OG’s Ana Reinvents Io as a Carry

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M-King

The defending champion is making everything work!

Ana photo by Valve

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Io is notorious for being an imbalanced lane support, and when Valve seemed to have finally nerfed the shining ball of light into oblivion after the recent patches, OG found a new reason to pick the hero.

In their matchup against PPD’s Ninjas in Pyjamas in the second day of The International 2019 group stage, the defending bearers of the Aegis of Champions channeled their inner Wings Gaming and drafted Io for their carry, Ana. It was an unorthodox pick that was only supposed to be seen in pubs, but after finding success in JerAx’s support Invoker yesterday against Infamous, OG seems to be adamant about putting all theories into practice.

Many have dared to explore the viability of Io as a right-click heavy carry, but only a few found success. With the recent redesign on its skills and talent re-adjustment basically stripping it off of its laning prowess, OG took the honor of revisiting the age-old idea. Ana’s Io, however, was more of a utility carry, rather than a pure damage-dealing core. He prioritized Helm of Dominator to Tether with an Alpha Wolf and utilized the farming aspect of Spirits with Aghanim’s Scepter.

At the end of the first game, Ana scored the highest kill score with 11 and gold per minute at 530, without taking the 150 gold per minute talent at level 20. Io’s level 25 talent, which allows it to attack the target of the one its Tethered to, worked wonders with Topson’s Focus Fire to destroy a tier-four tower with backdoor protection.

The second game of the series could have told a different story about the success of carry Io, if not for a monumental Echo Slam by Ceb that shattered NiP’s 8K gold lead. OG’s sweep, however, was only an icing on top of Ana’s consistent performance as he notched, this time, the game-high net worth without again picking up the gold per minute talent. OG’s success with a carry Io bolstered Io’s win rate percentage in The International to a stable 62.50% with eight games played. Though the strategy may just be an OG thing, the true viability of the Wisp as anything other than a carry is yet to be tested by other teams in Shanghai, China.

Meanwhile, OG extended their apologies for pre-emptively ruining everybody’s pub games.

With the 2-0 win against their co-European representatives, OG now shares the top seed with the Chinese powerhouse, Vici Gaming, with seven points. Meanwhile, NiP has yet to gain another score after the one point they receive from splitting the best-of-two series against Fnatic Dota earlier today.

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