Cover-Credits:
After playing his first DPC tour with his new team Nigma Galaxy, Ammar "ATF" Al-Assaf revealed the origin story behind his infamous “Mantle of Intelligence Drops” during a watchalong of the Western Europe Dota Pro Circuit (WEU DPC) tiebreakers with Janne "Gorgc" Stefanovski and Yazied "YapzOr" Jaradat. During his breakout year with OG, ATF was well-known for dropping Mantles of Intelligence just outside the enemy's base when his team was on the verge of winning.
However, as time passed, ATF revealed that he had no longer continued the practice as other players were replicating his practice and he no longer felt joy in doing the practice.
ATF revealed that he got the inspiration from playing 6K MMR pub games
During the watchalong, Gorgc asked ATF about his long abandoned practice of Mantles of Intelligence outside the enemy's base. ATF said that he recently came back to it after their 2-1 victory against his former team, OG however noted that he did not have time to complete the practice. “Oh, I did it against OG, but I didn’t have time to drop it because I was rushing to OG’s base while the rest of the team destroyed the throne.”
Gorgc then went on to ask the Jordanian offlaner turned carry on the origin story behind the practice as he had never seen anyone done it. However, ATF simply replied by saying that the inspiration came from a 6K MMR pub game.
“I think I was playing ranked in-game. It was such a long time ago actually. I was like, 6K MMR at the time and someone in my game just bought Mantles and gave them to me. It took me a while but I eventually understood the meaning behind it.” he said.
He then ended the story by saying that he followed the tradition of doing it upon joining his first professional team until today. “Then we started doing it on my first team, Creepwave, like everytime we win, we started dropping Mantles until today,” he added.
Nigma Galaxy were able to remain in Division I for the upcoming Spring Tour after managing to win crucial games to avoid the drop to Division II.
