FISSURE Playground: Falcons To Face Tundra in Grand Final

Grand finals day is always extremely unforgiving in the world of Dota 2. Regardless of the tournament, the teams left fighting their way through the lower bracket gets the short end of the stick and FISSURE Playground is no different. After taking down PARIVISION in a 2-0 lower bracket final, Team Falcons will now go on to face off with Tundra Esports in the grand final later today.

Viva La Falcons

Dota is a curious game, it’s not uncommon for one team to completely dominate the scene for a year (I’m thinking Gaimin Gladiators, Team Spirit and Team Falcons thoughts here) but what’s less common is for that team to stay on top more longer than a year. That’s what Falcons are setting themselves up for.

But this FISSURE Playground finals day is a little bit different to what they’ve come to expect as usually if they make it this far, we see Falcons sitting comfortably in the upper bracket with the pressure firmly off. This time round, ESL One Bangkok champions PARIVISION really made them work for it.

In classic Team Falcons style, we did get to see some “friendly banter” between the two teams but it’s all in good fun, at least according to Ammar. The games were close but at the end of game 2, even DM’s Phoenix couldn’t stand against the Doom/Omniknight combo, nevermind Skiter’s Gyro.

Tundra in Waiting

Now that the grand finals are just a couple of hours away, the stage is set for the grand finals. Tundra has a relatively new line up with ex-Gaimin Gladiators Anton “dyrachyo” Shkredov stepping into the carry position, Bozhidar “bzm” Bogdanov playing in the mid lane and TI champion Neta “33” Shapira playing offlane.

Usually, this would have me saying something like “there might be growing pains”, “they need to find synergy” or similar but not Tundra. Making it to the grand finals in their first ever tier 1 tournament together as a roster just makes me think Tundra might be the next truly dominant team in Dota and quite frankly, they deserve it. We’ll need to wait a few more hours to see if they can turn this run into a $400,000 W but I have faith.