With roughly two weeks until the International 2018 and no other tournaments left, it is time to do our predictions. Today we are going to focus on the “Teams” tab of the compendium, giving our reasoning behind certain choices.

The Summit 9 was the last tournament before the International 2018 and while it might have lacked international representation, there are still some very interesting developments. More than a month after the China Supermajor, the meta is changing once again.

For a hero with long cooldowns and no reliable stuns, Phoenix is doing surprisingly well in a meta that demands heroes to fight early.

It seems only recently we were asking a question of “Why does no one play Clinkz?” and… we are sorry. In an attempt to make the hero more viable in the professional scene, Valve has created one of the most powerful pubstompers in the game, who is currently terrorizing matches of all skill levels.

Is it possible to enjoy losing in Dota? It’s bound to happen about half the time. From low priority games to behavior scores, Valve has tried various approaches to the occasional, frustrating consequences from playing a game of Dota.

Silencer went under the radar of most players, despite a series of buffs starting in 7.13b. This hero suffers from the lack of identity, with community divided on whether he should be played as a support or as a core. While we do not have the statistics for exact distribution of support or core Silencer, we know that he is least successful when played mid and most successful when played in the offlane, probably as a position four support.

While Fortnite may not have too much in common with Dota, both games have sneaky fish assassins hoping to score some easy kills on unsuspecting players.

Bonus heroes is a controversial feature, especially in ranked games. It is decent as a system that replaced true random heroes in competitive matchmaking, but no one really knows why it was in the game in the first place.

With the last major patch out before TI8, it seems that there will be less hope for Lone Druid, who is picked 2nd to last and has the lowest win rate across all pubs.

The last five teams of the International 2018 are all great in their own way. They are not the tournament's favorites and haven't accomplished enough throughout the year to get top8 in DPC, but the fact that they managed to qualify for the biggest tournament of the year means that they should be taken seriously.