Tidebound eliminate tournament favourites to reach top 4 at PGL Wallachia Season 4

It’s been a minute since China has posed a real threat in the competitive Dota 2 scene. Tidebound, or Wings2.0 as some might want to look at them, are here to change that.

PGL Walachia Season 4 brings great news for the CN Dota, which has been somewhat dormant. China lacked a tournament winning calibre team since 2023. Despite Azure Ray and Xtreme Gaming’s efforts to keep the region afloat, fielding strong rosters, China is going through a big cone of shade in the Dota 2 space. Some of the most powerful organisations left the scene after continuous struggles. LGD, Invictus Gaming, Vici Gaming, EHOME, none of them are active anymore in the professional Dota 2 scene, leaving the legacy to be carried on only by the veteran players.

Xtreme Gaming and Tidebound are the only two teams that are nowadays trying to bring the glory back. But even so, earlier this month, Xtreme were not even able to field a full roster for ESL One Raleigh 2025, a tournament for which they qualified in January. ESL granted Xtreme’s spot to the next eligible team, Tidebound, who are currently just a group of veterans playing without an organisation behind them.

Their journey at ESL One Raleigh 2025 was cut short in the group play. They bowed out of the competition only 9th-10th place. However, fast forward to a couple of weeks later, Tidebound came to PGL Wallachia Season 4 in better shape.

In the meantime, Xtreme had finally locked in a roster and were also able to compete at PGL Wallachia, but as Jiang "Tianming" An stated in an interview with the tournament organiser, it depends on their results if this will be the final form or not. Unfortunately, the only couple of weeks available to practice before PGL Wallachia S4 didn’t seem to have been enough for Xtreme, who got eliminated in the group stage.

Tidebound were one of the teams to defeat them in the Swiss group stage format. Having some of the most seasoned veterans on their side, including TI champions Zhang "Faith_bian" Ruida and Zhang "y`" Yiping, along with coach Zhou "bLink" Yang, Tidebound secured a spot in the playoffs, remaining the only hope for CN Dota at PGL Wallachia S4. They were dropped to the lower bracket by PARIVISION, but they mounted a comeback from there.

Tidebound took down BetBoom Team a second time in the tournament to survive the first lower bracket series, and moving into the next round, they swept Team Spirit to reach the top 4.

Team Spirit came into the tournament as the main favourites for the title. They were hot off a second place finish in Raleigh, and along with PARIVISION, who won that event, they had the biggest targets on their backs.

Despite being known as the team to have mastered how to play from behind and achieve some of the craziest comebacks, Team Spirit felt powerless against Tidebound. The Chinese team had the guts to align two tempo drafts in their series against Team Spirit and executed them close to perfection. They ran a carry Clinkz with offlane Centaur in game one and left no window of opportunity for Spirit to turn the tables past the mid to late game stages. For game two, they brought a carry Gyrocopter and an offlane Beastmaster to stomp their way to top 4. The game closed with 33 kills to 8 in favour of Tidebound, who left Team Spirit staring into their monitors after the GG call.