PGL Wallachia Grand Finals: Yandex fend off a Liquid reverse sweep

PGL Wallachia Season 7 just showed us with its final day what a Dota 2 triathlon would look like. Team Liquid had to play eight separate games of Dota today, nearly breaking the all-time total match duration record in the process.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t get past Team Yandex despite getting close to reverse sweeping them in the grand finals, as the upper bracket team proved to be the better squad at the end of it all.

Game 1 — Do the Hotfeet Hustle

Yandex obviously didn’t want to faff about at the start of this series, as they drafted themselves a very tempo-heavy lineup revolving around Largo, Beastmaster, and Ember Spirit as the cores. They enacted their gameplan right off the bat, playing fast as their strengths primarily lay in their cores’ Aghanim’s Scepter timings.

It takes a ton of confidence to play like this against a highly experienced team like Liquid, so I have to commend them for putting the pressure on right away as was required by their draft choices. Dmitry “DM” Dorokhin did especially well in the laning phase against the Marci-Hoodwink pairing on Liquid’s side, which was impressive considering how awful Largo is at laning.

This translated to a decently fast 16 minute Aghanim’s Scepter timing, which immediately allowed Yandex to activate their gameplan and play at a breakneck pace. They earned themselves a lead of 10,000 gold around the 23 minute mark, and constricted Liquid’s side of the map by rapidly taking their outer towers. A massive teamfight win going their way 30 minutes in saw Arman “Malady” Orazbayev drop a huge Fatal Bonds (Q) and Chaotic Offering (R) combo as Warlock on three Liquid heroes, which dealt as much damage as you might imagine.

Things just spiraled way out of control from this point onwards. As caster Niklas “Wagamama” Högström noted, both Malady and Martin “Saksa” Sazdov (playing Shadow Shaman) were more farmed than Marcus “Ace” Christensen’s offlane Centaur Warrunner. You know you’re not having a good time of it when that happens. Not even the Tinker from Michał “Nisha” Jankowski could save them after getting put into the ground in the mid game. Advantage Yandex.

Game 2 — Total Yandex-struction

The second game saw Yandex put Liquid’s backs against the wall in a hurry in this grand final match. Picking Monkey King for Ilya “CHIRA_JUNIOR” Chirtsov was instrumental in getting them the early advantage, given that Nisha was playing Ember Spirit — a hero naturally crushed by Monkey King in the laning phase. Nisha has consistently been the best member of Team Liquid for the past few months now, and so keying in on him was obviously on Yandex coach Alexander “Accell” Litvinenko’s mind this game.

Combined with Alimzhan “watson” Islambekov’s Ursa, CHIRA_JUNIOR and the rest of his team played at more or less the same blistering pace as in the first game. This had the knock-on effect of also completely shutting Ace out of the game once more, with his Bristleback going 0-5 around 25 minutes into the game.

There really isn’t much else to say about the rest of this map. Yandex held Liquid to single digit kills the entire time, and they were winning basically every single teamfight with their flawless execution and shotcalling. Oh, and Liquid seeing themselves lose to DM’s offlane Phoenix might have destroyed their mental too. That’s something you definitely do not see every day.

This game in particular was a sign that Liquid might have come into this series completely exhausted. After all, they had played the second-longest professional Dota 2 match in history (in terms of total game time elapsed) prior to the grand finals, which had to have tired them out immensely. Yandex, meanwhile, enjoyed a long break and plenty of time to prepare for this best-of-five.

Game 3 — The Pale Horse wakes up kicking

Game 3 was just Liquid repeating the pattern that they’ve found themselves in this entire tournament — that being involved in games that last 60 minutes or more. This was an extremely gutsy performance for them knowing how worn out and fatigued they were by this point in the day

Nisha having a good lane for once in this series helped a ton. The first two games were uncharacteristically mediocre for him in the laning phase, and when coach William “Lee” Blitz gave him the Beastmaster, I honestly thought Liquid might already be done. Beastmaster isn’t really a hero one would associate with Nisha, but he did so much work in this one to keep Liquid alive in the match.

In perhaps the most significant teamfight of the game at around the 65 and a half minute mark, his Refresher Orb really came in handy in preventing DM’s Phoenix from saving watson’s Shadow Fiend from certain death. He popped the cooldown reset and waited patiently to go back in on watson, with his Primal Roar (R) pushing DM far enough away that he couldn’t grab watson in the Aghanim’s Scepter Supernova (R). Had Nisha not pulled off this clutch move, it’s entirely possible that Yandex would have turned the fight around and maybe gone for a high ground siege.

Yandex actually had a pretty big window to finally close the grand finals out in game 3, with watson and DM leading the way in the mid game. And although they eventually lost the lead due to Liquid’s smart teamfighting, they did an insanely good job of holding on in this game, even when they were staring down the barrel of a 30,000 gold lead on the side of Liquid.

But in the end, the Michael “miCKe” Vu Windranger came through. With Nisha’s control disrupting Yandex’s flow and rhythm in the deep late game, miCKe was there to dish out the physical DPS. He ended up clocking in at nearly 75,000 points of hero damage, in fact, and so Liquid got themselves on the board after an extremely grueling game 3.

Game 4 — Unethical Dota

I guess when you’re trying to make a reverse sweep comeback in a best-of-five series where you got punked in the first two games, you have to dip into some dirty tactics to give yourself a chance. That’s exactly what Liquid did in game 4, pulling out this disgusting Huskar-Tinker draft that worked maddeningly well.

It worked even though Yandex recognized the importance of shutting down Nisha on Huskar, with a move to put Saksa’s Muerta in the middle lane to serve as backup for CHIRA_JUNIOR’s Puck. Puck versus Huskar is an extremely unplayable matchup for the former, as I’ve experienced many times in pub games before — so this was the exact move that Yandex needed to make to keep Nisha from getting out of control.

It failed. I don’t think Saksa and CHIRA_JUNIOR were quite used to doing this kind of unorthodox strategy, because they were missing denies even though the lane was 2v1. Nisha shouldn’t have gotten as much out of this lane as he did, but the cooperation between his two opponents was not quite up to par. He ran away with the advantage nonetheless, which was bad, bad news for Yandex. Add to that the fact that Erik “tOfu” Engel was there to keep Nisha healthy as the support Tinker, and you’ve got a recipe for instant success.

With Nisha going on a tear from the early game, Yandex completely folded under the immense pressure of an unchecked Huskar. They managed only one — yes, one — kill the entire game. This was a shutout of the highest order, and just what the doctor ordered for Liquid given their position in the series up to this point.

Game 5 — Across the finish line

With all the marbles on the line, we moved into game 5 anticipating a slugfest between these two teams for the Wallachia title. This game was definitely much closer than any of the others, with neither side getting an insurmountable early advantage or anything like that. No, game 5 brought out the best in both teams, although the ending might not have been exactly what we wanted to see.

Neither side really came out of the drafting phase crushing the other. Yandex went with a Luna-Shadow Demon draft, while Liquid opted to counter CHIRA_JUNIOR’s Invoker in the lane with Void Spirit for Nisha. As for Liquid’s selection for miCKe, they went with Shadow Fiend — a pick that didn’t really fill me with much confidence given his performance on it in game 2.

Unfortunately for Liquid, CHIRA_JUNIOR managed to get a lot of creep kills within the first wave, which was definitely not supposed to happen given his terrible laning. Allowing Invoker to get such a good start complicated things for Liquid from the jump, although you wouldn’t know that just looking at how long this game went for.

Aside from that, though, both squads traded blows through the laning phase and in the mid game, with Yandex eking out a small lead. What allowed them to really get cracking in this one though was the fast Aghanim’s Scepter purchase from Malady, who was playing Jakiro in this game. And as if Jakiro wasn’t already one of the strongest heroes in the metagame, getting a Scepter this quickly was what allowed Yandex to really dominate teamfights in the late game.

They broke the game open with a fantastic engagement in their bottom jungle, where they had a hard read on Liquid’s Smoke of Deceit play. This is where the upgraded Macropyre (R) really came into play for Malady, as he lay down a carpet of ice and fire to keep Liquid from moving as they wished. They followed up the teamfight win with an easy Roshan attempt.

Realizing that miCKe might not have buyback at this juncture, they went for two lanes of barracks, which they took hand over fist. They moved over to the top lane to try their hand at getting mega creeps, but miCKe respawned just in time to defend the lane. It ended up not mattering, of course, because at this point Yandex were just too far ahead for Liquid to deal with.

Yandex showed a champion’s discipline by pulling back from the Dire base after getting mega creeps, recognizing that they had so much gold to spend on getting even further ahead and closing this series out. And while this was a somewhat risky proposition given Liquid’s penchant for turning deep late game situations around, Yandex’s execution at the end was more than enough to get them over the line.

Liquid threw bodies and buybacks at Yandex in the final siege, but it wasn’t enough. This was a much needed victory for Team Yandex, who are now two-time LAN winners this season. This team is so incredibly dynamic yet disciplined (even with a stand-in!), and they’re just getting better and better as time goes on. They could prove to be a serious threat in Shanghai once The International 2026 (TI15) rolls around.

As for Liquid, the reverse sweep just wasn’t meant to be. They played about 12 hours of high level Dota today, and the lower bracket disadvantage definitely played a part in their eventual loss. Still, second place after surviving a marathon earlier in the day is absolutely nothing to sneeze at, and they can come away from this grand final knowing that they’re also getting better bit by bit.