PSG.LGD - Strongest Team in the East

It is usually hard to quantify exactly how much the coach impacts most teams but on PSG.LGD it is a lot more apparent how important he is to their success. While Fy is the in-game leader and captain of the team, QQQ drafts and explains the strategy to his players before leaving the game in their hands. While coaches usually do assist their teams during the draft it is unusual for the coach to do it himself. QQQ has the players full trust as he decides the heroes they will play on and what the best approach to the match will be. Of course things don’t always go to plan and the players have to take things into their own hands, but given the talent on PSG.LGD that is also not something they can’t handle. 

QQQ believes strongly in “flex picks,” heroes that when drafted early can still fill multiple positions so it leaves your opponents unsure of what your game plan is. While this sounds like something more teams should do, it is limited by the hero pools of the players involved. PSG.LGD is one of the few teams in the world who are capable of truly playing different heroes in any position and not having it affect their overall play. This is part of PSG.LGD’s other major advantage during drafts, they can play almost anything.

During their Kuala Lumpur qualifier run PSG.LGD even pulled out an Arc Warden, Naga Siren, and Leshrac, winning with all three heroes. The absolutely crazy amount of strategies PSG.LGD can pull off due to their deep hero pools is one of the most exciting things about watching the team compete, you never know when you’ll see Io + Gyrocopter (assuming they aren’t respect banned), or catching Somnus’ Invoker in action. The sky's the limit for QQQ’s drafts and he puts his team's deep hero pool to good use when it comes to out-drafting other teams.

Fy is a standout player among supports and among captains. He is known for styling on his opponents with his Rubick and Sand King, taking command of games with his play-making maneuvers and outright dismantling the opposing team with reaction times that barely seem human. More recently it has been his Earthshaker that has been striking fear into the hearts of his enemies, as we saw during the TI8 finals. The problem teams face when they go up against PSG.LGD is that there simply just aren’t enough bans, and Fy is the main culprit behind that problem. He draws numerous bans and block picks which results in the rest of his team often having free reign for their heroes to be chosen.

Fy sets up many of PSG.LGD’s engagements, sometimes just using his own intuition to know where the enemy is going to be and sets up a trap for them to fall into. The scary thing about Fy setting up the initiation is that he almost never misses his spells. Ever. He always uses the right spell at the right time, and if he doesn’t have it, in the case of Rubick, he will steal it in order to make a fight-changing contribution. We can’t even count the number of times casters have yelled out Fy’s name in the middle of a team fight due to a perfectly placed Echo Slam, critical Spell Steal, or Relocate save. He is truly a cornerstone of PSG.LGD’s team fight and goes beyond ‘just’ being the best support in the world.

There has always been a unique phenomenon in the Chinese Dota 2 scene, where often times teams that do well abroad do not always share that same success at home. PSG.LGD on the other hand crushes their competition no matter where they may be. PSG.LGD may run into more difficulties at home due to how well the top teams in China know each other but it has not stopped them from qualifying for nearly every event they have tried to get to in the last year. Making it to Kuala Lumpur was just a continuation of the great string of qualifier results PSG.LGD has earned with their current roster and from what we’ve seen, we expect to see them at many more events in the near future.