This next week, in partnership with Loot.Bet, we'll be featuring the Starladder Minor games on the front page. We'll take a look at the next day's matches, Loot.Bet's odds, and call out which matchups have favorable odds. Yesterday, anyone who bet on Flying Penguins to win vs. RNG, at 9:1 odds, had a decent payday.

Viper was dominating the professional and high level pub scenes. Valve has acknowledged that he was a problematic hero, along with a variety of buffs to many unpicked characters. While the patch itself is pretty small, we believe it will result in disproportionate changes to the meta.

Now that Hand of Midas is back in the meta, players are picking it up at every opportunity, for better or worse.

Ever since Grimstroke was released, players started theorycrafting interesting and effective combinations to use with his ultimate, Soulbind. While initially many concentrated on doubling high-impact, single-target nukes or disables, people soon discovered that coupling it with pseudo-AoE and bouncing abilities can yield amazing results.

Top tier teams were spread between two tournaments this week, with a total of 20 teams competing in high-profile LAN tournaments and giving us a lot of data to work with. We’ve written several posts about the current state of the meta, highlighting how the 7.20-7.21b transition widened it through adding new viable heroes to top levels of play, and our statements regarding wider meta hold true.

While this meta still has some of the staple heroes of past patches, 7.21b has brought forth a few new faces into the mid lane.

7.21b slightly altered the metagame in the highest skill bracket, returning some heroes to the game, while nerfing the most successful carries. Overall the carry meta is in a decently healthy place right now, with a good variety of heroes.

This week, Valve releases 7.21b, OG returns to the DPC by taking down Alliance in the Kiev Minor qualifiers, and ESL unveils Katowice's group stages and first round matches.

For a moment in 7.20 it looked like the historical utility offlaners are here to stay—heroes like Beastmaster, Centaur Warrunner, Dark Seer and Tidehunter were very popular, creating space and initiating teamfights for their teammates, while building auras and utility items. This nostalgic period didn’t last long and once again we are seeing the return of greediness in the hard lane.

Lifestealer is finally back in the meta and dominating both pub and professional games. With direct and indirect buffs bringing parity to Strength heroes, the door was open for his return.