The Dota 2 StarLadder ImbaTV Minor is done and standing on top is none other than Team Aster with a near-perfect run. That’s right, Aster grabbed the last remaining slot for the ESL One Los Angeles Major 2020 by losing only one match through the entire tournament. The win also gives Aster a large share of the $300,000 prize pool and a minimum of 140 DPC points.
Team Aster may be relatively new to the scene, being established in 2018, but its current roster is a good mix of veterans to the game. There’s Song "Sccc" Chun, who has been in TI tournaments. Then there’s also Ye "BoBoKa" Zhibiao and Pan "Fade" Yi. Rounding up the team are Kee Chyuan "ChYuan" Ng and Lin "Xxs" Jing.
Aster was given a direct invite to the Closed Qualifier of the ESL One LA Major for the China region. The team was eliminated from the running to join normally, but secured a spot for the SLi Minor Qualifiers. It was here that the team showed its dominance to get a spot for the Minor.
At the Minor, Aster was grouped with BOOM Esports, forZe eSports, and business associates. The team's first match was against BOOM and they didn’t really have any problems. In the first game Aster limited BOOM to just five team kills. In the second game BOOM managed to get the early lead, but that wasn’t enough as the match swung back in Aster’s favor for the win.
In the Winners’ Match against forZe, Sccc ended with 15 kills while ChYuan contributed with 11 of his own. The second game was be pretty much like the first with the two players again showing strong performances.
In the Playoffs, Aster first swept Alliance 2-0 and then Gambit Esports again at 2-0.
However, in the Grand Finals Aster again met with Alliance. In the first game, excellent performances from Sccc and ChYuan carried Astor to victory. In the second game, Alliance drafted Medusa for Nikolay "Nikobaby" Nikolov, a strategy that had worked for them in the past. However, Aster would go for Arc Warden for Sccc.
With one game away from elimination, Alliance went for the Death Prophet and managed to prevent Aster’s heroes from getting online. This gave Aster their first loss in the tournament, and eliminated the sweep of Alliance.
With this, Alliance again went for Death Prophet in the fourth game, with Nikobaby on Faceless Void. Aster chose to go with Gyrocopter for Sccc, who was supported by Io. Alliance wasn't able to find an answer to the Gryo+Io combo and eventually conceded the game at around the 32-minute mark.
With the win, we now get to see if Team Aster can dominate at the ESL One LA Major like the way they did with this tournament.
