With the first day of The International 2019 playoffs now past behind us, it's time for the fantasy predictions for day two at TI9. Dota 2 fan and Luckbox community member Riley is here to assist with his TI9 Main Stage fantasy challenge predictions. Chat with Riley and other Dota 2 fans in the Luckbox Discord server.
A reminder on the golden rules
Always take note of three golden rules below, because the best TI9 fantasy challenge results are subjective to the cards you possess.
Golden Rule 1: Always pick players from teams that plays the most that day. It’s just maths, even players from underwhelming teams will definitely score more points if they played more games than players from top-tier teams.
Golden Rule 2: Card stats matter. Same thing can be said for these as in the above - worse-performing player cards with better stats will score better than high-profile player cards with worse stats.
Golden Rule 3: Some stats are better than others. Way better. Teamfight is generally a good stat to have. Kills, GPM, and Creep Score are the golden standard for carry stats; for mid, it would be Kills and for support stats, it would be Obs. Wards Placed and Camps Stacked. Runes Grabbed are also good for players that like to roam. Don’t pick cards with unreliable stats like First Blood or Roshan Kills - they’re garbage.
Disclaimer: Since the new Fantasy Challenge system merged Offlane into the Core role, it's almost always better to get 2 Safe Lane players for your Core since Offlane players yields the least amount of points compared to other players.
Now on to the day two predictions...
TI9 day two predictions - lay your cards on TNC Predator
Now, with the lower bracket best-of-ones out of sight for the rest of the tournament, we will see only best-of-threes for the rest of the tournament excluding the grand final. Thus, any team that will be playing on Wednesday (meaning not Infamous or Mineski) are perfectly viable. However, we still want to place our cards on series that will tend to drag out longer, since longer games means more points.
To be honest, all of the series on Wednesday, except RNG vs VP, look promising, especially TNC vs Liquid. Thus, for core, best picks would be ana, YawaR, Nisha, Arteezy, Gabbi, and Miracle-. For mid, CCnC, MidOne, SumaiL, Armel, w33; for support, JerAx, N0tail, MSS, pieliedie, YapzOr, Puppey, Cr1t-, Fly, Armel, eyyou, GH, KuroKy. Banking on players of teams you think will win the series will fare better in points, though, since in order to win they'll need to perform better.
Favored lineup: ana, Gabbi, Armel, Tims, eyyou.
Thoughts: My thoughts on the TNC vs VG matchup yesterday was exactly on point -with 172 minutes 37 seconds, that series was an absolute marathon. Lesson be learnt: any series with TNC equals to lots of juicy fantasy points squeezed out. So, hell yes, I'm going for another sweet TNC-heavy lineup.
Stay tuned for day three fantasy predictions.
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Pictures: Copyright: Bart Oerbekke / ESL
