DreamLeague S22 Qualifiers – NA results

DreamLeague S22 will be a $1 million Dota 2 event. The tournament is scheduled to be played between February 25 – March 10. It will bring together 16 teams, and 12 of them had to go through qualifiers. Only BetBoom Team, Gaimin Gladiators, Xtreme Gaming and Team Liquid received a direct invitation based on their EPT Leaderboard score.

In North America, the qualifier was very exciting to watch. In the end, after a long best-of-five Grand Final and a 67-minute game 5, Shopify Rebellion was victorious over nouns. It seems that Tal “Fly” Aizik’s former team, despite no longer benefiting from his vast experience as a captain, can still rely on the talent of Artour “Arteezy” Babaev.

ALL REGIONS ARE LOCKED IN! ✅

Congratulations to all the DreamLeague S22 Closed Qualifier winners! 🎉#ESLProTour pic.twitter.com/NNNDc7wPd9

— ESL Dota2 (@ESLDota2) January 18, 2024

Complete results

The tournament featured eight teams. Many of them have familiar names for NA fans, but most of the players are relatively unknown. Some have Brazilian origins, others are from Ukraine, South Korea, Romania, Germany, and, of course, Canada and the USA.

The big favorites ahead of the race were nouns and Shopify Rebellion. Of these two teams, nouns were regarded as being a bit stronger simply because of Fly’s leadership. Shopify Rebellion, who had to go through open qualifiers first, had a slightly smaller chance to win.

The two teams encountered each other for the first time in the upper bracket semifinals. And to everyone’s surprise, Rebellion won in a convincing way. They used heroes like Chen, Techies, Invoker, Arc Warden, and Pangolier. Many of these picks are not exactly standard and in line with the meta, but they still succeeded with them.

Nouns tried to play much tankier drafts that rely on burst damage to get the job done. They picked Timbersaw, Ursa, Magnus, and Abaddon, among other heroes. Game 1 lasted 48 minutes while game 2 was over after just 32.

After this result, everyone was convinced that the two teams would meet again in the Grand Final. And that’s exactly what happened. Nouns won three consecutive lower bracket matches without losing a single game, which emphasized the huge difference between the top two teams in the tournament and everyone else.

In the Grand Final, Shopify won the first two games using a very interesting Phoenix strategy. They ended up picking the bird four times in five games. Games 3 and 4 were won by nouns thanks to a Vengeful Spirit + Techies + Terrorblade combo, which worked really well.

But then, in game 5, Shopify went back to their game 1 formula, while nouns tried something completely new. In the end, after being far behind their opponents for the entire duration of the match, nouns lost their Ancient and their chance to compete in DreamLeague S22.

Header: ESL