Boombox Interview: “Win or Lose, We’re Playing to Improve”

Isaac “Boombox” Charles has proven himself to be one of the west’s strongest flex support players, but that didn’t come without its share of hard work. After a strong finish in Week 3 versus the Houston Outlaws, we sat down with Philly’s resident master to discuss his goals for the season, and how the Fusion are evolving into something entirely new. Enjoy!

[Related: An Interview with Carpe and Philly Player Profiles: Support]

To start things off, I want to check in with you and the team now that we’re approaching the halfway point in the season. How is the team feeling right now about where it’s at? And how are you feeling about where you’re at right now?

In this season already, we’ve had a lot of ups and downs. That said, I’m really proud of our team. We like pushing to be the best we can be, even through losses. At this point we’re just playing to improve – we don’t care about wins or losses.

With that focus in mind, what’s the single biggest thing that you’re working on in your play right now?

I’m mainly working on consistency. As a Zen player in this meta, you need to make a lot of tough decisions -whether or not to use Transcendence is the main one. Do you use your ultimate to save people, or just save it [for the next fight]? A lot of times you can be punished for using it the wrong way, so I’m really trying to focus on making the fewest mistakes in that regard as possible.

What goes into reviewing decisions like that on a micro level? Who’s involved in the process of determining exactly how well you’re accomplishing a goal like that, and what you need to do to improve? What conversations are had there?

We have three coaches who focus on different things in our team. When they’re reviewing or looking at each player’s ult usage, they’ll often suggest things or open discussions like, “What do you think would have been [the best course of action] here?” They try to generate very open discussions like that. As players, we’re working to understand and internalize those discussions. It’s not just like, “You shouldn’t ult here – you should ult here” – we want to think about and better understand the thought process behind [those decisions].

How are you preparing for Philly’s last match of the stage against the Shock?

These stages so far have been really GOATS-focused, so that’s what we’re working on the most. We’re looking to improve our neutral fights (or our fights where neither team has any ults,) because we have ult economy pretty well down now. A lot of times against tougher teams, we struggle in 50/50 fights, so we’re just focusing on improving and solidifying our tank play and being able to not lose fights for free.

Speaking of GOATS… do you think more needs to be done to move the meta away from 3/3, which has still been so prevalent despite the recent patch?

Personally, I don’t care what the meta is – if it’s GOATS or not GOATS. I think a lot of people are pushing for a 2-2-2 lock, so you limit the amount of supports and tanks that people can play. There’s a lot of synergy between certain heroes that wasn’t discovered at the start of the game, and now everyone’s starting to figure it out. Those discoveries have led to a lot of tank play, so they’re hoping that a 2-2-2 lock would fix that.

To close things out – your birthday was a couple days ago! How’d that go?

It was fine until the next day when we lost against New York – that wasn’t ideal! [laughs] But it was just fine, really. It was another day at work, basically. We had to practice for our game and I just focused on the match.

Any fun plans now that you have a bit more free time?

I think I’m just gonna relax a bit, since we don’t have a game for a few weeks. We have an opportunity to just take a load of time off, reset mentally and then come back and grind.

[Thanks to Boombox and the Philadelphia Fusion for taking the time to sit and talk with us – good luck this season, and enjoy your time off!]

Transcriptions courtesy of Kate!

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