Eight in, eight out: PGL Wallachia Season 9 playoff field is set

Eight teams in. Eight teams out.

After five days of Swiss competition, PGL Wallachia Season 9 has cut its 16-team field in half, with Team Yandex and Xtreme Gaming emerging as the early standouts while several of the tournament's more intriguing new projects are already heading home.

LGD Gaming claimed the eighth and final playoff spot with a 2-0 victory over MOUZ, ending another difficult tournament for the European roster and bringing the group stage to a close.

At the top, Yandex and Xtreme barely blinked. Both finished 3-0 in series and 6-1 in maps, an impressive opening statement from two teams that arrived in Bucharest with significant post-TI roster changes.

NAVI, Aurora Gaming, and GamerLegion followed at 3-1, while 1w, Team Nemesis, and LGD survived the final rounds to complete the eight-team playoff field.

At the other end, MOUZ and Yakult Brothers are out. So are all of the South American teams that entered the tournament.

And perhaps most notably, so is Conventus Stellarum.

Conventus Stellarum's debut ends early

The newly assembled roster of Ghost, lorenof, DM, OmaR and panto entered Wallachia as one of the event's biggest curiosities.

Built largely around players with ties to Nigma Galaxy and coached by KuroKy, the team was making its competitive debut in Bucharest, with it still unclear whether the lineup represents a long-term project or something assembled specifically for the tournament.

Their first outing ended one series short of the playoffs. For a roster assembled only days before the tournament, Wallachia was always going to be an unusual first test. Whether we see the same five players together again may be the more interesting question now.

Yandex and Xtreme set the pace

At the opposite end of the standings, two teams required considerably less time to book their places in the playoffs.

Team Yandex and Xtreme Gaming both finished the Swiss stage with perfect 3-0 series records, dropping only one game apiece.

For Yandex, that makes their immediate post-TI roster move particularly interesting. The organisation benched DM shortly after finishing third at The International 2026 and brought in former Falcons offlaner ATF only days before Wallachia began. Despite having almost no tournament preparation with the new lineup, it is an impressive first showing for a roster that already entered the new season with one of the strongest cores in Dota.

Xtreme Gaming's rebuilt roster has been equally convincing.

The return of Xm and XinQ reunited familiar pieces around Ame, while zeal and BoBoKa completed the lineup heading into Wallachia.

MOUZ are still searching for answers

MOUZ, meanwhile, remain caught in the opposite kind of pattern. After struggling through the closing stretch of the previous season, their Wallachia run did little to suggest those problems have disappeared.

They opened with a competitive 1-2 loss to Yandex and recovered with a 2-0 victory, but a 0-2 defeat immediately after pushed them back toward elimination. Another sweep in their favor pushed the pendulum to their favor and kept them alive, moving them to 2-2, setting up one final chance against LGD Gaming.

But it wasn't particularly close when it mattered. LGD swept MOUZ 2-0 in the final series of the group stage, securing the last playoff spot and sending MOUZ home in the end.

For LGD, it was a welcome recovery after an uneven middle of the Swiss stage. Their new international lineup began Wallachia 2-0 before consecutive 0-2 defeats suddenly left them one series from elimination.

The result completes the eight-team playoff field and gives LGD's radically rebuilt roster at least one more stage on which to show what this experiment might become.

Yakult Brothers and South America bow out

Yakult Brothers were another notable casualty of the group stage. The Chinese roster managed just one series victory in Bucharest.

South America's representatives suffered an even rougher tournament. PlayTime and Pibbles Corp were the first two teams eliminated after beginning 0-3, while Hokori and Team Cobra followed them out at 1-3.

None survived to see the playoffs.

A very different Wallachia

Season 9 was always going to be strange. PGL originally scheduled the tournament to begin on September 17, close on the heels of The International 2026. It was eventually pushed back two days to September 19 as the post-TI roster shuffle collided almost directly with the event. Even then, many teams simply were not ready. Several of Dota's biggest organisations skipped the tournament entirely while others arrived with lineups assembled only days beforehand. Visa problems and personal absences created additional stand-ins across the field.

The result was a $1 million Wallachia tournament that, despite carrying one of Dota's familiar top-level tournament banners, arrived looking considerably different from previous seasons — classified now as a Tier 2 event, a notable shift for a series whose recent editions have carried Tier 1 status.

There are obvious limits to what can be taken from a tournament played in the immediate aftermath of the biggest roster shuffle of the year. Teams have had little time to practice, several projects remain new or temporary, and the wider competitive landscape is still settling into place.

But eight teams are moving forward, and eight are already heading home.