Evil Geniuses - True Strength

You might think they’ve been playing together for a while because of EG’s strong showing at TI and the Kuala Lumpur qualifier, but the team itself hasn’t been together for long. Fly and s4 joined the team in May of 2018, however they have already adjusted to match the other three members of EG. Fly is a genius when it comes to making sure his team is on the same page when they play together as we’ve seen during his countless Major winning runs. His leadership style is well suited to EG, as he gives Arteezy, Suma1L, and s4 the room they need to showcase their skills while also keeping an overall goal for each game in mind. It’s a lot easier said than done to make sure everyone is playing towards the same objective but still making individual decisions on their own without being micromanaged but it once again speaks to the talent on the roster that they are able to make that work. It may be because of this that we saw EG quickly find their footing with so little time to prepare for TI8, no one had to change the way they were playing due to Fly’s strong drafting and focus on the larger picture in-game.

Nothing highlights this better than their hour long game against Team Liquid at TI8. In one of the most stressful situations you could ever imagine, against one of the best teams in the world, EG stayed composed and defeated the defending champions which secured their top 3 finish at the tournament. Throughout the game we saw Fly set up wards that would give his cores critical information on enemy positions, smoke ganks, and where they could safely invade to find farm and force rotations with little to no risk for their lives. Fly enables his teammates to make the best decisions they can by providing information which in turn is used by the other members of EG to gain map control, find pick offs, and set themselves up to win each game. While the way EG plays their lanes hasn’t changed too much, with Suma1L and Arteezy generally dominating their lanes, and with s4 added sometimes winning all three lanes outright, we see EG make less risky maneuvers due to the information they gain on the enemies locations around the map.

At the Kuala Lumpur Major, where points will be so crucial to securing a direct invite to TI8, EG will be in prime position to leave a big mark on the DPC. They simply outclass nearly all of their competition despite it being a meeting of the best teams in the world. 

The missing piece at Hamburg is the key to much of EG’s success — we must look again at Suma1L to see exactly how EG’s laning phase always seems to go so well. We felt his absence at ESL One Hamburg and while EG still played quite well, taking a game off Team Secret and Vici Gaming during the group stage – the two teams who ended up facing each other in the grand finals – we saw a critical part of EG’s usual bravado missing. Suma1L is one of, if not the best, mid laners in the world. His aggressive stance in lane immediately puts pressure on the enemy mid and his timing for pushing out the lane to ensure jungle farm, or quick rotations to either the safe or offlane often nets his team an even larger lead. 

With the mid lane being left more and more to a 1v1 matchup, Suma1L puts his team ahead from the start. His tempo controlling heroes like Storm Spirit, Lina, Mirana, or Tiny are all heroes that scale well into the late-game but can also have a massive impact at the very early stages of the game. Simply put, he is a killer. We’ve seen Suma1L solo kill the enemy mid more times than we can count and then use his momentum to push them off the lane entirely, from there every time he goes into the jungle he might be going to gank a sidelane which forces the enemy team to play more conservatively. Meanwhile he’s farming his woods and accruing an even larger lead for himself that is nearly impossible to stop.

Suma1L has perfected the art of using creep aggro, or the act of manipulating who the lane creeps target with their attacks, to control the mid wave to a level rarely seen in competitive play. He is also not afraid to use his spells to secure CS early on in the lane while also harassing his opponent at the same time, something which adds tremendous pressure from anyone else who is trying to secure their own farm. The thing about Suma1L is that he’s able to do this even on heroes who are thought of as being traditionally weaker in lane. On four different occasions at TI we saw him play Alchemist, which forced the opposing team to focus on trying to shut him down before he became too farmed to stop, only to find EG ready for their movements, baiting Suma1L to further their lead in the game. 

All of this happens naturally, the players on EG never seem to be forced to make their rotations or uncomfortable on their heroes even though they have played so many different drafts. How can you prepare for a team that can seemingly do anything? That is the question many teams will be asking themselves as the Kuala Lumpur Major begins, and it is a question no one seems to have the answer to. With Suma1L back in the lineup and each of the pieces of the fully oiled machine that is the Evil Geniuses back in their TI form, everyone is going to have their eyes on this squad as they take on the year’s first DPC Major event.