Entropy 2.0

I love my team so I want to write about it

Going into this season I had one requirement for this new era of Entropy — and I’m going to steal some language from Plupo here — high IQ players with even higher locker room MMR. Given the notable disaster of last season, and the long-term approach Naratheen and I are using for building Entropy, we wanted to just get a group of players together that would come together and play to an identity without conflict or confusion. We looked at this season as a “rebuild” when we first entered the off-season for a number of reasons, 1. Staples was climbing MMR fast so our cap was diminishing each day 2. We wanted to get a corer player that was value and could be mentored over several seasons for linear growth til we had the right combination of players most likely after waiting a season. 3. I was changing roles again and Nara was re-learning p1 after practicing p3 for the majority of season 8. We truly believed we could make a competitive, but not title contending team that would be fun and would have us all grow as players. However, things changed when I took an aggressive approach to get my favorite teammate in MD2L history, Sir Omar the Maddog .

When I broached the topic of joining Entropy with Omar, I at first was asking him as a p4 as we didn’t know if Staples was returning — for many valid reasons — within a day of asking Omar if he was interested in p4, we had Sam locked in, thus in Nara and I’s eye’s we thought we couldn’t fit him in. Then the crazy idea hit me, what if we just asked Omar to play the 3? He basically already played it from the mid-lane, and his mechanics are some of the strongest in the league. With the addition of the best p4 in the league by his side to help him learn and develop as a 3, I managed to talk Nara into the concept. Once we played for one night, we knew it was going to work, we just needed to find a mid that wasn’t Cam — sorry Cam, you’re a great laner, but I hate watching you teamfight with a true passion. At that point in the off-season, it was literally just Cam left as Divine mids in the league. So Nara and I hit up our friend, and one of the most in-the know amateur league players in the midwest, Applesauce, for recommendations from non-MD2L mids that would be good personality fits and value MMR. He sent me three players to check out and when looking at the opendota profiles, Sora’s immediately caught my eye.

Sora is amazing. I love playing with that guy, he’s got a very good game IQ, some map awareness issues at times, but so do we all, we’re fucking amateurs. His hero pool was what attracted me though, a cheese picker. Now we’ve seen Cheese mids in MD2L do well, but never actually make top 3 by my memory, but that was largely do to those players having hero puddles, Sora does not. Sora can play traditional mids, his cheese is just so good that we don’t need to pick them. We tried out Sora, I think it might’ve just been Omar, me, and Sora playing a few pubs one night and I really vibed with him. Within the next week it became clear Sora was our best option so we locked ourselves in as Entropy 2.0.

We played a lot of scrims heading into this season which featured a lot of bad drafting by me and close losses. I was figuring out how to draft for Sora, I wasn’t quite sure what my hero pool should be, and we were figuring out Omar’s heros as well. The biggest unknown was our identity as a team, and then we played KBK two weeks before the season and everything clicked. We dismantled them two games in a row with a few throws in the late game by us being split in two different minds, but we talked it through — more like yelled it through. Sora is very chill, but has great things to talk about analyzing the games after the fact and is open to any and all comments/criticisms. Me, Nara, and Omar on the other hand are open to all criticisms, but we’re impassioned about this game and about getting better. We all want this badly and are prepared to have difficult talks about decisions. We put our egos at the door and just talk it out, at the end of the discussion we usually realize that everyone is right in some capacity and we need to piece everyone’s ideas into the right one. It’s shit that we used to do on PG — maybe to Taylor’s chagrin — where we’d talk obsessively about strategy and decisions we made in-game. This constant chatter before and after games let’s all 5 players in on each other’s heads and it allows us to understand each other on a much higher level, so when we’re in-game, we don’t need to discuss it, it’s just natural like an “understood you” .

We’re now undefeated through three weeks, the last undefeated team in the league, and it wasn’t all that easy. We’ve stomped teams, but that came from me doing hours upon hours of draft prep work — sorry Macey and thanks for letting me do this dumb thing with passion. We’ve also played against really good teams, that KBK team in my eyes is a wild card team if they play up to their full potential, the PG squad is probably the 2nd best team in our division, and the Fellowship may have a bad record right now, but those guys play together and they make you earn it. With the importance of 2–0’s this season, starting 6–0 has been a massive amount of stress lifted from my shoulders. I saw all the pre-season contents putting us 4/5th in our division and I understood why, but I knew we were at worst the 3rd best team in our division and yeah I kinda took it personal — not from a “fuck you” personal way, but as a competitive fuel type of way. In similar fashion to Bobby, this season is a “put some respect on our names” season, and so far, we’ve done what we’ve needed to do to earn that respect.

I don’t really know what this piece was, just me talking, but I wanted to write something. I really love my team, I haven’t been this excited or energized since the PG team in season 6. Our coms are chaotic, but there’s and organization in the chaos. Sam has stepped up, and has been that 2nd voice I wanted — and we needed — him to be. We operate on a level where Sam does a ton of micro calls and I am there to make sure we’re hitting our macro goals and calling out team fight targets. It feels amazing, and I would say my captaining has improved quite significantly since last season, I don’t know if Staples and Naratheen feel the same, but at least I feel more confident in the role. And to be honest, this will sound egotistical, but there’s very few captains that are better at drafting than me — TB was not the pick game 2 against Plupo, we get ran out early game if we pick TB and do not have map control. There’s certain elements to drafting that teams have yet to figure out this season, and I’m certainly not going to explain them, but I will say, some teams need to figure out what they’re doing before they get into the lobby.

Ight that’s it, just a little something for Saturday morning. Good luck to everyone this season, besides Joey, fuck that guy, I play Wyvern better than you.

-Pierce “Spagheti Jesus” Trahan