It’s been an eventful past week in the Dota 2 scene, and there’s quite a lot to digest. We saw title contenders falter, a familiar face return, and some topics worth debating.

From tournaments to Reddit threads, here are the happenings in Dota 2 this past week that I’ve been invested in.

Dota 2 esports can be a basket full of surprises, but this certainly wasn’t on anybody’s bingo card. Tundra Esports and Team Yandex, the very two teams that made it to the Grand Final of ESL One Birmingham 2026 just weeks ago, have been sent packing from PGL Wallachia Season 8 in last place after both going 0-3 in the Swiss Stage.

Yes, both teams were forced to field stand-ins for this event, but each side had to replace only one player. Given they are widely regarded as the two best teams in the world, this really feels like a one-in-a-million situation.

Tundra was once again missing their carry, Ivan “Pure” Moskalenko, and we’ve seen them put up disastrous performances without their star player before. With how different Tundra looks with and without him, this really reinforces my idea that Pure is currently the best carry player in the world.

On the other hand, I’d say Team Yandex had a more capable substitute, bringing in Dmitry “DM” Dorokhin in place of Evgeniy “Noticed” Ignatenko. The last time they played with this lineup, they actually went on to win PGL Wallachia Season 7.

These results are surprising across the board, but even more so for Yandex. This feels especially true given that rumors from CyberMeta were already brewing that the team planned to replace Noticed with DM on a permanent basis. 

Either way, it almost feels refreshing to know we’ll see a different tournament winner this year. It takes us back to 2025, where it felt like any team could take a title.

PGL Wallachia Season 8 also let us check in on a familiar face: Omar “w33” Aliwi. The two-time TI finalist has been retired for quite a while already, but he’s going back on camera, this time in a different role. The Romanian local is making his talent debut at Wallachia, serving as a desk analyst.

I believe w33 is a very welcome addition to the talent pool. He’s competed at the top of the scene for years, so he’ll bring lots of insight and experience to the broadcast.

I’m not going to lie, it’s been a little too repetitive seeing the same talent at every single event, so his presence feels like a breath of fresh air. Hopefully, we’ll see him recommend a team to pick Tide and TA, because this pairing gives you everything, apparently. 

It also seems like w33 is following the footsteps of other retired pros like Quinn “Quinn” Callahan and Aydin “Insania” Sarkohi, who have transitioned into analyst roles after hanging up the mouse. However, the influx of former pros turning into analysts does put non-pro analysts’ jobs at risk.

I guess that’s just the price to pay. 

Speaking of Insania, the TI winner had an interesting take in Episode 28 of the All Chat podcast. Here, he mentioned flaws in the game’s economic system and said it was pointing toward a boring direction.

The main points he made in his rant were:

Honestly speaking, Insania is cooking with this take. As a spectator, I’ll admit it’s incredibly boring, and sometimes dreadful, to watch heroes stack survivability items like Black King Bar, Aeon Disk, Pipe of Insight, and Crimson Guard. Sometimes, players can land huge Chronospheres or Black Holes, and literally nobody dies during the duration because of how tanky they are. 

In other cases, heroes that historically didn’t have much damage potential in the late game can now buy items to solve that issue. Sand King used to just be an initiator with relatively low damage, but now he’s viable in the mid lane and the late game because he can buy items like Aghanim’s Scepter, Daedalus, and Skull Basher to just shit out/dish out damage.

This has also resulted in teams playing slow and choosing to farm the map. For example, when teams like Tundra Esports or Team Falcons are in the lead, they’ll just choke out the map and continue farming until they have a 30,000 net worth lead, because more items simply reduce the chances of losing the game.

When scenarios like this happen, us fans are forced to watch 10 to 20 minutes of both teams farming before an actual fight breaks out. 

Additionally, I think this also reduces the skill aspect of Dota 2. You can cover up for your slow reaction times, weak mechanics, or missed power spike windows by just farming faster than the enemy team and patching your weaknesses with more items. 

Quinn shared a very intriguing story on his live stream, claiming former pro player Mason “Mason” Venne was a toxic individual who allegedly leaked his father’s personal information.

He said: “Back when I was a nobody, and he was a top-tier pro, he was in a TeamSpeak channel that I was in with some friends, and he would relentlessly bully me in pub games and flamed me, specifically, like crazy hard.

“He made a blog post on NA Dota leaking my dad’s private family blog and doxxed my family. Mason is an awful, awful person.”

Now, Quinn isn’t exactly a spotless source here, as he’s also known to be quite a troublemaker in pub matches. We’ve seen him grief games and use foul language toward players in his matches on multiple occasions. That said, allegations of doxxing are clearly in a completely different conversation.

Quinn may not have the best reputation in-game, but outside of that, he’s generally come across as a nice fella in public. Meanwhile, Mason is known for being toxic both in-game and out of game, and has received 12 Twitch bans and multiple behavioral bans on his Dota 2 accounts. 

Overall, I think there’s a clear line between in-game toxicity and anything involving personal information being shared outside the game. This is a line where the two simply don’t compare. 

To end the recap on a lighter note, we have a very unusual development in the North American qualifiers for the million-dollar DreamLeague Season 29 tournament. Spoiler alert, this doesn’t exactly help the argument that NA is now a one-team region. 

GamerLegion, a North American squad that consistently qualifies for the biggest Dota 2 tournaments, was looking to secure its spot in yet another one. They participated in the DreamLeague Season 29 qualifiers, where they were only tasked to play against one opponent.

In a four-team double-elimination bracket, half the teams decided to forfeit every match and not play at all. This pretty much turned the qualifier into a 1v1 matchup between GamerLegion and an unsponsored stack named Amaru Flame. GamerLegion ended up mopping the floor, going 5-0 in total maps to qualify for the event.

The total game time across the entire qualifier is just under 180 minutes, or three hours. 

The craziest part is that only eight out of 20 players in those qualifiers were actually North American. There were a bunch of players from Europe and South America sneaking into the qualifier, so it’s even harder to call it the “North American” qualifier.

Considering we haven’t seen a resurgence of North American talent or organizations looking to invest in the region, we might be in this situation for quite a while. Gone are the days of Evil Geniuses and Shopify Rebellion, but it’s at least reassuring to see GamerLegion holding up well against the best teams in the world.