The start for Ninjas in Pyjamas at ESL One Cologne was looking very good. Three wins on Cache offered them a way into playoffs. On stage in LANXESS arena Cloud9 showed them how good they are in shape and beat them 2:1. Xizt is one of the NiP coreplayers for a long time and escene interviewed him about their mappool, the newest additions Fredrik ‚REZ‘ Sterner and William ‚draken‘ Sundin and the new gamestyle.
Die Berichterstattung zur ESL One Cologne 2017 wird präsentiert von be quiet!
escene: First of all, let’s talk about the map of your groupstage: cache. You played it against every opponent, What does that say about your mappool?
Richard ‚Xizt‘ Landström: I mentioned it in other interviews: We don’t even know ourselves and how our mappool is looking right now. We need so play more official games on LAN to find it out. But Cache felt good in practice and a lot of other maps were feeling good in practice aswell. Obviously Overpass and Cobblestone didn’t look good enough against Cloud9. It will need more tournaments together so find our map pool.
You had two changes in the team, REZ came in just two weeks ago. What can two new people bring into your squad? Is this an addition to your old core or does it feel like something new?
Switching two players can change a lot ingame like decisions or gamestyle. Draken is a very aggressive AWPer and we haven’t tried that out before. This offers a lot opportunities to our gamestyle. Also REZ is a good player to leave alone on bombsites. They give us so many options tactically. We just need to play more together. I would say, it’s a new NiP. There are new tactics and a new gamestyle in my opionion.
How can a transfer change your own playstyle and what differs it from a situation with long known teammates?
Always when you’re changing different players, you get a boost to yourself. I don’t know, why it’s like that. In the beginning of every team you get boosted individually. We’ll see how it goes in the future. I’m excited about it.
It’s the second time, you don’t attend to a major. How does it affect your mindset for upcoming events?
We were very disappointed to miss this major and the last one. But at the same time, it’s 2017 now and there are a lot of other big tournaments like this here in cologne. It isn’t a major, but still really big. Of course, we want back to the major. It’s the biggest goal for right now. We can’t stick in the past, we should be happy with what we got at the moment like attending to ESL One.
You got two guys from Epsilon. We had in Germany similar transfers, where PENTA players went to mousesports to make the next big step. Do you see this development in Sweden?
NiP and Fnatic haven’t change that many players before. There hasn’t been room for upcoming players to take a spot in a top team. But now we got two very skilled guys from Epsilon. And Epsilon did a great job to bring them experience.
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