Game one was on Terenas Stand. I scouted with a footman and found him creeping to level 2 with blademaster. I’m thinking, “great. I can creep the mercenary camp and a green for level 3 and tower rush with mercs.” So that’s what I did.

A couple things to watch for:

1) I used the wand of mana stealing on the green wizard creep. This is a great way to refill up on some of your Archmage’s mana after summoning water elementals to creep with. The wand of mana stealing item is otherwise not very good versus blademaster or other heroes anyway.

2) I sold my Town Portal for dust and boots.

Game two was on Lost Temple. This game the orc spawns next to my natural gold mine so I chose not to fast expand. Instead I teched to casters and Mountain King before putting up a tier 2 expo.

A few things to watch for:

1) At the very start, I sort of waited on the ramp next to my natural a little before going down to creep it. I was thinking that maybe his Blademaster would think I decided not to creep the gold mine creep camp and would go try to find me at the greens in the center instead. I had heard of some German human player doing this against FoCuS (I didn’t actually watch the game), but yeah, maybe it’s worth trying?

2) As usual, I close off my base at the beginning leaving no entrances for grunts or heroes.

3) You might notice I use my Mountain King’s storm bolt and thunder clap to creep a lot. I actually learned this from watching Storm vs ToD on Turtle Rock for WC3L finals ages ago. It is really worth using the mana to creep faster.

4) Notice my tier 2 creep pattern. I don’t creep all the camps that are next to each other.. but I go for the starting spawn location gold mines, the goblin shops and lab. These camps can drop very good items as well as tomes of experience. They are just much more worth your walking time and creeping time on Lost Temple.