Six months ago, PARIVISION looked like a team searching for an identity. Their early-season results ranged from underwhelming to forgettable, and the CIS rumor mill was busy writing obituaries. Then Clement “Puppey” Ivanov first stepped in as coach in December 2025 for DreamLeague Season 27, a trial run that became permanent by late January. SSS replaced DM on the offlane in early February, and the gears started turning in a different direction. On Sunday, those gears produced a DreamLeague Season 29 championship and a 3-2 grand final victory over Aurora Gaming that felt like the punctuation mark on a months-long resurrection.
This is PARIVISION’s fourth Tier 1 trophy overall, their first of the 2025-2026 season, and their second DreamLeague title after Season 26 in June 2025. The total payout: $250,000 to the players, $40,000 to the club, and 6,300 EPT points that all but lock a direct invite to The International 2026 in Shanghai this August.
The Puppey Variable
There is a version of PARIVISION’s story where Puppey’s hiring reads as a nostalgia move. A living legend gets a coaching gig at a young team while Team Secret sits on the sidelines. Nice PR, questionable impact.
That version died somewhere around ESL One Birmingham, when No[o]ne told Insider Gaming that Puppey was teaching the squad to play aggressive Dota. The results since confirm the claim. PARIVISION at DreamLeague S27, Puppey’s first event, finished third. At DreamLeague Season 28, sixth. Then came PGL Wallachia Season 8 with a fifth-sixth finish, and ESL One Birmingham 2026 at fourth. Incremental steps, each one a little higher. DreamLeague Season 29 was not a sudden breakthrough. It was the logical endpoint of a steady climb.
What Puppey brought to this roster is structure without rigidity. Watch how PARIVISION drafted across the grand final: game one featured Slardar offlane and Shadow Fiend carry, a lineup built to brawl early. Game three pivoted to an Io-Muerta combination that flipped the tempo toward late-game scaling. Game five went with a Gyrocopter carry backed by Axe offlane, a composition designed to suffocate Aurora through constant pickoffs. Three different identities in three winning maps, all executed by the same five players. That kind of versatility does not emerge without a coach who understands how to prepare multiple gameplans and trusts his roster to switch between them mid-series.
Noticed Fills the Gap, Satanic Closes the Door
PARIVISION entered the tournament with a roster change that raised eyebrows. Evgeniy “Noticed” Ignatenko, on loan from Team Yandex’s bench, replaced SSS on the offlane for undisclosed reasons. The move could have destabilized the team’s chemistry at the worst possible moment. Instead, Noticed played like he had been scrimming with this squad for months.
His game one stat line set the tone: 13 kills, 15 assists, zero deaths on Slardar, a performance that made Aurora’s attempts to contain PARIVISION’s aggression look futile. In game three, with Aurora threatening to take control in the mid-game, Noticed switched to Dawnbreaker and contributed 10 kills and 13 assists on just four deaths while Alan “Satanic” Gallyamov’s Muerta came online with 16 kills to seal a 55-minute win that proved decisive for the series momentum.
Satanic, still only 18 years old, was the most consistent carry at the entire event. His game five Gyrocopter finished with an 8-0-7 KDA, the kind of clean sheet that reflects both mechanical skill and the space his teammates created through relentless pickoffs. After the 30-minute mark on the final map, PARIVISION’s Axe started diving into Aurora’s backline, and Satanic’s Gyrocopter turned every fight into a systematic dismantling. Aurora called GG at the 38-minute mark. There was nothing left to try.
Edgar “9Class” Naltakyan deserves a separate mention. The support player carried a 10-match professional win streak into the grand final and extended it through the series. His recent form, including a reported 20-game winning streak in ranked play, suggests that the current PARIVISION lineup has found a rhythm that goes beyond tournament preparation.
Aurora’s Curse Deepens
For Aurora Gaming, DreamLeague Season 29 was supposed to be the tournament where the pattern broke. Since reuniting their roster with Ws and kaori in January, the team has been one of the most consistent squads in the world. They won FISSURE Universe Episode 8 to start the year. They earned a respectable fifth-sixth at ESL One Birmingham. They reached three Tier 1 grand finals in three months.
They lost all three.
DreamLeague Season 28 in March: fell to Tundra Esports, 1-3. PGL Wallachia Season 8 in April: swept by BetBoom Team, 0-3. DreamLeague Season 29: taken to the limit by PARIVISION, then stopped one game short. Three finals, three different opponents, three silver medals. The common thread is not a single tactical weakness. Aurora draft well, fight well, and their cores Nightfall, Ws, and Mikoto consistently produce top-tier stat lines. In game four of the grand final, Nightfall on Alchemist and Mikoto on Puck combined for 16 kills against 6 deaths to force the decider.
The problem is closing power. Aurora play the first four maps of a series like contenders and the fifth like a team that knows what is about to happen. Their game five Necrophos carry pick was either a stroke of genius or a desperation swing, and PARIVISION made sure it looked like the latter. When your opponent forces you into unconventional solutions in a deciding game, the deficit is mental, not mechanical.
Mira and the coaching staff have work to do before BLAST Slam VII, which begins today with Aurora facing Tundra Esports in the online group stage. The roster has the talent to win a Tier 1 event. Three consecutive runner-up finishes have made that clear. What those three silver medals cannot prove is whether this team can hold its nerve when a fifth map arrives and the crowd, real or virtual, starts counting.
The Road to Shanghai
PARIVISION’s DreamLeague title reshapes the conversation around The International 2026 invites. The tournament returns to Shanghai’s Oriental Sports Center from August 13-23, with 16 teams competing through a combination of direct invitations and regional qualifiers. Open qualifiers run June 9-12, followed by regionals from June 15-28.
After winning DreamLeague Season 29, PARIVISION sit comfortably inside the top tier of the EPT leaderboard. Combined with their previous placements across the season, including third at DreamLeague Season 27, sixth at DreamLeague Season 28, and fourth at ESL One Birmingham 2026, the trajectory is unmistakable. A direct invite to TI15 would surprise nobody.
Aurora, despite three runner-up finishes, have also accumulated enough EPT points to remain in direct-invite contention. Both teams have already secured spots at the Esports World Cup 2026 in Paris through their EPT standings. The question for both squads is not whether they will attend the biggest events of the year, but how they will arrive: as favorites or as question marks.
What Comes Next
BLAST Slam VII kicks off today with an online round-robin group stage, running from May 26 to June 7 with a $1,000,000 prize pool and 12 teams. The LAN playoffs take place at BLAST Studios in Copenhagen. PARIVISION open against OG, a matchup that tests whether the DreamLeague momentum carries over with just a two-day turnaround. Notably, SSS returns to the offlane for BLAST Slam VII, meaning Noticed’s stint as a stand-in appears to have been event-specific.
For PARIVISION, the season narrative has changed. Six months ago, the conversation was about whether Puppey’s arrival could stop the slide. Now the conversation is about whether this team can peak at the right time for TI. DreamLeague Season 29 proved they have the roster depth, the tactical flexibility, and the coaching infrastructure to beat anyone in a five-game series. Shanghai in August will tell us whether that combination holds under the weight of the biggest stage in Dota 2.
For Aurora, the arithmetic is cruel but simple. Talent without trophies becomes a talking point instead of a legacy. Three finals lost in three months will follow this roster into every preview, every interview, every pre-game broadcast until they find a way to win when the series goes the distance.
