I stumbled across Lantyr's (FW Coach) stream a couple of days ago where he went over his thoughts on the B/P phase for all of the games against BRU. He talks about his plan going into the series, where he messed up, as well as where BRU messed up. There were a lot of interesting bits that I'll summarize for you guys to the best of my abilities, I think you will enjoy it.

First he mentions that he thinks BRU is the better team in a best of one setting where all heroes are available (70/30 in favor of BRU), but in a best of 7 series where global ban takes effect FW is able to make up that gap to around 50/50 with their deep hero pool. From his research, BRU is really dangerous if they're able to get their hands on Lindis, Telannas, and Capheny. FW isn't very scared of Laville because they're very good at using Joker as a counter, and they don't think very highly of F1's Elandor.

He thinks Nunu's best heroes are Dirak, Krixi, Raz and Violet, and F1's best heroes are Lindis, Kriknak, Fennik, Rourke, Zill, Quillen.

His plan going into the series was to waste as much of BRU's resources (specifically Nunu & F1's best picks) as possible in game 1 and 2, and focus the majority of their own resources into game 3, 4, 5 and 6. He basically told his team that the first two games are going to be uphill battles, its okay if they lost but they all be at a HUGE advantage resource wise if they were able to steal 1 game.

With that plan on mind, he let Zip through the draft in game one hoping that BRU would pick it so FW wouldn't have to ban Zip for the rest of the series, and can just focus on shutting down Nunu & F1's picks. Althoufh it seems that FW also used a ton of their resources on Elandor, Lavelle and Raz, he explains that other than Xixi's Raz none of them are FW's priority picks but more so secondary picks. On the other hand they were able to bait out Capheny, Lindis and Zip who are all core heroes on BRU's side. He wanted to bait out one of Nunu's better heroes as well, but that didn't work out.

Game 2 is much of the same idea, but he thought that FW should've been able to win that game had they played better. Again the plan was to bait out 007x's Telannas Teemee pick. FW had to expand their Capheny pick as a result but he thought it was worth since FW doesn't depend on their MM to win games as much as BRU.

Game 3 is where this is get interesting and he goes in depth about his picks now that FW has the advantage resource wise. They get the first pick Dirak which he expected because BRU had to ban Zip and Florentino.

At this point he expected BRU to pick Laville because BRU only had Laville, Violet and Fennik as their good MM picks at this point. BRU only plays Fennik in the jungle so they most likely won't show their jungler in the first 2 picks, and Violet has too many counters, therefore Laville is the logical choice. Of course they pick their Joker instantly to counter Laville as they have had lots of success doing it. FW picked Thane as their support because they wanted a tank. At that point the only other good tanks available were Y'Beneth and Xeniel. They wanted to save Ybeneth against Krizzix, and Xeniel for a split pushing strat.

By now he realized that his team is very weak against tank heroes, so they banned Roxie and Superman who were some of the remaining tanky side laners and forced a Yena pick who FW can play fairly easily against with an Arthur pick. He picked Nakroth as the jungler because he thought Nakroth had a decent match up against most of the junglers BRU could pick at that time. BRU's options were quite limited because they can't pick another MM due to Dirak, and can't pick Kriknak due to the Joker even though he's good against Nakroth. BRU ended up picking Keera which Lantyr was fine with because he thought F1's Keera is pretty trash compared to his good heroes. He basically said that the game was 80/20 in favor of FW just based on the draft, and FW had to fuck up hard to lose this.

Game 4 Lantyr thought BRU made a huge mistake banning Xeniel because he would have been scared of a Xeniel Flor combo, but since BRU banned Xeniel themselves FW comfortably took Riktor. FW then took Ybeneth to go against Krizzix and Qi to go up against Flor which they are very comfortable with. They took Elsu mid and Kriknak jungle in the 2nd phase which BRU probably didn't expect. He explained that it didn't matter that FW had no magic damage because Riktor has true damage, Kriknak does % damage, and Elsu has 100% pierce. Again, he thought FW won the draft hard, and was very comfortable going into this game.

Game 5 is where he said he messed up. He said he picked Hayate and Paine too early which allowed BRU to counter pick too easily. In retrospect he should have picked Fennik or Lindis since they has an easier match up against Kriknak. He also regrets picking Kikgroth because it made their comp too late game centric with no reliable initiator. In retrospect he would be preferred a Superman pick in the slayer lane.

Game 6 he knew FW was in a good spot because BRU had no top tier heroes left while they still had Omen/Lindis/Ignis which were no brainer picks at that point. BRU chose to prioritize their mid/sp/slayer, which means FW can ban Violet and Fennik and force a Slimz/Brunhilda pick. Not much to be said here, he was fairly confident whether BRU picked Brunhilda or Slimz.

Game 7 is where it got really interesting IMO, because keep in mind that he thinks BRU is the stronger team when all heroes are available, so there's a lot of pressure for him to outdraft BRU which he ended up doing.

The bans were typical, FW banned Krixi and Dirak while BRU banned Florentino and Zip. He mentioned that he banned Krixi first instead of Dirak because he wanted to make it seem like they were going to take Dirak first and trick BRU into banning Dirak themselves, but BRU didn't fall for it. The reason why FW didn't first pick Dirak was because Riktor and Capheny were still available, and he wanted to get a Warrior on the side lane for GaDuo who wasn't doing too well with MMs this series.

BRU picked Omen and Capheny, FW countered with Qi and Lindis. He mentions that he noticed Summer never builds damage items on Omen, so Qi shouldn't have a hard time laning against Omen with her sustain. He picked Lindis as a gamble that BRU will choose to pair Lumbrr with Capheny instead of going for a jungler like Kriknak with their third pick. He mentions that this was a fatal mistake by BRU and was the reason BRU lost because he was able to ban Kriknak and Fennik forcing F1 to play Volkath or Darcy. Keep in mind that that F1 doesn't play Nakroth or Zephys, his only assassins available at that point were Keera and Quillen, both of which gets countered by Lindis.

In phase two FW picked Marja to go against Raz. This is a good match up for Marja since there's not much Raz could do to get once she has Gaias. They rounded off their team with Xeniel to create split push pressure of their own. Since BRU's Omen only builds tank items, he won't be able to solo kill Xeniel which plays into FW's favor.

This was an super informative stream, definitely showed that there's a LOT going on in the B/P phase than what we originally thought. I noticed that not only does he prepare the strategies for his team, he also adjusts his strategy to fit his teams condition. For example, he mentions that he felt GaDuo wasnt doing well with marksman in the series, so he wanted to prioritize a sidelane warrior pick for him in game 7. He mentioned that Xixi wasn't doing too well with Raz in the series, so he prioritized a much safer pick in Marja for him.

He also mentioned a lot of other interesting things like how they were most scared of facing HKA in the tournament because they were like 0-13 against HKA in scrimmages or something crazy like that.

Kato is also the main call for the team in case anyone is wondering. Which is surprising because he's one of the newer members on the team (only joined previous season) and came from a team that won ZERO games in the GCS the previous season. This just shows how good he really is, and they obviously respect him/trust him a lot to put him into that position. He was very underrated before the APL, he's almost never mentioned amongst the best junglers in the game it's always been Neil, F1 and ADC. But he's proved himself for sure in this tournament, and he did it with style playing the most number of heroes in the entire tournament showcasing his deep hero pool.

Anyways, I thought this was extremely interesting coming from the coaches perspective. Obviously I couldn't cover everything, so let me know if there are any questions with the drafts I'll try to explain more in detail.