely in an effort to upset me, we had a Carry Venge Hydra’s Breath rush, which thankfully lost another game so my bias can continue to be justified! First big lost fight of the game was at 20 minutes in Radiant’s Triangle, with Alch too busy giving Venge her Aghs to show up. And this is part of my concern with the Santa Claus Alch strategy. Ideally, you have a lineup with 1 or 2 mega aghs heroes, 2 or 3 heroes who have good or even great aghs, but struggle to build them, and then you have the ability to transition late game into a semi-carry if the power spikes from the aghs have not won it for you. Like if they have Pango, Lina, QoP, Beast this game, where a 20 minute Aghs PLUS regular 20 minute items is enough to run over the game, that’s fucking sick. Or if you have Drow, MK, Gyro, Pudge, etc in the safelane and an early aghs absolutely skyrockets their ability to farm, you draft defensive and go down that route. I felt like between the itemization and draft, there was not a cohesive idea for what the goal of the draft, and despite some successful fights, the running theme seemed to be a useless pos 5 plus Arc’s Venge dying. Which I understand is part of the deal, but for example, 37 minutes into the game we saw Dire wipe off the back of Arc dropping 8.5k damage in a fight, but earned less than 500g more than the Ursa who basically killed Hazy and died. All in all, the game was relatively even and back and forth until about 50 minutes, where two back to back fights around the pit cost Radiant 14k gold and maybe double that in exp. In hindsight, I can’t help but think that no Pipe on Dually did them no favours into the huge magic damage of SUX here, maybe costing them their window to win earlier? Overall, it was a barnburner of a game, without outstanding individual performances from both sides. McLovin and Neraidaphobia have to be my MVPs on Dire, though an honorable mention to Arc who did perform very admirably on the carry Venge.

Disinformation Campaign 🕵️ (11–3) vs The Mittenses 🐈🐱 (4–9) Perhaps an unsurprising outcome, though we saw the return of Chris to carry and Auryce to mid! Maybe a little bit of added drama for the week, I have heard that Trollbus is out of the DC fam, possibly off to greener pastures in Conquerer but we’ll see. In the meantime, my good friend and even good-er player Voidhunter stood in for offlane this week. Unclear if this is a permanent change up or not, but hard to argue with the results! Game one we saw Tkhi absolutely stomp the Lifestealer Venge lane, which was meant to dodge getting stomped by the Razor lane. However, Voidhunter’s Razor still won that lane against Axe, leaving only Auryce’s Necro ahead on mid. But outside of a slightly botched fight around a T2, it was more than a little one-sided, with the game ending in 33 minutes, 46–8. I mean when you have a 20k lead by 20 minutes, the game just isn’t happening lol. Game 2 was much closer, insomuch as the Moon is quite a lot closer than the Sun — within sight, but not exactly a stone’s throw. To keep the game interesting, DC opted to lose all three lanes, with Chris’s Jugg hanging 20 denies on poor Pango and Twystedweb showing the fuck up mid to give DavidX a rare L in lane. However, these early game kills would provide to be the last he enjoyed all game… DavidX was channeling his inner Sumail and absolutely popped of from this point on, dropping 16 kills and 25 assists. It goes without saying that Tkhi had a great game, despite the difficult matchup into Yugg and Axe, but I’d like to focus on the stellar performances of Finesse and Pedro. Pedro casually enjoyed the highest KDA in the game, participating in 44 of the 56 kills with only 4 deaths, picking up 2 dunks (POG), one on Axe btw, as well as 3k damage with stolen shrapnel. Finesse, not to be outdone, mogged everyone with 46 kills participated in, including 39 INT stolen. Both supports not only out damaged their own Pango but even the enemy carry and mid, only falling short of Axe due to 11k+ blademail damage from him. Excited to see how this stack looks going into Week 1 of Playoffs, whether they are against SlugPups or Boromir’s Buyback.

MOTW: Boromir’s Buyback ⚔️ 💸 (7–6) vs SlugPups 🐌🐶(9–4) Surprising only the doubters, an absolutely textbook performance from BB brought them a draw that perhaps should have been a 2–0 in their favour! Outside of admin interference, this performance would have resulted in tiebreakers for UB, but thankfully for the Fellowship of the Ping, they are now in 4th place, free and clear. Game one was a little bit of a weird one, with GUNDAM’s mid Bloodseeker facing off against Red Seal’s Sladar, Kenny’s Kunkka drawing offlane to Keyser’s iconic Drow, and Spectre eking out a draw against Beef’s Nightstalker. But as Bloodseeker went for the Radiance himself, the Spectre build felt a little strange, ending up with a kind of semi-tank Dispersion build? Fortunately for the Pups, the match seemed to stall out in the midgame, allowing LuMiX and Kenny to hit their timings and even Spectre to come online eventually. Overall a great performance by both Seal and Beef, not to mention Keyser, whose positioning was absolutely stellar in every fight. Unfortunately, they were simply unable to close out the game before the scaling of Radiant kicked in. Perhaps in hindsight, double Radiance would have been fine just to provide the farm speed spec needs, or just grab the Mjolnir on Blood instead. Game 2 we got to see a lil’ bit of clownery, with Wills auditioning for Mid on his infamous Nature’s Prophet. Losing all three lanes was not a position the Pups were used to, and it felt like the split pushing and wave cutting from NP was only enough to stall, not turn the game. The Red Seal had perhaps his best game of the season, hanging 17 unanswered kills on the pups. On the other side of the river, we saw a very uncharacteristic performance from the offlane duo of Kenny and Roshi, who typically are top impact no matter what. The Elder Titan Experiment of Season 47 simply did not go as planned, with ET unable to get farm, get kills, or have impact in fights. Similarly, GUNDAM’s legendary AntiMage, which has solo’d more games than I’d care to admit, just seemed to be unable to find the space to find farm and even then wasn’t able to translate that into the kills he needed to get back into the game. I do have to commend again Seal’s performance and decision to pick up a super early BKB, which SlugPups just never seemed to find the answer for. BB did play quite conservatively, holding out for HG pushes only when it was extremely prudent to do so. But when it was time for that final fight, NP was unable to dish out the turret damage needed, ET was unable to provide the teamfight control for AM to do the same, and through superior teamfight and overwhelming networth advantage, BB took the game they needed to guarantee UB tiebreakers, in this case just locking in the 4th place slot outright. WP to all the boys, excellent showing!

I will be writing up a bit of a playoff prediction post sometime this week, as there are no tiebreakers, sadly. But even a cursory glance indicates we are in for some spicy fuckin’ games next week. QD has to choose between Boromir’s Buyback, the only team to take a game off them, or SlugPups, a team that they 2–0'd but who has been looking really strong post roster change. Meanwhile in Lower Bracket, our bottom two teams are 2 of top 3 teams from Season 46 playoffs. Playoff Mittenses take no prisoners, and are infamous for being a totally different beast to regular season. Dually has the playoff experience that Josh A. ATL lacks; could that be the difference maker in their series? At this point in the season, the gloves (or Mittens?) are off and it’s time to see everyone at their best! Good luck to all and Shout Out to all the AD2L Dads! Happy Father’s Day to you and know that no matter what, you are loved and you fucking matter!