Tiny by name, giant by presence: How Tiny became the most picked hero of 2025

Meta is anything but stagnant in Dota 2. But in a game where new heroes, new items, and new mechanics are added regularly, there is one hero that remains a solid choice, quite literally.

This isn't a tale of a flashy, single-hero rework or a broken item interaction. It's a story of endless utility that was buffed over time, ultimately making Tiny the most picked hero in competitive matches in 2025.

Top 5 most picked heroes in professional scene in 2025

Tiny, the Stone Giant

Tiny ends the year at the top of the charts with 1054 picks. This counts qualifiers and main stages of all tournaments in 2025 per datdota. However, Tiny’s journey to the top started TWO years ago, with the 7.35 patch that buffed his Tree Grab ability. That alone made Tiny a tower-demolishing machine, besides being one of the strongest gankers in the game as well.

Three months later, Valve decided to buff his Tree Grab along with Avalanche damage and Toss damage again. But the cherry on top came in May 2024 with the 7.36 patch, which brought Facets and Innates as new mechanics. Craggy Exterior was no longer an Aghanim's Shard upgrade, but an Innate ability.

What came next was almost a year of Valve trying to balance the hero while the pro scene found in Tiny a perfect toolkit that wins trophies.

The real shift in hero choices came from the 2025 meta itself. The professional scene became defined by tempo: fast, aggressive lanes leading into even faster, more aggressive mid-game moves that would seal the victory around the 30-minute mark. Teams needed heroes that could create an advantage from minute zero and then capitalise on it before the enemy could recover.

Enter Tiny.

The lane bully, the playmaker, the tower crusher, the unkillable front liner.

What makes Tiny the most-picked hero isn't one thing; it’s that he is every good thing you need, all at once. More so, he is a highly versatile hero who gives drafting flexibility to the teams. Tiny is the safe first pick that gives nothing away. But he can also be the last-pick flex that can be played in three different roles. He is, in the words of analyst SVG, "the draft's safety net.”

Top 5 Tiny players in 2025

• read also: Dota 2 wrapped 2025: A year in numbers

For the first half of 2025, Tiny was in the top 3 most picked heroes of all LAN tournaments. His popularity escalated to the point where, at ESL One Raleigh, he was the most picked hero, with 41 matches and a 56.10% win rate, and also the second most banned hero, with 40 matches.

Immediately after that, the Avalanche damage was nerfed along with the Tree Grab base attack range. A few more adjustments got him fading away, but never completely disappearing. He wasn’t a hot choice at the two biggest tournaments of the year, The International and Esports World Cup, yet he made an appearance in the EWC grand finals.

More recently, he came back into the spotlight with Team Yandex, who delivered one of the biggest underdog stories of the year by winning the last tournament of 2025, with Tiny being played in the last two games of the best-of-five grand finals against Team Spirit. Interestingly enough, it wasn’t Martin "Saksa" Sazdov on Tiny, but Yandex’ mid laner, Ilya "CHIRA_JUNIOR" Chirtsov, who ended the year with a total of 17 Tiny matches and a 76.47% win rate.

• read also: Glow up of the year: Team Yandex

As the competitive season moves toward The International 2026, the question is "Who will be the new meta hero?" For now, the meta has a face, and it’s a craggy one. The Tiny era was built on a foundation that no amount of patch notes seems able to shake, but as we all know, Dota 2 is never a dull game, and meta shifts always happen.