The hometown favorites Team Falcons are on a serious tear right now at the Esports World Cup Dota 2 tournament.

Falcons make final push to make grand final at EWC Dota 2

They just took down Tundra Esports after a ridiculous Game 2 comeback, although they did take the first game in the series after a bizarre interaction between Monkey King and Mars allowed them to turn things around. Now they’re in the grand final match against Team Spirit, the winner of which we’ll find out after a best-of-five series on Saturday. It should prove to be absolute cinema, as the kids say these days, if both Spirit and Falcons are in form by tomorrow.

Game 1 — Wukong gets stuck on the fence

Well, uh… this was kind of a sh*tty way to lose after playing the laning phase and mid game pretty much perfectly. After Tundra hit their timings with Remco “Crystallis” Arets’ Monkey King flawlessly (read: 10 minute Diffusal Blade) and riding the wave towards a net worth lead of almost 10,000 gold, a game-breaking bug involving Mars’ Arena of Blood (R) caused him to get stuck on top of the arena wall after attempting to jump in with Primal Spring (E).

This prevented him from doing basically anything — including casting Wukong’s Command (R) which probably would have won them the teamfight and perhaps even the game. Instead, he just had to sit there on the wall and watch the fight get turned around, which cost them basically their entire net worth advantage.

Falcons made sure to really take advantage of their luck from there, pushing the pace in order to limit Tundra’s ability to come back from such a devastating turn of events. And with a better late game carry in the form of Gyrocopter in their hands, it was just a matter of making fewer mistakes. Tundra tapped out just before the 45 minute mark.

Game 2 — Malr1ne’s SumaiL-like comeback

The second game started off extremely rough for Stanislav “Malr1ne” Potorak, whose Ember Spirit pick just suffered immensely through the first 10 minutes of the game. Not only did he have to play against Bozhidar “bzm” Bogdanov’s Queen of Pain, a natural lane counter to Ember Spirit, but he also got ganked by Tundra’s supports early and often. He had nothing but Phase Boots and Null Talisman 10 minutes in.

Amazingly, though, he was actually able to recover after going 1-7 in the first half of the game. Combined with Ammar “ATF” Al-Assaf having a good Bristleback game to make up for Malr1ne’s awful start, Falcons were able to hang around in a game they had no business being in after being down for so long.

Tundra kept their lead of about 15,000 gold or so despite Malr1ne’s comeback efforts, which made me personally think they would still end up closing out this game as long as they didn’t make too many mistakes. But guess what they did? A late game teamfight around the X minute mark allowed Falcons to come back into the game, after taking advantage of a huge three-man Avalanche (Q) by skiter as Tiny.

The game continued for another 10 or so minutes, with Falcons’ better late game draft kicking in slowly but surely. Past the 50 minute mark, they actually held the net worth lead — and not a small one by any means at around 7k. This ballooned to as much as 15,000 upon Falcons’ second high ground push.

What can I say? Neta “33” Shapira is one of the greatest Dota players of all time, but even he can’t do much about offlane Undying falling off a cliff in deep late game situations. Tundra just didn’t have the power to fight back at 60 minutes and beyond, and they were honestly just treading water. It took Falcons a while longer to finally put them away (another 20 freakin’ minutes, in fact) but a few Divine Rapiers later, they were eventually able to complete one of the craziest comebacks in the tournament — outside of Team Spirit’s games, that is.

I have to give Malr1ne his flowers for such an incredible effort to get back into this game. As an Ember Spirit player myself, I was completely convinced that he and the rest of his team were cooked after he had gotten left in the dust by bzm and Tundra in the laning phase. But he bounced back in a way that I haven’t seen since Syed “SumaiL” Hassan do it at the Dota 2 Asia Championships back in 2015, when he also got beaten nearly to a pulp as Storm Spirit — but came back with a vengeance in amazing fashion.