The International - what have we learnt?

I learned that the dreaded Faceless Void / Skywrath Mage combo is actually a lot weaker than originally thought.

void is only as good as the player who uses them.

for instance universe is just unreal at landing chrono's. but the thing is that players like ferrari and xboct are 'forced' to play that hero even though it isnt their style, just becouse he is trending.

Whoops, yep, messed up the players. He was indeed on LGD last year, don't know why I got so confused. But I believe they used it against LGD too, they used it in 50% of their games lol.

http://www.gosugamers.net/dota2/vods?game=9&tournament=2087&teamFirst=2590&teamSecond=&recommended=0&onlyFirst=0&filter=Submit&playerFirst=&playerSecond=&heroes=&raceFirst2=&raceFirst14=&raceSecond2=&raceSecond14=&onlyDecks=0

not really, they only picked pudge 3 times. 2 times against tongfu. but game 1 was just a pudge stomp and so was that game against LGD.
the chen hooks only came into effect in that one game 3.

so 1 out of 30 games is hardly 50% :P

Let us pray that there is no flood of tears over something "broken" this year -_-

need 1 more ban in the first stage of drafting, for a total of 6 bans.

Don't know why Xiao8 mentinoneed the strat in one of those fancy interviews shown on Twitch before the game would start, but he mentioned the strat, and it being cheap. Then again, not sure why he would be mad about it if it wasn't used against him.

Wrong asumption.

I learned that VG likes to draft the same thing 3 times in a row after already being stomped by Newbee the first time.

Also it seems the early push deathball strat is the hot new meta right now.

That trend ruined the International for more than one team. Instead of playing heroes that their players are comfortable on, their signature heroes, they ended up playing on "current meta" heroes, even though they weren't good at it. They ended up being terrible on it.

Examples: XBOCT Razor, Dendi Tiny, XBOCT Faceless void, Burning Razor, Kuroky SWM, etc.

I agree with you just not with all the examples.
Dendi was actually really succesfull with tiny-wisp earlier in the tournament. Burning is also fine on razor it is just that that the hero was so overpicke that he often didnt make sense at all in their strategy.

It was like mirana all over again, when she became more popular she also had a **** winrate becouse it was ******ed to have her as your hard farmer, razor has the same problem.