How Team Spirit's rise to the top trumps even OG's Cinderella story in Dota 2

When PSG.LGD lifted the AniMajor trophy, they appeared to be a league apart from any other Dota 2 roster.

The team had been close to the aegis of the champions, the ultimate relic of honor in Dota 2, several times. They had been eliminated from the semifinals thrice and lost TI 18 to OG in the finals.

The Dota 2 community almost unanimously thought this was PSG.LGD's year. Their current stack, with Cheng "NothingToSay" Jin Xiang and Zhao "XinQ" Zixing on loan from EHOME, is arguably the strongest they have ever been. Right up until the TI 10 grand finals, PSG.LGD had not dropped a single series in the tournament.

Moreover, their semi-final clean sweep against Team Secret was vehement, with a clear gap between how cleanly the two teams executed their plans. Wang "Ame" Chunyu, the PSG.LGD carry, had not died a single time in the two matches.

And yet, TI 10 was to be the second time the Aegis would slip from Ame's grasp in the grand finals. It would also be the second time they have catalyzed the triumph of legendary underdogs: first OG in 2018, and now Team Spirit.

Team Spirit won TI with only a year of experience in tier-1 Dota 2 play

Team Spirit's TI 10 squad was only formed in 2020, when the organization signed the currently inactive Yellow Submarine stack. The sole exception to this is Miroslaw "Mira" Kolpakov, who was brought from the tier-3 Ukrainian team, Cascade, to replace Vitaly "so bad" Oshmankevich.

Out of the four ex-Yellow Submarine members, only their captain, Yaroslav "Miposhka" Naidenov, has any prior TI experience. Playing from Team Empire, Miposhka's TI 2017 squad made it to the 7th-8th spot, before they were trampled by Team Liquid's legendary lower bracket run.

Interestingly enough, their own lower bracket run in TI 10 almost mirrors the 2017 Team Liquid. The one big difference here is that Team Spirit is far from a glamorous group of TI veterans.

For Illya "Yatoro" Mulyarchuk, Magomed "Collapse" Khalilov, and Alexander "TORONTOTOKYO" Khertek, their first tier-1 Dota 2 event was ESL One Germany 2020, which took place roughly a year before TI 10.

Before this, their Dota 2 careers consisted of tier-2 and tier-3 East European tournaments worth a couple thousands of prize money. As TORONOTOTOKYO noted in a pre-finals interview, their steady improvement was mostly ground out in a year of scrims with the top-tier teams in and between the DPC 2021.

As their coach, Airat "Silent" Gaziev, would put it, their luck had carried them in a lot of cases. But as any team grinding through the obscure tier-3 regional scenes would know, it was their unmatched team chemistry that flung them to the top of the Dota 2 hierarchy.

As the team that ousted OG from their '3peat' dream in the lower brackets, Team Spirit also has much in common with OG. Like OG, Team Spirit also dazzled their opponents with their off-meta strats. Collapse's magnum opus, Magnus, might be the most meta-offlaner of TI.

But looking at Yatoro's diverse portfolio of picking 13 different carries throughout the main stage, it becomes very clear that Team Spirit crafts their own meta instead of following other teams.