Fnatic vs Motivate.Trust Gaming: Who will continue to fight for a spot in the majors?

South-East Asia's first DPC league of the 2021/22 season will continue on Thursday, January 06. Fnatic and Motivate.Trust Gaming will meet in the only match in the elite division.

DPC SEA 2021/22 Tour 1: Division I is an online Dota 2 tournament from December 01, 2021, to January 22, 2022. The top eight teams from the SEA region will battle it out for $205,000. On top of the cash prizes, the teams will also fight for three entries to the majors and the crucial DPC points needed to qualify for T11.

Fnatic is no longer the same team that topped the nation in Southeast Asia in 2021. The renewed roster is only battling for a place on the Wild Card majors, which is unusual for this organization, but it is much better than the current TNCs' situation. Fnatic is 2-2 in this DPC league so far, which gives them a position exactly in the middle of the table. A game against MTG will swing the lads either down to the strugglers for life in the elite or to the top to contenders for the last slot in the majors.

If you look at the games held, Fnatic won the teams TNC (2-0) and Neon (2-0), lost respectively BOOM squads (0:2) and SMG (0:2), so this was not yet a game with T1, so Fnatic must beat MTG, because the real problems will even maintain a place in the elite SEA, which will be a sensation, along with the departure of TNC, which is about to form.

A renewed Fnatic squad achieved their main goal last season, qualifying for the TI10 through the tough Asian qualifiers. After that, the boys arrived in Europe to prepare for the year's main tournament and did not do well in those games.

The Fnatic team performed extremely poorly in the majors in Singapore and the second DPC league. They won the first Asian DPC league but lost twice in the majors without a chance and quickly dropped out of the play-offs without getting a single DPC point for their performance. In League Two, they failed to qualify, finishing fourth and losing in the replay to Execration.

After their success in qualification, the boys took part in the BTS Pro Series Season 7: Southeast Asia, where they became the tournament's vice-champion. In Europe, the Fnatic team found it extremely difficult. It is difficult to evaluate their performance at TI10. The Asians finished in 9th-12th place, leaving the tournament in the second round of losers, where they lost to eventual TI10 champions Team Spirit (0-2).

After returning from Bucharest, the squad went on holiday without official games. There were changes in the squad: Armel, an experienced player who played for TNC Predator for more than three years, took over as midfielder, while Jaunuel, a star at OB Esports x Neon, took over as number five.

It's hard to assess the impact of the game's postponement with T1, as MTG also had a game with BOOM (0-2), which failed. Maybe now it would have been a string of three defeats in a row, but it's only minus two and a chance to break the bad streak.

In the elite division, MTG's debutants kicked off their new DPC cycle with 2-0 wins over TNC and Execration. These teams are their immediate and close opponents, but the boys proved that they are ready to go head-to-head here and now. Already at the end of the first league game week, I can safely state the fact that MTG here will not fight for survival, and whether they will fight for a slot in the major, demonstrated just the game with SMG, which the guys still lost, showing that not yet ready to compete with more experienced and star teams. If passing SMG was difficult, given their unconventional and unreliable picks, beating T1 and BOOM is now simply unrealistic.

Motivate.Trust Gaming is one of the most interesting Asian teams, which from the bottom could even breakaway on the TI, given their results in the early last summer of 2021, but in the end, failed quals at the TI, the team also failed last summer's tournament BTS series, it is about the 7th season (6th place). Still, in season 8, the guys managed to enter the top three winners, namely finishing the tournament in 3rd place.

The main star of the squad is carry JaCkky, who joined the squad from T1 in March after upping his MMR to 12K. The guy from Laos has shown an unbelievable game, blowing everyone by farming speed and button-pushing on his heroes.

The squad hasn't changed since the summer. Now the guys are showing up well at Tier-4 tournaments: Moon Studio Asian Tigers and PNX Invitational, which was a great warm-up before the ninth season of BTS and, of course, before the upcoming new DPC season. The BTS boys finished in 3rd place and approached the DPC in as good a shape as possible.

The bookmakers have such insane faith in Fnatic that it's hard to believe. Both opponents go 2-2 in the league, show +/- the same skill set, and give ridiculous odds at the expense of the tag on Fnatic. I expect to see three maps in this encounter, so I suggest playing Total Over 2.5 maps for 1.95.

The first map should please us with Total Over 48.5 frags for 1.83.

And for lovers of high odds, we can play the correct score option, which I think will be 2:1 in favour of Fnatic for 3.24.