Team Serenity: What We Know About Dota 2’s Chinese Dark Horse

There’s a lot that’s special about The International and it all starts with the qualifiers. This year, the surprise happened right from the regional qualifiers before TI8 in China. An unexpected name that will be attending TI8 in Vancouver, Canada, is Team Serenity! Team Serenity entered the closed qualifiers after passing the open qualifiers in the China region. This team is unknown to anyone and according to Nahaz, they played 22 official games before the China closed qualifiers.

When you just woke up and a team you never heard of just dumpstered LFY and iG in the China qualifiers ?

— Nahaz (@NahazDota) June 20, 2018

In the closed qualifiers, Team Serenity won 2nd place after passing the group stage to enter the next round. One notable team that didn’t go deep is Keen Gaming. In the playoffs, Team Serenity defeated LFY 2-0 and Invictus Gaming 2-1 to assert themselves. Any team that beats these two names deserves to go to TI. This is not to say that LFY and Invictus Gaming are the best Chinese teams. However, the community hopes LFY, Invictus Gaming or Keen Gaming will make it to the next round easily. Unfortunately, only Invictus Gaming can get through this narrow door.

Here is Team Serenity’s TI8 lineup:

Jin ‘zhizhizhi’ Zhiyi
Zhang ‘Zyd’ Quanda
Zhao ‘XinQ’ Zixing
Xiong ‘Pyw’ Jiahan
Xiao ‘XCJ’ Chaojian

Members join the organization at completely different times. The final piece of Serenity’s puzzle was completed when Zyd joined in March 2018. The team had 3 months to get to know each other and practice together, but never made it past the qualifiers to participate in a DPC tournament. This may be because they are still finding ways to promote the strengths of the members. Without saying much more, let’s decipher each player in the Team Serenity roster:

1) Jin ‘zhizhizhi’ Zhiyi

zhizhizhi is one of the quite popular names. He played for EHOME.K and then Keen Gaming before moving to Serenity. zhizhizhi is famous in China for playing with streamer OB (Old Boy). He is one of the few players with an MMR above 9K on the Chinese server, but he is considered the weakest 9k player due to his poor performance in the pro scene. Perhaps now, people will think differently about zhizhizhi.

2) Zhang ‘Zyd’ Quanda

Zyd was the last member to join the team. Having played for CDEC Avengers before moving to Serenity, this mid player is quite tight-lipped in the professional scene.

3) Zhao ‘XinQ’ Zixing

XinQ is probably the most famous of the 5. He was discovered when LGD Gaming owner Ruru found him at a Dota 2 game show in 2014. He is famous for winning matches with Invoker, playing with one hand while eating noodles with the other. It’s not easy!!

After being discovered, he played for TongFu for a while and For The Dream (FTD) after that. But XinQ has never made a big hit and is largely due to its arrogance. With a player full of talent, XinQ is also very toxic in pubs and is quite ostentatious instead of trying to play to win. He’s famous for his Blink Dagger for Queen of Pain, and this is the item he picked up in the final draw against Invictus Gaming. Then he continued on to Dagon.

Despite his natural talent, he is not approached by top teams due to his arrogance and laziness. But now, it seems XinQ has found teammates that will help him shine against the best teams in the world.

4) Xiong ‘Pyw’ Jiahan

Not much is known about Pyw. He is a new player that appeared with Serenity and this is also the strongest team he has joined.

5) Xiao ‘XCJ’ Chaojian

XCJ is the first member of the current roster to join Team Serenity, since September 2017. Prior to Serenity, he played for Team Max alongside Yang ‘Chalice’ Shenyi, who enjoyed success with LGD Gaming. But XCJ was kicked from the team because of poor performance. A few months later, it seemed he had ‘cast the bad luck away’ and started to flourish.

All five of Team Serenity’s players are in the top 100 of China’s rankings. This is a fairly new team in Dota 2 (before TI8). They not only possess young talents but also have a desire to win and a strange way of playing: this can be the main weapon to help the team defeat the opponent. With nothing to lose, Team Serenity confidently headed to Vancouver to the surprise of many. This is a dark horse that can reproduce the success that Wings Gaming senior made history at TI6 two years ago.