Somnus and his veteran teammates at Azure Ray have been handed a lesson in Dota 2 from the new kids on the block as LGD stomp their regional rivals 2-0 to lock in a top-three spot at The International 2023.

LGD was ruthless in executing their game plan against Azure Ray, with position one carry Shiro nigh unstoppable across both games recording 27-8-28 in total on Muerta and Spectre. While the matches crossed 40 minutes, they were truly over by minute 20 and as LGD offlaner niu explains, they were prepared to deal with AR’s Weaver option.

“I feel Weaver is not a bad hero, he’s pretty strong, but you have to draft around it,” niu said in his post-game interview. “You can’t pick it and expect just to win.”

It’s not a dig by any means at AR’s strategy, but Lou struggled to make the Weaver work in his favor in both maps, recording just four kills over the course of the series. Niu understands it takes more than a single-player performance to land a win on the TI main stage, however.

“I feel my team is amazing, they’re so good,” he said, adding he and the squad are at their best now. They’ll need to be—their next opponent, Russian squad Team Spirit, is riding high after a solid win over Team Liquid.

“Yeah, I watched [Team Spirit] at TI10, I will try my best,” niu said. “I feel they were underdogs at TI10, we’re going to give it our best though.”

LGD will be the ones with the underdog tag tomorrow in their upper bracket final against Spirit, but if they played like they did today, they’ll be very tough to bring down. Both matches showed how resilient LGD is regardless of the game state with the squad forced to come back twice after mediocre laning phases.

In both cases, Azure Ray failed to capitalize on their early leads. Given LGD’s decision to lean into late-game team compositions, AR needed to win before 25 to 30 minutes. But LGD never gave them an opening, with each player outplaying their opposition mirror match.

Team Spirit won’t be as comfortable to handle tomorrow for the young Chinese squad, while the veterans will need to overcome Spirit’s regional partners in BetBoom or they’ll be sent packing from TI 2023 altogether.