General DiscussionSD + Luna

Heroes with good highground defense like tinker with March and the aghs blind on all illusions as they are usually not split up

Either kill the SD beforehand or burst Luna fast. They're good at drawn-out fights where the illusions can do maximum damage, not in a short initiation burst kill.

winter wyvern is great for a quick kill when all those illusions are around and easier to get your splinter procs, lion also to mana drain / hex illusions or a pug with aghs scepter is good playstyle against illusion drafts, a good 0 sec cd spell to make sure we're not jumping on a fake

oh and lich, sd disrupting any team mates for a save is always a good chance for a perfect ult

if you're thinking on the defensive later on when lunas got manta, sds illusions

ld and sniper are the cores youd want to go

tinker or sniper. wws good if you can play her well only

tinkers actually my fav hero this patch

Also, to make the discussion more interesting, let's talk about playstyle rather than just heroes specifically.

my playstyle with luna is
treads domi (dmg or move speed creep) lance manta skadi butter sata right click enemie ancient and destroy it

lifestealer midgame agression strats are dope, as far as i see on the chinese dota scene

sniper, tinker for cleaning. (tinker is probably the best of all)

ww to kill luna each time they make the illu.

If you have some spare nuke (like from lina) you can consider getting lc to help cleaning.

Best of all -in terms of simplicity-, you have tb, that simply stop the combo. (but the prob is having tb against a sd, which can be solved if you have enough teamfight power, or if your team can constantly and reliably take down sd).

Timber, enigma, zeus and ench also deals quite well with this combo (but ofc are not enough by themselves).

Special mention to arcwarden, as he can simply put a stop to the push of base's tower, and thus avoid the everywhere bouncing.

I still don't get why sd's illusion are soooo tanky. The damage output is definitly too high, but at least if we could kill them without spending every single spell, that would soften the problem.

why not sd/terrorblade

TB is OK but you can run into issues where the SD just disrupts you if you team doesn't have a good way of picking the SD off whenever he runs forwards. Tinker is the classic counter especially when combined with other strong ranged cores such as Sniper or Druid. Apart from that your best bet is to pick strong jump/gapclosing heroes like ember/naix and try to get on top of the combo and slay them, however this strategy is dependent on winning midgame and ending fast as lategame when Luna gets enough hp/bkb to survive your jump the sd illusion siege will start causing issues and lategame SD can just put purge on naix every fight and make him useless.

Personally i wud draft ember mid, offlane axe or cent, lifestealer, slardar support roaming (you can put him offlane too of course) and maybe a disruptor, but i just love disruptor personally.
Another idea is an sf mid early aggression draft with lc offlane and something like weaver support and venge/dazzle/slardar support and safelane ursa.

sniper.

sand king trashes that shit hard

Thanks for the feedback guys. Great points overall. I had WW and Lion in mind at the start (being a support player) but Tinker is an obvious choice for high ground as mentioned. However for the rest of the heroes I believe we have to be super aggressive. I see the strength of lifestealer infest combos with initiators but the carry pick is something I'm puzzled over, solely because of SD's purge. I see heroes like sven, ursa, LS and the likes just helpless in such a situation. Does weaver sound like a good idea? Additionally because of his default linken's build? Sand king is not terrible I think, but for that kind of a playstyle, I see Luna building tanky items for the illusions like skadi and satanic, which wouldnt be cleared by SK in a single spell (even with Aghs).

sd + morph is strong too without the glaives