Mjz explained why you shouldn’t reveal a completed Blink Dagger to your opponent

If you watch recent games, you’ll see that Slardar usually gets his Blink Dagger around the 12–15-minute mark—that’s the average timing. In other words, your opponent already expects the offlaner to have a Blink Dagger by the 13th minute. But even when the item is expected, you need to make the play itself look fast and unexpected. The other team shouldn’t know exactly when you’ll get Blink Dagger. There are small details that turn a gank into a surprise, and whether it works or not depends on them.

There’s a huge difference between Black King Bar and Battle Fury. Black King Bar is extremely helpful in 5v5 team fights, while Battle Fury offers absolutely no benefit there. The same goes for Maelstrom—it’s not a team-fight item; it’s a farming item. Blink Dagger is somewhat similar to Black King Bar because it also lets you fight, but there’s a difference: with the Blink Dagger, you secure a solo kill and return to farming, whereas with the Black King Bar, you engage in a major skirmish, then take an objective, and only after that do you go back to farming. There are also intermediate options—a good example is Mage Slayer: it provides mana and helps with farming, but it also has combat potential thanks to its magic resistance and passive ability.

You need to understand this difference because you can’t buy a Blink Dagger and keep farming, and you can’t buy a Black King Bar and keep farming. That only happens if you’re way behind and can’t do anything about it. But if the game is even—which is usually the case—then with a Blink Dagger, you go in, secure the kill, and return to farming. With Battle Fury, it’s the opposite: you shouldn’t fight; you should farm. I often see in practice sessions how someone playing a carry buys Battle Fury on Phantom Assassin and keeps diving into fights. The only fights you should engage in are when the enemy dives into your team and you can teleport in to get one or two kills. But you don’t want to fight—you’re just helping your team.

As soon as Slardar gets close to buying a Blink Dagger, he starts showing up on the lane. He doesn’t dive or force ganks—he just lets his model be visible so the enemy knows he’s there. Meanwhile, his courier doesn’t go to his lane but heads to mid: it’s much faster that way, because the courier is very slow. This is important because you almost always have more options when you’re in the center of the map: from there, you can go top, bottom, or stay in mid. The same goes for the support—from mid, it’s easier for them to join the action anywhere than to travel across the entire map to bot or top. That’s why you need to secure control of mid first, and only then control the side lanes. If Slardar had brought an item back to his lane and then decided whether to go to the center, the gank simply wouldn’t have happened: the courier arrived in mid, the hero teleported, and immediately sealed the game.

Before going anywhere, you need to push the lane. If you’ve pushed it through—then you decide for yourself: top, mid, bot, wherever. If you haven’t pushed it through, you’re not going anywhere. A pushed lane gives you a window of opportunity: while the creep wave is making its way back, you can do whatever you want—even go into the jungle. Meanwhile, your opponent is forced to spend time pushing the lane back; otherwise, they lose their camp and farm. In that play, Slardar pushed the lane, forced Clinkz to show himself, and then chose between top and mid—and went to the center, where the opponent happened to be.

Once you’ve bought the Blink Dagger, you shouldn’t reveal it—it should remain a surprise. Here, Slardar gave the item to Keeper of the Light, who hid and went into smoke, while Slardar himself, after buying it, stopped appearing on the lane and went to farm a hidden camp in the forest. At this point, the opponent can only see that he doesn’t have the Blink Dagger yet and assumes the item will appear later. One small detail that everyone already knows: he’s saving up his Blink charges so he can jump right away with it.

Next, the team moves under the smoke, and since they’re positioned in the center, they can choose—down or mid. It’s a long way up, but that’s exactly what makes for the fastest game. Whether the fight is won or lost isn’t that important. What matters is that the sequence was correct: farm, a hidden Blink Dagger, and only then moving under the smoke.