Team Falcons Continue Dominance At DreamLeague S22

Today marked the first day of the second Group Stage of DreamLeague Season 22. Unlike the first phase, all matches will follow a Best of 3 format, and only one match will be played at a time. Here’s a quick recap of the four matches played on Day 1 of the second stage.

Xtreme Gaming 2-1 Team Spirit

After losing 0-2 to Xtreme Gaming in the Group Stage, Yatoro had another chance to take down his idol, Ame. Unfortunately, the result didn’t change, as the Chinese squad could win the series against the TI winners.

 Yatoro immediately had a tough game ahead of him, playing Troll Warlord against Outworld Devourer and Faceless Void. Team Spirit took decent control over the game but could not snowball their advantage to a meaningful lead. Eventually, Xtreme Gaming’s lineup scaled much better into the late game and took the win. 

In the second game, Ame’s Phantom Lancer was not given a chance to dominate, thanks to an excellent performance from Larl’s Ember Spirit, who ended the game 9/0/17 and 38,000 hero damage dealt.

The decisive map was relatively close until the 33-minute mark, when Xtreme Gaming completely took over. The three Chinese core heroes only had two combined deaths, with Ame going 10/0/9 on Lifestealer to seal the game and series.

BetBoom Team 2-1 OG

The first game of the series didn’t start of well, not because of the two teams' performances, but because the BetBoom Team experienced problems with their communication channel. TORONTOTOKYO expressed his anger in all-chat, insisting the DreamLeague admins fix their Discord channel, which was experiencing issues. 

After the delays were settled, OG took the game convincingly after 36 minutes, thanks to a clean performance from their newest recruit’s performance on Windranger.

The BetBoom Team had to pull out their pocket strategy: Nightfall’s Meepo. Ultimately, Nightfall didn’t have too much impact, only because Save and gpk were running around the map, killing OG heroes left and right. It only took 30 minutes to force OG to tap out. 

In the final map, the BetBoom Team had the net worth lead against an Alchemist throughout the entire game. OG kept defending, and the game was drawn out. Ultimately, the BetBoom Team could close the map after 59 minutes to win the match.

Team Falcons 2-0 Gaimin Gladiators

The most-hyped series of the day was between the Gladiators and the Falcons, who are looking to claim the title of being the best team in the world. With this performance, the Falcons could achieve that goal very soon.

The first map was utter domination in favor of the Saudi-backed squad. After convincingly winning the laning phase, the Falcons snowballed their advantage, giving the Gladiators no chance. The map ended with a kill score of 35-5 and ended in 35 minutes.

Malr1ne got a chance to play his Grandmaster tier Huskar in the second game, which turned out to be a very entertaining map. It was a back-and-forth game, but skiter and Malr1ne could still win out the map in 48 minutes, closing the series 2-0.

Shopify Rebellion 2-0 Team Aurora

The final match of the day was between the North American and Southeast Asian representatives. Shopify Rebellion, notoriously known for being a fantastic Group Stage team, continued to prove why they were known for that. 

The Canadian organization had a relatively free first game after dominating Team Aurora in 37 minutes. Aurora could only manage 5 kills, while Shopify Rebellion had 28 when the game ended.

In the second map, Shopify Rebellion had complete control over the game, but Team Aurora didn’t want to give up. The game was stale until Rebellion could finally win it after 64 minutes. Arteezy on Sven had a flawless game, ending 8/0/14.

It’s still early days in the second Group Stage, but four teams will be eliminated at the end.