It’s been far too long since we heard someone shouting “Empire strikes back,” but the long wait for a Team Empire return seems to be finally over.
A bit over a year after their last important tournament appearance, Team Empire delivered the big surprise in the opening series of Beyond Epic with a 2-0 sweep over Alliance. The roster competing for the next couple of weeks in the $200,000 Europe and CIS leg of the competition is in fact the Empire Hope line-up that earned their place via regional qualifiers, and that success got them promoted to the main team of the organization.
“Tomorrow will be exactly six months since the moment we opened the youth Dota 2 roster. During this period there were both sour defeats and pleasant victories, and in any case – 6 months for me is the mark after which I need to sum up all results and do significant adjustments,” said Team Empire Esports director Alexander “StrangeR” Solomonov a day before the first series in the Beyond Epic group Play for Team Empire.
StrangeR elaborated on the line-up progress since December, when it was put together, and also mentioned that the players have been now promoted to the main team and their contracts have been re-signed.
Team Empire roster:
- Alexey “Smiling Knight” Sviridov
- Alexander “Lightless” Potapenko
- Alexey “Mastery” Vinchevskiy
- Dzhama “jAMES” Abdurashitov
- Sergey “EcNart” Slobodyanyk
- coach: Arkadiy “Akella” Enivatov
Coming into the Beyond Epic group stage, Team Empire is the ultimate underdog, but that didn’t stop them from opening their tournament run with a 2-0 over Alliance. They started the series with an offlane Death Prophet, meant to counter Gustav “s4” Magnusson’s safe lane Enigma, and although the laning stage went in their favor, they found themselves overwhelmed in the mid stage by Nikolay “Nikobaby” Nikolov’s Morphling and Linus “Limmp” Blomdin’s Ember Spirit. However, Alliance were somewhat limited in the team fights by the big cooldowns from Enigma and Earthshaker, and Empire took full advantage of their adversaries’ weakness to take game one victory. In game two they ran over Alliance with Luna-Nature’s Prophet pushing duo, enabled in battles by a plethora of lockdown spells from the rest of the line-up.
Team Empire are also going to open the second day of group stage matches. They will be pitted against Ninjas in Pyjamas, the series being scheduled to kick off today, June 16 at 14:00 CET.
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