C9 Coach Astini: "In SA if you don't win, you don't make a living"

When I left nouns I had a few offers from different teams. But I wanted to run my own project and test some game ideas. I also wanted to do this with a fully Brazilian line-up.

Unfortunately, we felt like we were not improving and hit a wall that we could not bypass with the current line-up, and there is unfortunately a lack of available Dota 2 Players in Brazil, so we could not move forward. That's when I considered the Entity offer and joined.

Midas Club was originally an in-house league that I owned and the idea was to have Midas Club Elite formed by the in-house players. In-house doesn't exist anymore. Nowadays Midas Club is just a tag we use when forming stacks. Any player that played on it is free to use the tag as long as it is a Brazilian team.

Plan is to do well at TI. From the beginning I was sure we would qualify, even with the amazing teams we had to play against, we did really well at the previous online tournament and the Riyadh Qualifiers.

We did amazing in groups, finishing the tournament having the second best overall performance but we failed twice at playoffs. We felt the pressure and lost our confidence in our strong points. I believe the biggest work we can do in relation to that is to have a psychologist support and that is something we are working together with Cloud9 to get.

It is easier to coach a European team because you get better practice in better conditions. In SA you were scrimming NA with 170ms (this changed a bit nowadays with new cables, especially, one that connects SA to EU that made ping to Europe go from 250ms to 150ms in São Paulo and to 90ms in Fortaleza).

Also it's a different type of pressure for results, in SA if you don't win you don't make a living, in the EU you feel the pressure to perform because people expect you to do well. For myself, I don't feel any pressure at all now because of this because if you compare it with the previous pressure you get in SA, that's nothing.

I don't have much info on how that went. We liked Entity as an organisation but I was excited when I learnt that we were getting acquired by C9.

It is all very new for us. We are very hyped, but can't tell the changes so far. We're going to see how things unfold at TI13.

It is a good balance patch pre-TI, with some QOL changes to the game that make it better. I like the Faceless Void and Lifestealer changes because now you don't need to choose a “2 benefit facet” versus one. In this sense, I completely dislike the Shadow Fiend change, when they added a 2nd benefit to a facet (which was the innate).

It seems like Valve wants to nerf the fast pace of the game a bit by slightly nerfing auras, and also nerfing lane dominators that would have 2 spells at level 1 (such as Weaver and Brewmaster).

I also like the bracer damage change which indirectly nerfs the strength and universal hcs, and makes you consider playing more agility carries.

Too early to tell but for now it hasn't changed much. It seems like auras are still strong and teams still want to play for the early lane. It just changes the heroes that are strong in lane now.

I see that the idea behind is to push for a later win condition around agility carries but not so sure if it's happening. Maybe, now instead of grouping up on your offlane Greaves timing, you will be grouping up on your Gyrocopter/Luna BKB timing, your Medusa Butterfly timing or your Drow Hurrican Pike timing, but still very fast-paced game.

There will likely be a mini-patch correcting some imba heroes. I'd say that for now the offlane aura builders, pos5/pos4 strong laners, and a carry with good lane and early timings will most likely dictate the meta.

Expect that everyone will work their 100% and pour their soul into it. Every decision we make the entire year is thinking about how to perform better at TI. This does not guarantee any result, but what I learnt is the harder you work, the better your results will usually be. Sometimes you might get a bit lucky or unlucky, but you just keep working hard and results will eventually be a consequence.