I’ll be the first to admit I’m a little biased towards TD, with three of their members hailing from my home (Canada) and with TD Zignature living about an hour outside my hometown. That aside, I would have been the last person to suspect they would perform so well at IPL 4. After that tournament, I was 100% behind this team; they gave a number of top teams a run for their money. Showing up at MLG Anaheim more practiced and prepared for a LAN environment, they made their way in to my top 3 to take home the gold.

Their first series of the day was against former Absolute Legends EU, now Curse.EU. The first game in the series was a disaster for TD. TD ZionSpartan on Vladimir was absolutely taken advantage of by the opposing Irelia, resulting in a surrender vote called out by TD. Many teams would feel demoralized by such a crushing loss, unable to come back for even one win in the Bo3. Leave it to TD to come back with such strength to muscle their way to victory in the next two games. One of the more notable plays was TD NintendudeX camping top brush by golems with his Vlad to kill Irelia as she returned to lane from a previous death. The post-game interviews also yielded some interesting information: NintendudeX runs 21 utility on his jungle Olaf, mentioning an affinity for CDR and increased experience gain. Their next match was against the veteran team Dignitas, which knocked them in to the lower bracket, but not without putting up a fight, coming out 1-2 against Dignitas.

In the Lower bracket Dynamic continued to show that they were not going down without a fight, beating well-known teams Curse.NA and Fnatic. I think one of the highlights from these games was the Akali pick-up versus a Vladimir top. ZionSpartan played a fantastic Akali, snowballing his lane hard with the aid of NintendudeX’s ganks, of which one consisted of NintendudeX as Dr.Mundo sitting in top river bush for at least 30-45 seconds waiting for the opposing lane to return from shop, only to get ganked and die.

However, victory was not in the cards for Dynamic when they came in to their match against the powerhouse CLG.Prime. Though they were able to take a game off of CLG, they were no match to the calm determination CLG brings to the game, and were eventually knocked out of the tournament.

Admittedly this article is a little late, but my point still stands. This team is perhaps one of the most important in the competitive scene today. They have demonstrated great skill in defeating some of the top teams in NA and EU handily in their matches. But that’s not all. TD as a team represents a great shift in E-Sports. Personal testimony from the players will show that they did not receive support for this choice in the beginning from their parents. This is critical. Once they started earning legitimate income from the game, their parents became much more supportive.

When you were growing up and you told your parents you wanted to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an athlete they would get behind you without question. Being a pro-gamer, on the other hand, would take some convincing. But if our community gets some strong role models that prove that pro-gaming can be a legitimate career path, it would be a great step in the growth of E-Sports.