NA underdogs Demon Slayers knock out Team Liquid from DreamLeague Season 12

DreamLeague Season 12 has really been an underrated event. With not much noise on social media, the event hasn’t really garnered much attention from the mainstream media. However, it has lowkey been one of the better events of the year with some great games and entertaining panels and segments.

Today, we saw NA underdogs Demon Slayers, who failed to qualify for the first set of DPC Minors/Majors eliminate Team Liquid who booked a slot in the MDL Chengdu Major earlier this month.

After the Group Stage concluded yesterday, Team Liquid was placed in a Lower Bracket match against FlyToMoon while J.Storm took on Demon Slayers in the first set of matches. Team Liquid managed to turn around 1-0 deficit into a 2-1 victory and made it to the next round.

Similarly, in the other series, Demon Slayers upset J.Storm in the elimination game making a comeback from 1-0 down after the first game, and securing a 2-1 victory to book a showdown against Team Liquid.

Team Liquid vs Demon Slayers

This setup a David vs Goliath situation where the Demon Slayers had to take down a TI calibre Team Liquid. But it appeared to not faze NA upstarts. 

Game 1:

Against a greedy Alliance lineup featuring a mid-Gyrocopter, an Anti Mage and a Pudge as their cores, Demon Slayers showed incredible aplomb to overrun the Europeans with an early-mid game focussed pushing lineup.

iAnnihilate, in particular, put up an impressive showing on his Lycan, taking advantage of a few positioning mistakes by Team Liquid and punished them by securing objectives restricting their farming territory and map-control. This forced the Europeans to make risky moves which were duly punished by Costabile’s Bloodseeker and oldWhite’s Sand King.

The underdogs secured the victory in 31 minutes after massing an 18k networth lead to push Liquid to the brink of elimination.

Game 2:

Once again, in Game 2, Team Liquid picked up 3 greedy cores in Timbersaw, Death Prophet and Gyrocopter and once again Demon Slayers answered with an aggressive mid-game heavy lineup.

This time, Costabile was the MVP of the NA team as he managed to farm up a storm, utilizing the space expertly created by FLee and became a raidboss finishing a 20-minute Heat of Tarrasque. Team Liquid was simply unable to deal with the sheer tankiness and the damage that was output by Costabile and succumbed to the pressure conceding the second game in 32 minutes and was knocked out of the tournament.

With this victory, Demon Slayers manage to secure a Top 3 finish at DreamLeague Season 12. They will be facing NiP in the Lower Bracket Finals after which the winner will face the Alliance in the Grand Finals.

Even if they fail to triumph tomorrow, this is a massive achievement for Demon Slayers, especially their stand-in mid player iAnnihilate considering the circumstances he is playing under.