See, i feel that's quite the misunderstand, it's not that eastern teams don't innovate and try out new strats. Wisp CK is literally the most popular pub-duo in high level chinese dota 1 pubs and slark is probably the most popular hero for solo Q over there(High level chinese dota1 pubs is basically the same as B-tier scrims in the west). You could see that LGD was caught by surprise by wisp CK, why? Not because they don't know about it and haven't tried it themselves, but because they didn't expect it. It's the same reason they pre-emptively banned dendi pudge at TI2, it's not that they don't know about pudge and don't know how he works, it's just that their practice and strats haven't been tested against pudge. And pudge by his very mechanics is the bane of chinese play and always has been. He starts fights, and if you don't fight you lose a team member with each hook, and if that team member is a 2nd or 1st position, it's a big loss, and if you do fight it's on pudge's terms. It goes very heavily against the chinese picking and choosing their fights.
An example to this is bounty hunter as well, he was a top pick for a month straight even in the eastern scene, suddenly he's a semi-rare pick-up. And it's not because of the armor reduction being removed, people just learned that, hey this hero actually is pretty pineappleing bad in the early-game laning phase.
The chinese know this and are very aware of it, LGD.int also won a lot of their early scrims when they arrived simply because the chinese weren't used to said strats, the second they were used to them, LGD.int had to resort to new methods and adapt.
I do however agree that the westerns have an edge in the department of being ready to deal with a wider roster of heroes simply due to the large amount of teams just around the same skill-level, but i don't agree that the western teams are more innovative(They're however clearly more ready to try out heroes IN tournament matches, but if that is due to the fact that a lot of tournaments in the western scene are small 5k USD tournaments where most eastern tournaments are big ones with LAN finals, i can't tell you). I also enjoy slark pick-ups, but it's also not hard to see why the hero isn't a top pick everywhere, slark falls off in teamfights unless he gets to rack up a lot of agility, in which case you should've won the fight anyway.
The main reason the picks were off to me though, was simply magnus. Seeing him ignored in a game for an omni was simply weird, because omni doesn't give your team more teamfight, early game, push or anything compared to a magnus.
