I think I was the first person to use Visage in competitive play. Back in March, I could only really play two competitive heroes, Lich and QoP, and the only reason why I was considered able to use QoP was because I had to play something that I didn't completely feed at if Lich was taken away from me. Well, I could Silencer and VS too, but they weren't being used by us much in competitive play then.

Well, with that story, let us proceed to our semi-finals game in RGN Season 3 against Rev0.

Our first 3 picks are probably something we won't do against any other clan. Losing the coin toss, we end up with Chen, Zeus, and RK as our first 3 picks, picking them effectively just to deny Rev0 these heroes. It does allow them though, to get Warlock, QoP, and THD. They get Veno on their 4th pick, and after contemplating for a really long time we finally picked Sandking as our fourth choice, seeing AoE as a rather important factor.

Their last pick is unexpected when they pick Slayer. At this point, we start assigning heroes.

Tofu: Ok, ant zeus solo mid.
Ant: No no I can't solo warlock with zeus.

See, I'm mostly fine with Zeus solo in a 2v1 or a 3v1 situation, because I can just use Arc Lightning to farm and what I'm expected to do is simply to not die. In a 1v1 situation though, I don't have that 1v1 experience with Zeus to actually control a strong opponent, not just humji and farm.

Tofu: Okay, ant play RK!
Whole team: NO!

I actually think I can RK pretty fine, except it's probably nowhere near ice or even Tofu or LuX's standard. For the most part my RK is blacklisted because of some hiding incident... which wasn't actually that bad but I won't elaborate on it.

Tofu: Ant can chen right? I mean he can enchantress...
Ice: I can Chen better then him with one hand and one eye (note: THIS IS PROBABLY MORE THAN TRUE)

See, the difference between Ench and Chen is that Ench can just suicide all her creeps and pioritises more farming and surviving than backstabbing (since you can never be ensured to have a good backstabbing creep when you reach a faraway lane to backstab, whereas Chen's creeps are permanent so you can rely on it more).

Tofu: Ant SK is not bad wad...
Ant: ROFL NO (90% Miss Burrowstrike FTW).

I've done some pretty decent Sandkings actually, but seeing as how Sandking is really the hero here that makes or breaks us, I'm not exactly willing to take it up. Add in lack of experience and the fact that my Burrowstrike hitting rate is on-off.

So, left without a choice, the last hero pick goes to me. LoA was a consideration but triple melee isn't desirable. Viper is possible but for one I'm not too confident with it, and Slayer sort of scares us from choosing Viper. The same goes with Bear. Thus, we opt to sacrifice a little bit of lane control in favour of late game power and survivability as well as hero allocability for me and draft Visage.

I solo mid against a Warlock and actually do rather decently. With Gargs up at level 6, I'm farming and denying well enough to drive the Warlock off the lane when he wishes to farm faster. Veno QoP from Rev0 at top lane is however, losing quite badly to SK and Zeus. LuX does amazingly well early game and never loses his momentum throughout the game.

For the most part, LuX and Musica are pwning around the map while ice mixes farming and backstabbing. For the most part he actually takes much less creeps than me, but makes this up by stealing all the hero kills. My lane is always surprisingly deserted. Everytime I go to a lane to farm, it doesn't take more than a few waves before the enemy hero decides to go backstab another lane or find better farming prospects elsewhere.

Tofu's role is more or less bait. I have no idea why, but the means that Rev0 are using to take down Tofu's Zeus are far too extreme for their own good. In a "LuX tells Tofu to go get caught and Tofu miraculously listens" moment, he gets simultaneously BLINKED AT, Infernalled, Ice pathed, Macropyred, Dual Breathed, SSed, Poison Novaed, and finally SONIC WAVED, effectively clumping all the enemy heroes together without their ultimates and blink for LuX to happily blink in with Epicentre and clear them.

This game wasn't really as close as we expected. Rev0 holds out very well, seeing as how ice and me are far too well farmed for them to stop around 40 minutes into the game, and that the QoP, despite having a long time to free farm in her lane, has been caught a lot and thus isn't very well farmed, but once their ultimates are used they have nothing else left to take us down. The Sven more or less finishes all of Rev0's heroes, unfortunately giving no credit to the Visage that is flinging skulls at them and doing most of the damage while the RK walks up to them. I do manage to get one KS from radiance though.

Game doesn't end that quickly, but it ends convincingly enough with pretty much no chance for Rev0 to have won. A short writeup since I spent most of the game farming empty lanes against no one so I'm sort of blur as to what happened around the map.

Well, replays should be released anyway for anyone interested to watch. If anything, take a look at the replay of the quarter finals against Etny.

As for the finals game though, I'll cover it tomorrow or something, and hopefully I remember what was going on around the map. It was definitely much more exciting but there isn't a replay, so expect a more detailed writeup. I won't be as sleepy when I write it either.