Tundra Esports Wins FISSURE Playground Grand Finals in Reverse Sweep

For a finals that seemed like it would be a cut and dry 3-0 for Team Falcons, this series really went the distance. It took Tundra a bit of time to realize they needed to show up but once they did, they really showed their teeth. Now Tundra Esports are the grand final winners of FISSURE Playground.

Game one: a misleading barnburner

The first game of the series saw Falcons win in about 66 and a half minutes, with plenty of back and forth between both teams throughout the duration. Tundra actually held a sizable lead in the mid game, thanks in no small part to Bozhidar “bzm” Bogdanov’s signature Invoker. Unfortunately for them, getting bzm his Invoker wasn’t really enough to help them close game one out, because on the other side, Falcons got their hands on Enchantress for Wu “Sneyking” Jingjun and Bristleback for Ammar “ATF” Al-Assaf.

Both of the aforementioned Falcons players showed Tundra just why you can’t give them those heroes in particular. ATF was truly unkillable in the late game, absorbing ridiculous amounts of punishment from Tundra while dishing out a ton of his own as well. Special mention also goes to Stanislaw “Malr1ne-” Potorak and his play as Puck, going 13-4 and constantly putting pressure on Tundra with his own massive damage output.

While a cursory glance at this game would make it seem like Tundra had several chances to take this game — especially with the fact that they were able to take one set of barracks out — in reality, the Falcons were in control for majority of the match. Tundra put up a valiant effort to keep themselves in the game for as long as they did, but it just wasn’t enough against ATF’s Bristleback in the end.

Game two: match point already?

Game two went even better for Falcons, with Oliver “skiter” Lepko running completely roughshod over Tundra’s entire lineup. His Dragon Knight is feared across the land for good reason, as he was able to do absolutely whatever he wanted throughout the 50 minutes of play. 24 kills and zero deaths tells you all you need to know about how well he played, and so does his 902 gold per minute by the end.

Plans being formed… pic.twitter.com/7b1RXjC546

— TUNDRA (@TundraEsports) January 29, 2025

As if anyone needed to remember just how good this guy is at playing carry, no? Tundra just had no answers to his overfed Dragon Knight. And though they could very well have ended the game 20 minutes earlier than they did, Falcons just buckled down and leaned into their strengths as a late game squad to make sure that Tundra couldn’t capitalize on any mistakes to come back into the game.

Game three: Tundra finally wake up

The start of the third game made things look like a complete wash for Tundra, as Falcons took a comfortable early lead on the back of a good laning phase. ATF and Andreas Franck “Cr1t-” Nielsen in particular beat the daylights out of Anton “dyrachyo” Shkredov and Matthew “Whitemon” Filemon in the lane, thus setting Falcons up for success going into the mid game.

But Tundra didn’t let the poor start in the safe lane deter them, as they gradually clawed their way back into the game with confident, methodical play. Recognizing that their draft this game was way better than what they brought to the table in the previous two, they took advantage of their overall mobility and burst damage to get important pickoffs in the mid game.

The Lifestealer pick for dyrachyo eventually paid dividends in the late game, considering how reliant on magical disables Falcons’ lineup was. Having Lifestealer’s Feast (W) also helped plenty against Falcons’ Slardar and Dragon Knight picks, and dyrachyo was able to show skiter that his DK isn’t unbeatable.

Game four: I don’t think any of us expected that

If you just tuned in at this point, you’d probably be wondering what the hell was going on. This was one of the wildest early games I’ve seen in Dota 2. By 15 minutes, the score line was 8-21 with a 10K gold lead in favour of Tundra. Nothing could stand toe to toe with Whitemon’s Warlock, being so active in the bottom early on proved invaluable to buying Dyrachyo’s PA time to farm. Saksa’s position 4 Bounty Hunter was out earning every member of Falcons.

Falcons called it quits after a mere 25 minutes and honestly, it was miraculous they managed to hang on that long. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were simply getting fatigued at this point, having already played the lower bracket finals but everything just completely fell apart from before the opening bell tolled. It just goes to show that if you do manage to start snowballing, even Falcons can’t stop you.

Game five: Death or glory

Things definitely got off to a slower start in this final game of the series and one thing stood out to me: fatigue was starting to set in for Falcons. They made a couple of very un-Falcons-like mistakes in the early game including over-extending Malr1ne’s Earth Spirit to get a kill on bzm’s Invoker, only for Malr1ne to fall first.

From there, things started to snowball for Tundra. It wasn’t anything like we saw in game 4, but once it got started, there was nothing Falcons could do to slow it down. With ATF way too far away from hitting his BKB timing, Tundra were pushing high ground at 22 minutes.

Tundra is running a truly all-star roster in 2025 and if they continue to put on performances like these final three games, I think we can really expect them to go a long way on the road to TI.