Three Legends of the Past Return to Professional Dota

After several months of absence, Anathan “ana-” Pham, Kurtis “Aui_2000” Ling and David “MoonMeander” Tan have returned to professional Dota. However, they haven’t joined any of the established teams. Instead, they formed two entirely new teams with a lot of potentials.

The former OG midlaner ana- is now playing for Team World alongside 4 other well-known teammates:

• Martin “Saksa” Sazdov: former Digital Chaos player and TI 6 finalist with this team.
• Sang-Don “Forev” Lee: former MVP Phoenix, Team Secret, B)ears, Digital Chaos and Immortals player.
• Greg “Keyser-Water” Kallianiotis: former London Conspiracy, BrooDMotherS, Prodota Gaming, Hellraisers, and Mouseports player.
• Avery “SVG” Silverman: former Team NP and Cloud 9 player, and Evil Geniuses coach.

Team World made their debut in the ESL One Katowice European qualifiers against Team Moriarty RO, a match which they won with the score of 2-0. We’ll have to see how they fare against a much stronger opponent (OG) in their next match of this qualifier, but without a doubt this roster has a lot of potentials.

The other two professional players, one a TI winner with Evil Geniuses (Aui_2000) and the other a double Major winner with OG (MoonMeander), are now playing for Animal Planet in the North American region alongside “ritsu” (former VGJ.Storm player), “bryle” and “kitrak”.

So far, Animal Planet has only played one important match, against VGJ.Storm in the North American qualifiers of StarLadder i-League Invitational #4. They won with the score of 2-1.

At the moment, it’s still too early to say whether these 3 accomplished players have restarted playing Dota 2 professionally just to practice, stay relevant and keep a presence on the big teams’ radar, or if they actually believe that they can qualify for Dota Pro Circuit LAN events and maybe even The International 2018.

The move certainly comes pretty late, given that we’re already 4 months into the new competitive season and more than 27% of the total number of Dota Pro Circuit points have been distributed. But, as the history of the game has proved, you can never know who the next dark horse is going to be.

Meanwhile, in the European and North American regions, the competition has just become even fiercer than before. Both of these regions were already stacked with high caliber teams, but now in each of them there’s one more hungry adversary to worry about.