Credit: Valve Gaming
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What Dota 2 loses after Falcons' 799-game run ends
September 8, 2026·6 min read
After 799 games together, Falcons' Dota 2 lineup has reached the end of its run. Team Falcons is leaving the game, bringing almost three years with skiter, Malr1ne, ATF, Cr1t- and Sneyking under the same banner to a close.
Falcons arrived at a time when professional Dota was changing. The DPC was disappearing, tournament organizers were taking over more of the calendar and the teams at the top were shifting from event to event. Falcons became one of the few lineups that stayed intact through that period.
Their departure therefore leaves more than five open roster spots. Dota is losing a team that spent almost three years competing near the top, adapting to different metas and giving the rest of the scene the same opponent to measure itself against.
Valve ended the DPC after six years because it believed the system had taken too much space from independent tournament organizers. The 2024 season no longer revolved around regional DPC leagues and Valve Majors. ESL expanded its Pro Tour, PGL returned with Wallachia, and other organizers filled the calendar with their own formats and qualification systems.
Falcons entered directly into that new version of professional Dota. Their first major LAN, ESL One Kuala Lumpur, ended in fifth-sixth place. Two months later they beat Liquid 3-0 to win BetBoom Dacha Dubai.
The wins then came quickly. BetBoom lost 3-0 to Falcons in the DreamLeague Season 22 final and again at ESL One Birmingham. Gaimin Gladiators, the team that had swept the 2023 Majors, lost 3-0 to Falcons at DreamLeague Season 23.
By the end of that ESL Pro Tour season, Falcons sat first on the leaderboard with 18,280 points. BetBoom followed on 16,300, with Gaimin and Xtreme much farther back.
The post-DPC calendar had several organizers and several championship teams. Falcons kept appearing near the top of all of it.
Falcons spent almost three years alongside Liquid, Spirit, Tundra, Gaimin Gladiators and BetBoom at the top of international Dota. Being at the top did not mean winning every event, but they stayed in the championship picture across several patches and tournament cycles.
After finishing fourth at The International 2024, they ended the year with wins at BetBoom Dacha Belgrade and DreamLeague Season 24. In 2025, they kept reaching the later stages of major events before winning The International.
Being that consistent says more than any single trophy, especially because other teams moved in and out of form. Falcons kept returning with the same roster and remained one of the teams that every serious contender had to account for.
That continuity reached its peak in the TI 2025 final against Xtreme Gaming.
Falcons went 1-2 down and had to win the next two games. In game four, ATF played Ursa from the offlane and got enough farm to finish with more than 22,000 net worth and no deaths. Skiter and Malr1ne stayed productive as well, and Falcons forced a deciding game in under 34 minutes.
The roles changed again in game five. Skiter's Medusa became the main core Falcons played around, while ATF moved onto Magnus and spent more of the game setting up fights for him. Falcons won after 58 minutes and took the Aegis.
Within one final, Falcons had shifted resources and responsibility between their cores without changing the players around them. They had already spent hundreds of games learning how to do that together.
Falcons kept the same roster after finishing fourth at TI 2024, through lost finals and through weaker stretches in 2025. By the time the lineup ended, the five players had reached a record 799 games together with a 65.4% win rate.
Playing together for that long also meant their regular opponents knew them well.
By 2026, teams like Liquid had years of Falcons drafts, hero preferences and lane combinations to prepare against. Their experience together remained an advantage, but very little about the roster was new to the teams they faced most often.
Falcons' 799-game run ends alongside several other changes at the top of Dota. Tundra Esports left the game in June, although Pure, bzm, 33, Ari, Whitemon and the coaching staff stayed together and moved to 1win. Vici Gaming disbanded its TI 2026 roster after being eliminated in Shanghai.
Falcons is different because both the organization and the five-player lineup are ending. The players may continue elsewhere, but skiter, Malr1ne, ATF, Cr1t- and Sneyking will no longer enter the next season as the same team.
The organization has not published financial figures for its Dota operation. Its statement says it reviewed its wider esports plans and will focus on games with stronger strategic alignment and long-term operational sustainability.
That decision comes less than a year after Falcons won The International. A TI title, a record 799 games together and almost three years near the top were not enough to keep the organization in Dota.
The next season will therefore lose more than another familiar team name. Tundra's former roster continues under 1win, but Falcons' lineup itself is gone.
Skiter, Malr1ne, ATF, Cr1t- and Sneyking may return on other teams, but Dota will no longer have the same five players building around one another from tournament to tournament.
Falcons arrived just as the DPC disappeared and spent the next three years near the top of the new tournament landscape. They won across different organizers, patches and metas, eventually taking The International in 2025.
The individual players can continue elsewhere. ATF and Malr1ne keep their hero pools, skiter remains a TI-winning carry, and Sneyking and Cr1t- take years of top-level experience with them.
What disappears is the team those players built together.
For almost three years, Liquid, Spirit, Tundra, BetBoom, Xtreme and the rest of the top scene knew Falcons would probably be waiting somewhere deep in the bracket. They knew the players, had years of drafts to study and could measure new lineups and strategies against the same five opponents.
Next season, those matchups start changing. Falcons' players may return in different rosters, but the 799 games they spent learning how to play around one another cannot simply move with them.
Dota 2 is not losing five elite players at once. It is losing one of the teams that helped define the top of the post-DPC era.
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