Mason Feels Evil Geniuses Lacks the Ability to Work Together as a Team

In spite of being the undisputed champions of North American (NA) Dota 2, Evil Geniuses has faced fierce competition this Dota Pro Circuit (DPC) season, especially from TSM. In the wake of Evil Geniuses' most recent defeat to TSM during Tour 2, popular NA livestreamer Mason "mason" Venne discussed the teamwork problems. Mason says Evil Geniuses lacks the ability to play cohesively as a team and that this will be a big issue when it goes to international LAN events. Additionally, Mason pointed out and compared some of the former players' playstyles with the new ones at Evil Geniuses.

Mason feels Evil Geniuses’ Dota 2 team lacks teamwork

After Evil Geniuses lost its first series of Tour 2 against TSM, a team that has dominated Evil Geniuses in recent months, on 17th April, mason, who was broadcasting the series on his Twitch handle, went on to talk about problems the team may be having.

“I kinda just wish that they would figure out a way to play as a team because whatever they are doing here, this will not work. It’s clearly not working in the regionals and when they go to a LAN and play versus the top-tier teams from other regions, it’s not gonna work there either,” mason suggested.

Mason then talked about a past iteration of Evil Geniuses which included Roman "RAMZES666" Kushnarev as the offlaner and Tal "Fly" Aizik as the position five/captain. Compared to the current roster, he said that the former had fewer issues, and the support duo of Fly and Andreas Franck "Cr1t-" Nielsen had much better synergy. Mason also critiqued Jesse "JerAx" Vainikka's playstyle, saying that it didn't help his team perform better in teamfights.

“With RAMZES666 and Fly, I don’t think I saw this kind of gameplay. Yeah RAMZES666 was an offlane player who farmed and maybe they didn’t play a lot of tournaments and it was only like a year and they only played two Majors with him, I think. But they got second place at both Majors. And I feel Fly and Cr1t- had way more synergy than Cr1t- and JerAx do. I feel the real problem here is that Nightfall is super farmy and JerAx compensates but in a very weird way. He compensates in a way that doesn’t enable teamfight. He just keeps playing by himself and they never seem to get something rolling in terms of the team department like - teamwork.”

These days, Mason never feels in awe of Evil Geniuses' teamwork when they engage in a teamfight. Mason reiterated that there is an "obvious lack of synergy" within Evil Geniuses.

“I have never seen EG take a teamfight and I am like - Damn, that was a sick teamfight. Yeah, it’s draft but it’s also like a very obvious lack of synergy, lack of teamwork so I don’t know. I think EG is in a bit of trouble and I don’t think I am really overreacting. It’s very obvious from how they play Dota.”

Evil Geniuses’ current roster had an abysmal start to its DPC 2021-22 Tour 1 campaign in December 2021 when it lost to Black N Yellow and Wildcard Gaming. Even though it has improved over time and is now ranked among the top teams in the NA regional leagues, the team has yet to reclaim its top spot.

Evil Geniuses has had trouble keeping up with TSM for the past four months. In this DPC 2021-22 season, including two Tours and the Regional Finals, TSM has won four of the five head to head matches.

Evil Geniuses’ final series in Tour 2 of the DPC 2021-22 will take place against Team DogChamp on 20th April.