PGL Wallachia Season 7 group stage: Tundra and Vici show grit and determination

The group stage of PGL Wallachia Season 7 is now over, and we have our eight playoff teams decided ahead of the upper bracket quarterfinals.

The final day of proceedings in the Swiss leg produced two compelling matches in particular, between Chinese compatriots Xtreme Gaming and Vici Gaming, as well as perennial rivals PARIVISION and Tundra Esports.

Who even needs the qualifiers?

So here we are, with Vici Gaming making it through the group stage after a spirited performance against Xtreme Gaming — a team that was significantly better than them on paper this tournament. But as caster and Chinese Dota enthusiast Benjamin “Bkop” Kopilow mentioned at the end of the third game, they’re doing this without even qualifying for PGL Wallachia Season 7 first.

True enough, they were a last minute replacement for Eastern European qualifier winners Power Rangers, who opted not to attend the event in the end. VG weren’t even supposed to be here. And yet here they are, guaranteed to finish at least top 8 despite not really being a big ticket squad from China. To be fair, XG are the only big ticket team from China this season — but if VG have anything to say about it, that might just change soon enough.

Huge props to Guo “Xm” Hongcheng in particular, who thoroughly proved that he is still just as good as any mid laner from his home region. While he might not have outplayed Cheng “NothingToSay” Jin Xiang the entire series, his overall impact from the lane was felt the whole time. He displayed a knack for knowing what to do with the fact that he crushed NothingToSay in the games where he did win the lane matchup, whereas NothingToSay basically did nothing to advance the game state in XG’s favor when it was his turn to win the laning phase.

As a fan of Team Tidebound and by extension the old Wings Gaming, I’m super stoked to see that this Vici Gaming roster will be moving on into the playoffs. I don’t think they’ll win the whole tournament, but right now, any win is a good win for this team.

As for XG, they should rightly be embarrassed for losing the way they did to a club that didn’t even have the right to attend before. Wang “Ame” Chunyu just ain’t him anymore, to be honest, and it showed in his performance as Kez in the third game. Kez isn’t really that good at just playing a straight up stand-and-deliver style, which Ame tried to do against Guo “shiro” Xuanang’s Shadow Fiend. He was quickly taught by shiro the error of his ways, thus kicking XG out of the tournament.

Child’s play

BetBoom Team enjoyed a total whitewash against Na’Vi in the second match of the day, completely outclassing the BLAST Slam 6 Malta grand finalists two games to none. It was hardly a close contest at all, with neither game even reaching 40 minutes of elapsed time. It didn’t help Na’Vi’s case in this series that their laning phases in both games were utter garbage, something that has been a chronic issue for this roster in particular for some time now.

Read: Baqyt “Zayac” Emiljanov was level 4 at 13 minutes into the game. On his signature Earth Spirit, no less. This whole “strategy” of theirs where they just put Yurii “pma” Prots in offlane hell isn’t going to cut it, and I’d really like to see them veer away from this entirely. Zayac needs to learn to play heroes that don’t just sacrifice the offlane from the outset, or Na’Vi are going to be an extremely exploitable team for the rest of this season.

The second game wasn’t much better, either. They survived for an additional 30 seconds compared to the first game. That should tell you everything else you need to know about how poorly they played versus BetBoom. Team diff, for sure.

Parker TA saves the day

Finally, we had PARIVISION versus Tundra Esports — easily the most exciting matchup of the final day of the Swiss group stage.

PARIVISION seemed to have quite a bit of momentum to start this series, as they won the first game off the back of Volodymyr “No[o]ne” Minenko’s Tinker. Tinker winning another game hand over fist was always going to be an expected outcome, given how strong the hero is right now. The Faceless Void pick by Tundra for David “Parker” Nicho Flores was also quite suspect to begin with, because Void is just not really a Parker hero at all.

Onto the next game, then, where Tundra shouted back in a big way to even the series. They had a torrid laning phase to start this one, which made me think that PARIVISION had an opening to just run away with this series two games to none. And for a long while this was indeed the case, with Valery “SSS” Lazarev’s Bristleback dictating the pace up to the late game. They even had the opportunity to take two lanes of Tundra’s barracks, putting their opponents on the back foot heading into the 40 minute mark.

But I guess bzm is called the “best zoomer mid” for a reason. This guy’s Invoker is just world class through and through, and he was the biggest reason Tundra didn’t get eliminated from the tournament coming out of this game. Teams really should stop giving him this hero, because it almost always pays off big time.

And speaking of paying off, that $4,000 plane ticket that Tundra supposedly had to pay out of pocket because Parker missed his flight from Peru to Romania is paying serious dividends now. First picking Templar Assassin in a deciding game 3 sounds like a recipe for disaster, but not when you’ve got someone like Parker piloting her. The laning stage went slightly better for Tundra in the deciding map, with PARIVISION shutting Neta “33” Shapira’s Timbersaw down and causing him to go 0-5.

With Alan “Satanic” Gallyamov having a great game as Luna, it looked like it might be curtains for Tundra. PARIVISION’s late game draft was better on paper than Tundra’s, with Luna being a much stronger hard carry compared to Templar Assassin. Parker didn’t care a single iota about that, though, because he put Tundra on his back regardless of the supposed draft advantage I just talked about. He just slapped the living daylights out of PARIVISION past the 40 minute mark — a performance worthy of praise given that he’s just standing in for this team.

Tundra will therefore escape a disappointing fate in the group stage, and will move on to the playoffs. While they’ve shown a bit of inconsistency here and there at PGL Wallachia Season 7, I think this win in particular should galvanize them well for the road ahead. I still have them firmly in contention for the title in Bucharest, especially if Parker can take this win and use it to motivate himself going forward.

The playoff bracket

So now, the playoff matchups are set in stone. The following teams will face each other starting in the upper bracket:

• HEROIC vs. BetBoom Team
• Team Spirit vs. Vici Gaming
• Aurora Gaming vs. Team Yandex
• Team Liquid vs. Tundra Esports

Liquid versus Tundra on the first day of the playoffs is quite insane if you asked me, and I’ll be looking forward to that matchup in particular tomorrow. I also want to see if Vici Gaming can somehow survive the red hot Team Spirit, who have been on a serious roll this entire tournament thus far.

The playoffs of PGL Wallachia Season 7 begin tomorrow, March 12th, starting at 4AM ET/1AM PT.