In their last series in the Group Stage, Newbee and Mineski put their Upper Bracket positions on the line.
For Newbee, winning one game would mean securing their spot. Mineski, meanwhile, would need to take both games and then still have to worry whether Alliance or TNC can pull off wins to overtake their spot in Group A.
With such high stakes on the line, both teams played very cautiously, leading to a very slow game with only three kills at the 10 minute mark. While Mineski had Kam “Moon” Boon Seng’s Tinker, Newbee pulled out the support Invoker for Arif “MSS” Anwar.
Mineski took their time, but once Moon’s Tinker got his Boot of Travels, the Southeast Asian team started taking fights and winning them. Thanks to Tinker’s global presence, Mineski also started to farm more of the map.
After a few more solid fights, Mineski were able to take Newbee’s tower down just 21 minutes into the game. Thinking that Mineski were at Roshan, Newbee smoked into the pit.
However, Mineski were taking the Shrines and instead rotated to take down the barracks while Newbee traded for a Roshan kill. Newbee had no answer to Moon’s Tinker and continued losing barracks and fights. In the end, Newbee called GG 28 minutes in.
With momentum in their favor, Mineski got off to a strong start in the next game, although Newbee managed to even things up, only 1,000 gold behind at the 15-minute mark. This time around, Newbee had Yawar “YawaR“ Hassan’s Alchemist comfortably farming. Mineski decided to make a play for the Alchemist, but failed.
Instead of retreating, Mineski decided to keep fighting, and ended up feeding more kills to Newbee. Newbee continued to take more great fights, building up a 35,000 gold lead. Mineski just couldn’t find a way to come back into the game and eventually conceded at 37 minutes to tie the series.
With the tie, Newbee have secured their Upper Bracket slot while Mineski will now likely need to play tie breakers.
Be sure to check out our coverage of The International 2019 Group Stage for more TI9 action.
