First Blood, Sixteen Deaths

The headline stat

First blood, sixteen deaths

Same night as the Dazzle game — a couple of hours later, same account, considerably worse luck.

I opened this game by personally securing First Blood at 3:46, a three-man read on Lion with Phantom Assassin and Hoodwink backing the play. I closed it with sixteen deaths, the joint-most of any player in the match, on a hero who also finished with the highest hero damage (58,646) and the highest teamfight participation (71.4%) of anyone on either team. Those two facts sitting next to each other is the entire story of this recap.

18:55–19:01

The other good moment

Between the two disasters either side of it, six minutes into the mid-game I picked up a double: Muerta at 18:55, Windrunner six seconds later at 19:01. It’s the only stretch of the whole match where Phoenix looked like the hero winning fights instead of dying in them.

41:58

The mercy kill

My sixteenth death wasn’t from Radiant at all. It was our own Sniper, finishing me off at 41:58 — a deny, not a gank. Under a quarter health, an ally can deny you outright to keep the gold and experience out of the enemy’s hands. It’s a real mechanic, it’s the correct play, and it’s still a strange thing to see in your own combat log: the one death this game that wasn’t the other team’s doing.

45:40–53:33

The end, efficiently

Radiant took Roshan uncontested at 52:15 and had already started the real siege five minutes earlier: from 45:40 onward they took three towers, four barracks, both tier-fours and the fort in well under eight minutes. There wasn’t a counter-push in this one — once the map opened up, it stayed open.

Some games you carry and lose anyway. The box score doesn’t have a column for that, so it just looks like a bad night.

Full scoreboard

Reconstructed from the match replay with dotabuff/manta · combat log + entity snapshot analysis. Match 8675536337 · 10 players · 55:52 · Radiant victory.