Team OG (ft. MinD_ContRoL) are incredible at Berlin Major 2023

Ivan “MinD_ContRoL” Ivanov and Team OG have their differences throughout the many championships they compete. However, MinD_ContRoL was not the one to shy away when OG needed a reliable offlane player to stand-in for them at the ESL One Berlin Major 2023.

At the very least, OG didn’t ask him to play like Ceb. And for sure he did not.

Team OG runs the Berlin Major 2023

The Berlin Major 2023 is already the hottest major of the season with many formidable teams making their entry. OG, being the fourth-place team from Western Europe Division 1 of the second Tour, must have been feeling the impostor syndrome from the get go.

WEU’s Big Three: Gaimin Gladiators, Team Liquid and Tundra Esports have proven themselves to be the best in class, not only in the recent Lima Major but the International 11 (TI11). OG being the oddball of the bunch, surely didn’t look as promising at the start of the event, yet are now the hottest team in the competition.

Going up against the eighteen strongest teams in the world isn’t challenging enough, two OG players (Dmitry “DM” Dorokhin and Evgenii “Chu” Makarov) and even coach, Mikhail “Misha” Agatov, couldn’t attend the Berlin Major.

As such, MinD_ContRoL as stand-in offlaner for DM (and Kartik “Kitrak” Rathi as hard support for Chu) was apparently their best and only option at Berlin Major.

Two clean sweeps versus Xtreme Gaming and Team SMG, showed us what OG can do on this patch. Against SMG, OG drafted a greedy line-up, comprising of Slark, Void Spirit and a Beastmaster. But, considering the extra resources on the map and early dominance in midgame, this greedy draft actually paid off.

Whereas OG decides to take a different approach against Xtreme Gaming by having a stronger team fight capability using the various AOE-based controls and sustain. They rendered Xtreme obsolete when the latter didn’t have sufficient damage output to overwhelm OG.

Just play like MC 🤜🤛 pic.twitter.com/uK8FCrGMNJ

— OG (@OGesports) April 26, 2023

Playoffs at the Berlin Major are already looking phenomenal for this OG line-up. Their opener versus Team Liquid went 2-1 in OG’s favor and they are a series away from securing a top 3 finish.

Their next duel is versus Gaimin Gladiators on Wednesday, May 3rd.

Side note, don’t expect MC to shift sides to OG anytime soon. Even though, it looks very tempting to ditch Nigma Galaxy for a younger team in their prime. This is arguably the closest MC fans can hope for MC to be winning at Dota 2.

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