Interview with mYiBlumbi: "You win as a team..."

I actually enjoy it. It’s a lot less pressure to play. If you’re called the potential winner of the group already before it’s even started, it’s really hard to perform under pressure, but if you’re called the underdog – the team that no one knows about – it’s a lot easier because you can just make these upsets even though no one knows the scrim results and no one knows how strong you actually are, which only the teams themselves know but no one outside that. It’s a lot easier to play like that, and I actually enjoy being the underdog.

Definitely. It’s the power of that. In the end, you win the game by winning the game and not by having a specific roster for a long time, but it helps. I think you are less nervous, you know the guys you are playing with. When all the teams did roster changes, they stole some of our players. They stole Gerd, they stole Crozzby, and, I don’t know, we just immediately, after two or three weeks, found new players and we went with them. Other teams, they try out for months and months, and they swapped and swapped and swapped, and we were just like, “Why? This is a team game." Yes, it is about individual players as well at some point, but, in the end, you win as a team, and if you just swap and swap, it’s not going to work out. You have to stick together.

In December, we finalized our roster with HasuObs and Splendour, and I think it’s a huge part actually when I think about it. It’s like three months. I think it’s an advantage, and the other teams, I don’t know why they’re swapping so much. Like, Ménè went from Fnatic to Na`Vi to Dignitas, and now he’s in Dignitas. We were scrimming all the teams, and we didn’t know who we were playing against because two players from Fnatic, three from them, everything was mixed all the time. We were like, “What are we playing against? Who are these guys? What is the team? Hello, are you Fnatic or Liquid or…who are we playing against right now?” It was so funny to see. There’s one accurate tweet that a guy made that shows the roster swaps of all of Europe…it’s just crazy how much other teams swapped around. And I can understand the frustration of fans who were like, “Aw, what is this? I don’t even know who to root for anymore,” but you can root for us! We are five since December, we didn’t do anything and we didn’t even swap out, our players got stolen.

Yes. We played a lot of Lost Vikings, and every team is scared of it. We played a lot of Cho’Gall -- every team is scared of it. We played a lot of standard comps, which we are really strong with, and we have so many different things that that we are playing that they can’t ban all of them out. So, in the end, they ban Cho’Gall, they ban Vikings, stuff like that, but we will end up having another draft in mind still that’s really, really strong because we just prepared so much. We just have a lot of stuff prepared, and the other teams can’t handle it right now.

I’ll have to tell another story about that: we were always the team to pick up a Hero before it was in the meta. I don’t want to say we made the new meta, but we had a huge influence in the new meta all the time. Even last year when we didn’t qualify for Prague, we made a lot of the meta. A lot of teams give us credit for building comps and building drafts, and they copied the drafts from us. I think Na`Vi did it – back then, it was the Anub’arak draft we [discovered?]. It’s the same for Thrall. We played Thrall before he was meta. I think Darkmok is the best Thrall in Europe -- some might disagree, it might be Lowell -- but I think Darkmok is the best Thrall because he’s played it for one year now. He played him pre-buff, pre-changes, and the same thing for Cho’Gall.

We practiced him from the beginning. We saw the potential because he’s extremely tanky and he has the tools to survive. He has this insane level 16 Spell Shield that reduces 50% for two seconds per enemy hit, so if you need to fight, you hit the W on Cho, it basically gives you Spell Shield for 10 seconds, and people don’t realize how strong this is. He can’t die. Even a Seven-Sided Strike from Monk does 50% reduced damage -- everything. We realized from the beginning that like, “What is this? This can’t be -- something is wrong with this.” So you have to specifically draft against Cho’Gall to win the game, and we realized that pretty early. I don’t want to leak scrim results or something, but we destroyed a lot as Cho’Gall. So it’s gets played a lot against us, and people try to pick him up as well. I just think we are ahead on the meta a lot of times, and I think we have a huge influence, even though a lot of people don’t realize it.

A lot of people say Fnatic, Dignitas, or Liquid, they built this comp, they’re the origins of this comp, but it’s just copied. And we also copy stuff – everyone copies stuff. It’s how it goes, but I think we copy a lot less than people copy from us. Cho’Gall is just really really good overall.

Oh, of course. We want to win the final, but I can tell you that all the teams just prepare for semis. Like, Fnatic is not specifically preparing for us right now because they know they won’t face us until finals, and finals don’t matter like that. They matter, but in a way that no one cares anymore. It’s 1K more per player that you get – it’s basically a lot more since you get seeded into the top eight in Korea, but if you qualify for Korea, no one cares as much anymore. It’s like last year. It’s true, the final is undervalued a bit. It shouldn’t be, but you can’t force the mindset of a player to be like that, to say, “All right, we qualified for Korea -- we basically won already -- and now let’s win more!”

Yeah, the semis are all that matters. The finals are just, “Who’s the very best?” If you lose finals, you don’t care. You are like, okay, we got to Korea. If you win finals, you are even more ahead, but it’s just a show basically.

Definitely! Whatever new is coming up, we are prepared. We love to prepare strats enough to find out what’s good, and we are confident in everything that’s coming up, especially for the next series [against Virtus.Pro].