
Clockwerk is back, baby. He went from being seldom picked to the most popular pick at a LAN. This comes alongside the once incredibly popular Centaur Warrunner's downfall.
For a while, Centaur was a go-to offlaner, but he was neither picked nor banned in Manila. It seems that bringing his Aghanim's Scepter Stampede damage reduction down from 60% to 40% was enough to make teams look for better options.
Meanwhile Clockwerk has had a pair of buffs making him a bit more durable (2.9 to 3.2 strength gain in 7.06 and 24 to 26 base strength in 7.05). His talents were also made much more appealing in 7.02 from the original 7.00 version, but that was back in February, and not enough to supplant the still very popular Centaur.
Nyx Assassin was also a very popular pick, mostly run in the offlane except for

The three heroes with the highest overall winrates were Juggernaut (6 picks, 5 wins), Enigma (4 picks, 3 wins) and Faceless Void (4 picks, 3 wins).
The preceeding LAN event was Starladder | i-League Invitational #2, at which Sand King and Jakiro were the 1st and 2nd most picked heroes, respectively. They were both middlingly popular in Manila (Jakiro was picked 8 times, Sand King 9) but were overshadowed by other heroes. In Manila, only three of eight teams overlapped with StarLadder, meaning we got to see a different set of teams show us what they think is strong in this patch.

The bans also give us a good luck at team's draft priorities at The Manila Masters. Io remained the most banned hero from StarLadder and now in Manila, while Treant Protector surged to the top of the list after being somewhat ignored in Shanghai.
Considering what


Obviously it didn't stop them from winning the whole thing.
Both Death Prophet and Enchantress were heroes that teams feared, but didn't pick very often. Both heroes were played four times, and won twice each. Both Death Prophet wins went to

EG, NP, and Faceless all tried Enchantress, but only EG and NP got the wins. Both of NP's two Ench games were against


With Zotac Cup Masters already underway, and the recently released patch 7.06c already shaking things up, the meta is always adjusting. This look at Manila might give us a hint at the direction things are going for TI7 regional qualifiers, which are already less than a month away.
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