Million-Dollar Dream Coil

The TI3 grand final: Alliance vs. Na'Vi

The International 2013 was held in Seattle. The grand final pitted Sweden's Alliance against Natus Vincere, the winners of the first TI. The series went to a fifth, deciding game; Alliance won 3–2 and took home $1,436,970, often rounded to $1.4 million.

Na'Vi had a historic record on the line: they could have become the first two-time champions of The International. As ONE Esports points out, it was the Dream Coil moment in game five that stopped them.

The final was a best-of-five, and it went the full five games, so the tournament came down to the last map of the series.

Split-pushing and canceled teleports

Alliance spent a long time split-pushing, stretching Na'Vi across the map. When the Swedes sieged the inner structures, Na'Vi's heroes teleported in to defend. Gustav “s4” Magnusson on Puck met them with Dream Coil and canceled their teleports (TPs).

With no defenders, Alliance took down the base without even committing to a full final teamfight. Sources describe the details differently: some talk about the teleporting heroes in general, others say only Xboct's and Dendi's TPs were canceled and that the casters first thought the whole team had been caught.

Dream Coil is Puck's ultimate: it stuns heroes in its area when cast and tethers them to its center, and breaking the tether stuns them again. A stun interrupts a teleport, which is why Na'Vi's heroes never made it back to base.

Why the Dream Coil was worth a million

The name “Million Dollar Dream Coil” became canon because one ability effectively decided who got the grand prize of over a million dollars. Some breakdowns note that s4 landed good Dream Coils in other fights of the final too, but this is the one that went down in history.

The play appears in rankings of The International's greatest moments. It later got a companion, the “$6 Million Echo Slam” from TI5: both moments are named after the size of the prize they brought in.

Russian-speaking fans use both the English name and the calque «Дрим Койл на миллион долларов». Both refer to the same moment from game five of the TI3 final. The Philippine outlet thegame.ph includes it in its list of the three most iconic “million-dollar plays” in The International history.

The champions' photo with the Aegis in the catalog

The catalog card shows not a frame from the game but a photo of Alliance players with the Aegis of Champions. One of them has a Swedish flag over his shoulders, and a photographer is working nearby.

The photo shows where the meme leads: the trophy in the Swedish team's hands. The Dream Coil itself isn't in the picture; the play lives on in broadcast recordings.

The Aegis of Champions is the trophy awarded to the winner of The International. In the photo, it is in the hands of the Alliance players.

Captions with Puck and teleports

These examples are made up for illustration: “When the enemies hit TP and you're on Puck with ult ready”, “Five teleports to base, zero arrivals”, “My pub Dream Coil: caught one creep and myself.”

People use the meme when someone cuts off the opponents' escape with a single well-timed action, from an intercepted teleport in-game to the last second before submissions close. The higher the stakes, the better the comparison to the “million-dollar” Dream Coil.