Puppey and KuroKy reveal how N0tail advised them on strat against Alliance in TI3 grand final

Clement "Puppey" Ivanov shared a story about the famous grand final of The International 2013. A match between NAVI and Alliance started with a game in which they tried to implement a strategy from Johan "N0tail" Sundstein. They discussed this with him and KuroKy in a PGL Wallachia S5 podcast.

Puppey: He's talking about TI3, but he's not saying that they recommended us to do stuff against Alliance. Remember? Before the grand final? [KuroKy nods]
N0tail: Yeah, I was talking to both of you about how to beat Alliance, because we were their kryptonite. They had a choice of picking us or LGD. And LGD was a top dog in China. But Alliance picked them over us. We were like, "All right, at least we got that!" [Everyone laughs]
But yeah, we had a strategy, which was you had to destroy AdmiralBulldog on the lane, leave Loda for later. If you can destroy Bulldog first, then you focus s4. This was our simple way of approaching the game.

The plan didn't work out and NAVI were destroyed in game one. However, they discovered their own approach, which was about focusing supports.

KuroKy: They recommended us some strats. I don't even know if you listened to them.
Puppey: We insta lost the game. We went trilane...
KuroKy: Yeah, we put Venomancer and Vengeful Spirit on the same lane... We were super desperate, because The Alliance just kept beating us.
Puppey: We lost the first game in 20 minutes, it was just... We had no idea how to play the strat, no idea how to do that.
N0tail: That was against Lone Druid. The idea was you Gale the bear, you trilane him, and just hit the bear [laughs].
Puppey: Something happened in that game that was just not going to work. But we found out stuff! We found out how to ban them.
KuroKy: Yeah, we then knew how to ban, and it clicked. We targeted their supports. We figured out that their strategies were based on them, not the Lone Druid. So no Chen, we contested him both ways, because Puppey played Chen. No Naga, Enchantress, KotL, and the Io.
And then the Io, it was the key, because I didn't play Io, and neither did Dendi. Maybe I played it in some pubs. But we only had so many bans, so we were like, "Let's just pick Io, let's play it!" We never played it before. Never touched the hero. So I think that was my first Io game, in the TI3 finals. But yeah, that was the idea: Steal their supports, pick their supports. That was actually a genius idea, to be honest.

The veterans have pretty good memory of the series that happened 12 years ago. Their depiction perfectly matches the hero picks of the TI3 grand final. At the same time, it's possible that NAVI did not understand the strategy fully, as Alliance picked Nature's Prophet for AdmiralBulldog instead of Lone Druid, but NAVI still reacted with Venomancer and Vengeful Spirit.