Maelstorm: “Miposhka is someone who cannot be replaced.”

Of course, Miposhka’s departure had a huge impact. Without a doubt, Miposhka is irreplaceable. Well, because Miposhka has a very strong trait as a coach: the understanding of what needs to be fixed—and how—and what doesn’t. I mean, when the team does something completely stupid—something totally out of line—he just tells them, “Guys, that was just a terrible game, like: ‘There’s no fixing this. It just shouldn’t be like that at all.’” And every player, in his opinion—and in reality, they already understand this—realizes, “Here, here’s where I messed up; here’s where we played poorly.” But if there’s something specific—a specific moment, like a good play where they entered the high ground a bit awkwardly, didn’t play the ward properly, or failed to place a specific ward where it was needed—he’ll always point that out. Of course, we don’t see everything, but this is what you can see from the vlogs and what stands out compared to other coaches, because, well, when I listen to other coaches, I don’t really understand what exactly they want to fix. There are just too many ideas, whereas with Miposhka, everything is very clearly organized, so it’s hard to replace him. But the way I see it, MiLAN has learned a lot from him, I think. You could actually see it, again, from their vlogs on Inta—he was really soaking up everything that was going on. I think he can contribute a lot now, too. And Illidan has completely new ideas—we need to take those into account as well. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen Illidan with the team yet—apparently there’s some visa issue—but it looks like we’ll definitely get to see him. Even without Miposhka, though, they’ve developed an interesting style.

I don’t consider Collapse’s departure a problem at all, because Collapse would have played terribly. He absolutely couldn’t have pulled it together last season. He needs a break; he’s not motivated enough. So, a Collapse at his peak is probably better than Batyuk right now, but the current Batyuk is definitely better than the current Collapse would have been in this tournament. And speaking of Batyuk in general, yeah, I think everyone’s realized that he’s fit right in. Well, one sign that Batyuk has fit right in is that everyone keeps giving Larl a hard time in every game, literally right there: “Here’s Larl, when he gets kicked out,” while Batyuk seems like he’s been playing on this team his whole life. <...>

Batyuk also realizes by now that Collapse isn’t just taking a month off and then coming back, but that it seems like Collapse wants to quit Dota 2 altogether. Judging by how I see it, it’s already very hard for him to play on a regular basis, and it’s unlikely he’ll continue doing so. Maybe he’ll return to Intu at some point, or maybe not. And for the time being, this is definitely the right place for Batyuk. That’s the first thing. And second, he’s already played there. Things didn’t go so well for him at first, but then he really got into his stride and that was that. So this second stint there seems like a really great move for him, in my opinion.

The way skiter played on this team, the way he… Well, it’s just… I didn’t really like it that much in the group stage. Well, I just didn’t like a lot of the games in the group stage—they somehow lacked that polish. But in the playoffs—especially early on—I really got into it. He was just a bit off on the second-to-last day, but overall the games were very good. It was exactly what I wanted to see. You expect the players to do exactly that, and you see them do it—and even a little faster, a little more polished.

Yeah, I really liked Aurora Gaming, too. Maybe—well, it’s obvious that Mikoto is absolutely the backbone of this team. And the fact that the last tournament was without him made it much worse because of that. They really came into their own here. Mikoto and Ws are very strong. They’re missing just a little something somewhere. And it’s unclear whether they’ll ever be able to get that—and need to replace someone—or if there’s still some room for growth, so to speak. But I have this feeling that at some point I thought that Team Spirit vs. Aurora Gaming should either be the grand final or they should be facing off against each other somewhere in the losers’ bracket. I really enjoyed it. Especially skiter’s games on Ursa—how fast everything is, how cleanly it all comes together. That was awesome.