Some teams up at the top are clearly more innovative than others, and quite often it pays off. Take TLT, they seem to be the team that pretty much forced morphling up a tier in terms of nice carries to choose from recently, and it payed off - morphling certainly won them some games.
Ks.Int have pretty much been at the forefront of making innovative hero choices over the past few months, with some interesting outcomes. Whilst everyone was still in "carry hero mode" after 6.52e, ks.int were one of the first teams to come out against the grain with full on ganker lineups, and had almost a "signature" playstyle with puppey on some sort of 100% roaming hero - lina/shaker/chen, generally making himself a pain to teams in the early game, giving kuroky a chance to happily farm up some godly items. This was most definately innovative, with many different sorts of lineups around this ganking theme, and for a little while they were completely unbeatable. They worked interesting heroes into their lineups - beastmaster, weaver, tiny, sven, leshrac - all not considered "top tier", but whilst using out-of-the-box heroes, they continued to play around the same theme that worked.
Recently however, their picks have sometimes looked almost insane. Ever since they stepped away from their "winning formula", they just haven't seemed quite the same team. They went through a stage of having puppey carry on kunkka, and im sorry but this plain didnt work, why not have players stick to their strengths? Even more recently their teams have most definately been out of the ordinary; a few times over the past couple of weeks i've seen puppey play a sort of half-roaming jugger, now I do love watching puppey roam, but is jugger the right hero to do it on? Seems not to have been working in quite the same way against the top teams as his roaming a few months ago did.
They've also quite often been one of the first teams to recognise that "imba" heroes are counterable. They were one of the first heroes to stop banning krobelus, more recently necro, over the past week i've seen them allow teams to pick TC and undying against them. Thats pretty ballsy, and infairness if you think you can counter those picks then it sort of plays into your hand as you can count on the opponents picking them. Props to them for that, but I can't say its worked every time recently.
On the other hand, they do appear to be the team thats introduced clockwork into regular competitive play recently too, they've definately done well with him in their strats, and I see how he fits their teamplay particularly with his sort of "map-hack" missiles to give vision.
There seems to be a fine line between innovation, and being careless about what you allow your opponents to pick. Its all very well trying out something new, but constantly trying out new strats is no way to build up consistancy. Once you have a nice style of play developed, why not stick to picking heroes around that theme? Of course its nice to mix things up, but going completely off the chart doesn't work unless its already been pretty well practiced already.
GJ Ks.int on making things interesting, but please try and win a bit more? :D
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