First order of the day: http://www.dotasg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1586

If you haven't voted, do vote, and since most of the stuff said is pro-XL, it'll be good to have some valid comments about pro-AP if you vote against the current majority, otherwise it's pretty easy to dismiss any errant votes.

GG-Client ADC is coming up. TGL's massive online single-elim tourney is also coming up soon, but no news yet on that.

Now that we're done with those, lets get on to WGT. I thought the replay pack would save me from having to feel a need to do any reporting on matches but the replay pack seems to be short of lots of replays, including a Zenith vs XqR replay that is... anything but what it professes to be.

To start, player lineup. Some background. A couple of weeks back we get invited (again) to the same tournament in The Phillipines that has been trying to go off for a while, except this time they seem pretty certain that it actually is going to happen. Well, it clashes with WGT, but it's so much more fun to fly over and play overseas!

The lineup for going to The Phillipines was proposed to be: NutZ, Tofu, zx, me, and one more from somewhere else. I wasn't even confirmed since it was smack right after my prelims. More bummer, since WGT was going on it was kind of hard to get anyone we knew to sacrifice WGT for their team and fly over with us. GPS was kind of busy studying anyway (which Tofu and I should have rightfully been doing...), we couldn't confirm anything with LuX, and ice was out of question. The solution? Fly Musica over from Australia!

The best benefit of this was that it left us with a lineup that could actually train together. After our exams at least. We almost always had 3 or 4 online for at least one game each day the week before WGT and we made sure we were at least moderately prepared to fly down to The Phillipines.

The week before we were supposed to fly over though, we STILL hadn't confirmed anything about the trip with the organisers on the other side. Seeing as how we had to book air tickets for Musica, we needed to make a decision quick about whether to fly him over or not. In the end, we decided that in the event that we didn't fly over to The Phillipines, at least Musica could play WGT, so we signed up for WGT as a backup tournament.

Lo and behold, as Musica flies over, we get word from The Phillipines side that it would best for us NOT to fly over (which is all fine... if Musica wasn't already on a plane and after we had made arrangements already for the week). Oh boy, looks like we would actually have to play WGT =.=

So up comes our first match against Gamers Inc. Tofu insists on playing Pudge. By insists I mean he threatens to throw the game or emo if we don't draft Pudge for him. I get thrown into playing SF and NutZ gets thrown into playing PotM. Role reversal eh? Tofu plays Pudge, and Musica plays THD, and together in top lane they do a mighty fine job of first blooding, as expected, the lane against Viper and Bristleback. After which, they continue doing a mighty fine job of feeding the Bristleback to no end. I believe it's something like 6 kills for the BB in the span of 10 minutes or something like that.

Well, to summarise, the game ends with NutZ being 12-0 and my SF getting 16-0, so Pudge and THD's feeding is offset a little.

The next game sees us up against x3m.osiris with Tofu INSISTING on playing Slayer, which thankfully only blows for the first 15 minutes or so of the game. It's Musica and ZX this time who, aided by a few arrows from the opponent, feed the PotM down at bottom lane. PotM continues to rack up kills with very well placed arrows, but lacks a lot in the farming department, which leads to a rather even hero score in the mid game, but a serious farming advantage on our side.

The next day has us up against GG[U] first thing in the morning and I can't even remember what happened. I vaguely recall a relatively one-sided game with Musica actually, amazingly, not blowing at QoP, getting hex up very quickly - without dying!!!!!(!!!!!!!oneone111)!!! and me pushing alone not really being needed much by the team at all as PotM.

Up next was Knightmare who had just finished DNA-SK. I think the replay is available and full, so shouldn't be a problem for anyone who is curious to find out what happened. About the draft choice, SP was a pick simply because we knew where the draft was going and we simply wanted to screw up Knightmare's draft to see what they would do without SP. Fortunately, they didn't do anything much.

Sunday's game against xqR was a rather good game. Musica's QoP went up against BB in the bottom lane, my Silencer went up against SF in the mid-lane which was quite unexpected because we had as of then not yet seen xqR's SF solo mid. Tofu and ZX with PotM NA went up against a Slayer RK that surprisingly fended them off very well. Their beastmaster roamed around, and NutZ, playing Viper for the first time I've actually seen him use it competitively, ran around as well.

Tofu fed with PotM. Sort of. He farmed pretty damn slowly, being taken down repeatedly by Slayer Beastmaster and RK. Still, I think Musica and I are slightly thankful to Tofu for feeding so much since it made our job a lot easier with less heroes after our skin. Musica went on a practically unhindered farming spree and got hex up in 23 minutes (he would love for me to add that he had the money for hex long before he bought it, but only actually got the stick of hexxage at 23 minutes or so).

Skirmishes went rather evenly for a while, but always left Musica's QoP and my Silencer alive, resulting in the QoP and Silencer being insane sources of damage which xqR, surprisingly underfarmed, were unable to stop. Tofu, being Tofu, still managed to up his cookie-cutter Skadi + Mjolnir in a pretty short time and when that was done, the 2-hex 3-ranged focus fire with Musica's Stygian Desolator was cutting through their heroes... LIKE BUTTER!

Might not be the best report, but with replays up, a rather blurry memory from lack of sleep the past few days, I guess it's a sufficient summary.

Then there was Micro. The replay is up there, and that's pretty much all there is to it. Maybe they weren't quite prepared as much for us this time, seeing as how we pretty much didn't even plan to play through WGT until the day of our first match.