In what can only be described as a shocking result, South American Dota 2 squad Heroic taken the first ever tier 1 tournament title for their home region at PGL Wallachia Season 2 — all while beating the most dominant team from the previous competitive season in Team Falcons.

How Heroic Took First Tier 1 Win for SA at PGL Wallachia Season 2

And they did so in fairly convincing fashion no less, with a 3-1 victory in the Grand Finals against one of the toughest teams to beat in the entire Dota 2 scene. Though South American teams haven’t historically been taken seriously as contenders at high level Dota 2 competitions, Heroic showed everyone just why their rivals should start looking at the region as an actual threat to win international tournaments.

The closest that South America had ever gotten prior to Heroic’s win at Wallachia was top 6 at The International 2022 (TI11) with Thunder Awaken.

Of course, that result bagged more than twice the prize money that Heroic earned at Wallachia ($662,543 for Thunder Awaken vs. $300,000 for Heroic), but the very fact that the region now has a trophy to boast about is big for the scene over there.

Parker Makes the Difference

Young gun David “Parker” Nicho Flores, who joined Heroic just a few weeks prior to the Wallachia, stood out immensely throughout the entire tournament. Parker signed with Heroic to replace Héctor “K1” Rodríguez after their TI disappointment and immediately made his presence known.

His performance at this tournament has certainly turned heads across the Dota 2 world, with the community at large praising his steady play as a more traditional “greedy” carry player. While the metagame these days typically dictates a more teamfight-oriented playstyle from all five players, Parker literally said, “I’m him,” and won the entire competition anyway playing like an old school position 1.

It helped plenty that his support duo in Elvis “Scofield” Peña and Matheus “KJ” Santos Jungles Diniz stepped up to protect him as the important win condition that he was.

Actually, the rest of Heroic really leveled up their gameplay at Wallachia, particularly in ways that really enabled their new carry to shine and bring them across the finish line comfortably.

The Road Ahead

So it seems like SA Dota is soo back. This first place finish could be the first of many for the region, but there’s still quite a ways to go before most are ready to call them top dogs.

Defeating Falcons was hardly a fluke. On their way to the grand finals, Heroic also took down Infinity, Tundra, Azure Ray and Navi, all in pretty convincing fashion.

Heroic PGL Wallachia
via PGL

Next up, they’ve got DreamLeague Season 24 at the end of October to look forward to, with several other top tier teams to contend with then.

It’ll be interesting to see if Heroic can keep their win streak going at DreamLeague.

This tournament will be played online, which has historically always been a problem for South America thanks to the latency between them and the servers that international tournaments are typically played on.

This time round, DreamLeague will be played on the Europe West server, so they will have to contend with possible connection issues on top of the fierce competition they’ll be facing, including the likes of TI13 winners, Team Liquid.

There’s clearly still work to be done for them, so we’ll have to wait and see if they can keep this momentum going early into this new season. And who knows, perhaps we’ll see them do well enough this year to get invited to the next edition of The International if they keep this up.