MDL Chengdu Major will be the first Dota Pro Circuit Major of this new season. The event is scheduled to take place between November 16th – 24th and offers one million dollars in prizes as well as 15.000 qualification points for The International 2020.
In this article, I will take a brief look at what happened during the MDL Chengdu Major Qualifiers that took place between November 5th – 8th.
Team Secret, OG and ex-Team Liquid declined to take part in the MDL Chengdu Major Qualifiers and as a result, Europe was an open battleground for a lot of other teams. With the three strongest competitors missing, Alliance and Team Liquid had a fairly easy tournament and secured tickets for the first Major of the season. Keep in mind, however, that these two teams are not who they used to be last season. Team Liquid is actually the former Alliance roster while Alliance has a totally new lineup as well.
In North America, two of the three big teams have secured tickets for the Major. These two teams are Evil Geniuses and J.Storm. Quite surprisingly, Fighting Pepegas managed to beat J.Storm in the Semifinals, which forced Quincy Crew to play against them after their loss against Evil Geniuses (2 – 1) in the other Upper Bracket match.
In case you don’t know who these teams are, Quincy Crew is SumaiL’s new team while Fighting Pepegas is EternaLEnVy’s. Both squads looked great on paper before the tournament but I’m pretty sure that most people would have predicted Quincy Crew to be the stronger of the two. And maybe it is, but at least in this tournament, they did not manage to make use of their exceptional individual talent. It seems that even with SumaiL in the team, the crew needs to go through an extended period of training in order to develop the cohesion required to win at the highest level.
In this region, the results were fairly predictable. As you might have expected, beastcoast won the tournament with relative ease. They’re the former Infamous roster that finished 7th – 8th at The International 2019 and it looks like they still know how to play Dota.
The second MDL Chengdu Major ticket reserved for this region was won by Team Unknown. And they are, just like their name suggests, mostly unknown at this point. Some of the players do have a little bit of history at the professional level, but the team overall is not that impressive. We’ll have to see how they fare against the other competitors at the Major.
In China, PSG.LGD declined to participate and the three big winners were Vici Gaming, Team Aster and EHOME. The first two of these teams were definitely expected to shine, given their rosters and past results. But EHOME was certainly not supposed to triumph over RNG. It looks like RNG’s former players (LaNm and ah fu), who left after The International 2019 (where the team finished 7th – 8th) were instrumental in that success and cannot be replaced so easily.
In the CIS region, both Na’Vi and Virtus.pro had a disastrous performance and failed to qualify for MDL Chengdu Major. In Na’Vi’s case, they even failed to qualify for the DOTA Summit 11 Qualifiers.
By the looks of things, Virtus.pro will either undergo massive changes again or they will certainly not maintain the status they enjoyed over the last three seasons. As for Na’Vi, it’s not clear what they will do. But they did not look good at all during these qualifiers.
And finally, we have the SEA region, where Fnatic and TNC Predator emerged victorious, as everyone expected. The region even got a 3rd ticket for this first Major, which was claimed by Team Adroit. Very little is known about them at this point so we’ll have to see them play at MDL Chengdu Major to get a better idea of what they’re capable of.
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