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Introduction

Hello I’m Free cookies, I come from Bosnia and Herzegovina, I am 19 years old and I
love helping other people learn Dota! I started playing Dota about 4 years ago, I originally
calibrated in 1K mmr, back then I was playing with a friend. We were two casual schoolmates
playing some doters for fun! after he stopped playing I was left alone down in the deep dark
trenches. so I started practicing dota, after a little bit I managed to create a method to self
improve as fast as possible, it took me about 1.5 years to reach 5k :D (no one ever coached
me to help me get to higher mmr :c), with my highest being 6k about a year ago. My
methods gave me about 500 mmr increases every month that I’d practice. my current skill
is somewhere 5-6k. I have boosted over 40 accs with winstreaks up to 80+, and this is my
guide on boosting mmr with position 1 Anti-Mage

- Cookie 2017

Part 0: Pre-requirements

Unlike to the other simple hero guides I’ve written with the main guide this one will require
a lot more knowledge, primarily you will need to have mastered farming patterns, and you
need to be able to farm at the highest speeds without having to put any mental effort into
this. This is the most crucial part to a successful antimage, you need to be able to use the
active part of your brain to keep track of the map to find the best openings for kills and
pushes while not dying at the same time. Think of it like riding a bike, at first you won’t be
able to even ride with the training wheels, but later on you’ll be able to ride it on 1 wheel
without using your hands, this is all just muscle memory and it requires lots of practice so
that your brain does it for you. In this mini guide I won’t talk about that as I’ve explained
it all in the main guide, but rather about the hero and how I boost mmr with it.

For starters, as already mentioned, you need to have quite decent farming speeds. I’d say
anything below 700 avg gpm on Anti-Mage is terrible, regardless of your bracket, and this
needs to be fixed with lobby practice of lasthitting and efficient farming patterns. I know
that most people hate doing these lobby drills, I personally love doing them as fun little
challenges for myself, just to prove to myself how well I understand the game.

If your enemies had a better farming skill, or somehow get better lanes than you, which results
in them snowballing out of control with their level/item advantage, then they wouldn’t be
in your bracket as they would simply over time get to a higher bracket With that simple
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logic we can conclude one really helpful thing, that gave me personally a lot of mmr when i
realized it: On average, your enemies will make the same mistakes as you and
your team.

And this is why I say: whenever you’re playing antimage, never drop below 700 gpm, even
in an losing game.

I usually have 900-1100 in 0-4k mmr games. if you aren’t able to simply match my farming
skill then you will not be able to match anything else I do in this guide.

Other things you will also need to know is how to play from behind, for this I’d recommend
Gurupathik’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDQG-rIjxJ4

and I’d also higly recommend to check out brendota’s youtube channel, as he has some really
good carry content there, and even an antimage guide:

https://www.youtube.com/user/BrenGaming1/videosI

Part 1: Item and skill build

Due to it’s efficiency i also use the standard skill build of getting all 3 skills at lvl 3 then
maxing blink, then maxing manabreak and finally spell shield, ult at regular intervals(6, 12,
18)

so the build would go as follows: 2-1-3-2-2-4-2-1-1-*talent*-4-1-3-3-*talent*-3-4-*talent*-

*talent* sometimes instead of maxing my blink first I’d level my blink and manaburn in
paralel or get 2-3 points in manaburn before maxing blink as in some lanes you could abuse
manaburn to completley own them.

for talents: i always get +20 damage and -1 second blink cooldown as their fighting and
farming abilities do stack quite well with each other, then +10 to all stats and +25 to agility
as these 2 would total you a +35 agility which is really amazing at lvl 25 considering that
this will also buff your illusions quite a lot. If the enemy’s primary damage source is physical
then i’d get the evasion talent.

Item builds for this hero are quite simple as almost every game you’ll be going for the same
base build, sometimes you’ll do some minor adjustments.
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Starting items:

• 2x slipper of agility

• tango

• salve

then you’d pick up the safelane bounty rune and buy a stout shield once you get to the
sideshop next to your safelane so you’d complete a Poorman’s shield.

Alternative build against high non-physical nuke offlane(s):

• Stout shield

• 2x tango

• Salve

• branch

This alternative build is good when you’re playing against harassers in the offlane that don’t
rely on right clicks as much but rather spells as it lets you directly trade with them because
you’ll have way more regen to burn, and obviously this allows you to get up and close and
burn their mana as you can always regen everything back with this abundance of regen and
tankyness. PMS and Quelling blade is also a part of this build which you can get later on
after 2-3 creepwaves. Don’t be afraid to trade regen for last hits as if you don’t miss last
hits you can have your RoH as soon as 3 minutes. But obviously don’t just burn your regen
unnecessarily without getting a good tradeoff or those last hits, aka pull aggro and stay back
if there’s no last hit. Also remember that when you’re trading with someone, even if he can
slightly do more right click damage, he is still losing MANA for every hit. Meaning you can
keep track of his mana while trading, then just stop the trade after you’ve burned all of his
mana and the he won’t be able to annoy you with spells anymore.
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Early game items:

1. Quelling Blade

2. Ring of Health

3. Power Treads

4. Void stone to complete your perseverance,

5. Claymore

6. Boardsword to complete it all to a battlefury

reason I’ve put it like this is because this is the most efficient order to buy them in due
to Treads + PMS + QB + RoH allowing you to take sidecamps before battlefury which
accelerates your battlefury timing by a huge margin!

There’s not that many alterations to this build, only alteration I ever do would be adding in
a Ring of Regen the item before or after Ring of Health against some really annoying lanes.
If the lane is REALLY REALLY REALLY annoying, then you can even turn that Ring of
Health into a Headdress after you finish Treads.

Mid game items:

Always, and I mean ALWAYS have at least 2x teleport scroll on you after finishing your
Battle Fury till the end of the game!

This is my standard midgame build:

• Vladimirs Offering

• Yasha

• Ultimate orb and Manta recipee to finish your Manta

Next up most of the time I’d get butterfly as my farming patterns are at the max efficiency
so I can finish all of this by 23 mintues or less. But in some games I’d get basher first if
I feel like I can get easy pickoffs with it or join fights to end the game sooner. But most
of the time I’d just end up ending the game regardless because I’m a lvl 25 Anti-Mage at
25 minutes with more items than the whole enemy team combined. After this the builds
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are dependant on the game, only if you don’t need to finish other items like BKB, MKB,
Linkens, Aghanim’s etc. for that specific game then I’d say just make an Abyssal Blade.

Situational items:

BkB- great for teamfights against heavy magical disable lineups

MKB- against evasion heroes and/or evasion items
Aghanim’s- linken’s on steroids, amazing at annoying single target heroes
Linken’s- aghanim’s is better, but sometimes enemy has a legion commander.
Heart- amazing at turtling the highground: jump in> take half of the tower’s HP> lose half
your HP from the enemy nuking you> blink out> repeat in 10 seconds.
Skadi- better than heart if you need in teamfight tankyness, and the slow and stats are quite
welcome.
AC- skadi replacement against really heavy physical lineups, also pretty good at pushing.
Moon Shard/Rapier/Blood thorn- pretty good as a 6th/7th item as in “why not, I’m already
drowning in cash”

Part 2: Game plan

Your first 5-7 mintues are really simple, just hit your last hits and a little bit of trading here
and there, but overall all you need to do is not miss last hits and you’ll be fine.

minutes 7-14 aka after you have treads + qb + pms + roh but but before your bfury. You
can now push the wave at x-1:50 before it reaches your wave, killing half of it or all of it
by the time your wave reaches it which will force 1-2 waves into the enemy’s tower, then at
x:00 you can now take 1-2 side camps, and from now on you keep just repeating the same
pattern of pushing the wave as soon as you see it approaching and then taking a sidecamp
between the waves

if you do this properly, you’ll be able to time it such that you won’t miss any last hits (or
at worst you’ll miss 1 last hit) and you’ll be able to take those 2 side camp(easy + hard)
every minute, which will net you a +160 gpm. meaning by the time you finish your bfury,
those treads would’ve paid off for themselves and everything else is just extra profit. because
treads give you 25 attack speed and +10 to selected atribute, this becomes quite apparent
why getting treads>bfury is better than bfury>treads as they that extra farming speed you
got during 7-14 minute gave you the treads basically for free.
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Minutes 13-16 you’ll be running trough your fastest possible available farming pattern to
finish your Vladimir’s by 16/17 minutes. This won’t be an issue as there’s farming patterns
you can take that give up to 1k gpm with only treads + pms + bf meaning the vlads can
easily be finished in 2-3 minutes.

Minutes 16++ is where the real fun starts, this is where you start forcing your enemies into
making bad decisions, from here on they’re not allowed to think for themselves but rather
you own their decision making.

Like in the Crystal Maiden guide I’ve explained how you can pincer the enemy heroes into
their base using ganks and controlling their available farm space, Anti-Mage can do the same
using a different method; wasting the enemy’s time onto chasing him and splitpushing to
take their towers which eventually leads into antimage having so much farm that he’ll be
able to kill anyone and anything on the enemy team, after which the majority of low mmr
players will become afraid of him and start hiding instead of chasing him. Which basically
means their farm gets limited and you take their t1/t2 towers, aaaaand now they can’t leave
base anymore because you’d kill them which in result gives you even more farming space
and items which in result gives you complete control over the game.

So your job is very simple: waste as much of your enemy’s time as possible, farm efficiently
as possible and all while also taking enemy towers. Teamfights are unnecessary, only fights
you’ll need to take are to defend or to take HG, or if there’s free kills without ANY RISK
OF being punished for it. In reality, I ignore almost all the teamfights, and most of the time
you can push faster than all 5 on the enemy team so you can just trade t3 towers faster than
them so you won’t even need to join HG defense teamfights.

To begin with; you need to identify what can kill you, i have talked about this in my main
guide and I won’t explain it again. But just a small re-cap; keep track of the heroes that
have a guaranteed kill on you, there’s 3 types of those heroes: Guaranteed setup, guaranteed
followup or the “100% kill” aka both of the others combined.

for example, guaranteed setup would be something like spirit breaker with multiple stuns.

guaranteed followup would be nukers like Bloodseeker who’d easily burn all of your hp if
someone were to lock you down as his silence isn’t reliable and you could simply blink into
nearby treelines or just simply teleport away.

these 2 types heroes aren’t problems by themselves, as you can simply ignore them.

example if a bloodseeker were to come up to you, you can just teleport away and he wouldn’t
be able to even take half of your HP, same with spiritbraker as a setup; by himself he doesn’t
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have the damage to kill you, he’ll only stun you for a couple of seconds and burn like half of
your HP and then you’d just blink away to safety.

the only problem with these 2 types of heroes is that the only way they’d get a kill on you
is if they are together, meaning if you know where 1 is on the map, you can be on the other
side of the map taking towers and just not care about the other, as he can’t kill you by
himself.

the “100% kill” heroes are those who function as both setup and dps and these should be
avoid. heroes like this would be a legion commander who can blink>duel you and you’d die
most of the time.

there’s also a additional 4th type of heroes aka the ones we just don’t care about, meaning
every other hero that can’t guarantee setup a kill on us nor guarantee burst us before we
can blink away. these are heroes like omni, veno, abbadon as they can’t nuke you in a super
short period nor do they have high mobility nor lockdown. these heroes we can just ignore
and walk around them as there’s basically no way they’d kill us without at least the presence
of 2 of the other types.

Remember: the guaranteed followup hero can always be ignored if you know the location of
the guaranteed setup hero or their last location less than 30 seconds ago.

After identifying what heroes the enemy has now we play a simple game: When your enemies
are split up you force them to group up, when your enemies are grouped up you force them
to spit up.

If done constantly, with all of that the enemy’s gpm will be severely damaged as they’ll
spend most of the time chasing you between a couple lanes.

All we have to do is splitpush as aggressively as possible, since we’ve identified the dangerous
heroes, all we have to do is keep track of those heroes and just ignore every other hero.

this is the direct gameplay pattern, stick to it:

• enemy guaranteed setup or 100% kill hero(s) are showing on the map or
have shown at another lane less than 30 seconds ago: Instantly go to the
opposite of them lane and start pushing it for as long till the situation changes, if they
keep ignoring you then keep pushing and take as many towers as possible.
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• enemy guaranteed setup or 100% kill hero(s) have not shown on the map
for more than 30 seconds: push the wave if it’s near your side and go to the safest
farming place, usually your jungle but in most cases the enemy jungle is safer. If a
ganker were to look for an Anti-Mage, the first place he’d look for is in your jungle as
he’s expecting you to be farming there. Meaning the enemy jungle can be safer as long
as you don’t run into enemy tower/creepwave vision.

• if the enemy doesn’t have a guaranteed setup hero or 100% kill hero, OR
they have those but that hero is showing or has shown on the map in the
last 30 seconds, and are split up: push as much as you possibly can till they start
3-5 man chasing you at that lane, as the enemy basically can’t do anything against you
unless they’re 4-5 manning. dive as deep as possible into their territory by pushing
and cutting waves to force them to come to you, once they waste their TP’s trying to
chase you, you jsut blink into trees and teleport to the opposite lane to do the exact
same thing. You can also not show for 10-30 seconds after teleporting away by farming
your jungle instead of instantly pushing, this can cause the enemy to waste time trying
to find you in the trees in their territory.

• if the enemy doesn’t have a guaranteed setup hero or 100% kill hero, OR
they have those but that hero is showing or has shown on the map in the
last 30 seconds, and are grouped up/pushing/fighting: pop to the nearest lane
that is opposite to where they’re fighting/pushing/grouping and start pushing it as
aggressively as possible to force teleports so that they have to split up.

• if your escape mechanism is on cooldown and enemy has a guaranteed setup

hero or 100% guaranteed kill hero who hasn’t shown on the map in the last
30 seconds: don’t kill yourself, farm a nearby safe area.

• if the enemy is grouping and you were farming the jungle close to that lane,
but far away from them: farm your way behind the wave and cut them so that the
enemy’s push gets slowed down while your push and farm get accelerated.

If kept strictly to this pattern, and combined with high quality farming patterns(at least
700-800 avg gpm), then controlling the enemy team will be really easy and your farm will
supercharge with this, while their farm gets cut severely. everything after this is simple:
25 minutes into the game you should have your manta + butterfly + treads + vlads +
bfury finished and then going roshan or just simply walking up highground will be super
easy and finishing the game will be a joke, as with these gameplay patterns the enemies
would have spent most of their time chasing you instead of farming or pushing properly
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which in result gave your teammates freefarm and kills, while you had incontestable farm as
the less items the enemy has the harder it is for them to kill you.

you have to remember: a guaranteed kill hero, setup hero or 100% kill hero can become
just another one of those heroes that you can ignore if you just prevent every death and
eventually you’ll just have way more items than them. Meaning an legion commander can
kill you with blademail blink, but if you have 25 minutes all of the mentioned items above,
and she wasted time chasing you, a simple blademail + blink wouldn’t save her and you’d
end up killing her as she is simply 10-15 levels below you and has no real farm nor duel
damage.

But, if you fail to stick to the pattern, don’t do it properly and the enemy gets fed, then a
hero that previously was to be simply ignored can become a 100% kill hero.

You are not allowed to die even once during the first 25 minutes, if you die even once then
download your replays and find your mistake and make sure that a similar mistake never
happens again. But again “fixing” doesn’t mean just playing passively and hiding in trees
afk, this means doing something better and more efficiently! You should never catch yourself
not doing anything, walking from camp to camp to farm them is doing something, but hiding
behind trees because you don’t know where the enemy is not doing anything!

Good luck; have fun!