Following his victory over 100 Thieves, CLG’s mid laner, Tristan “PowerOfEvil” Scharge sat down with TGH to discuss Yuumi, the meta and bootcamping in Korea.
Alright, so right off the bat, that was a pretty clean win, how do you feel right now?
‘Pretty good it’s always really great to start off with victories.’
I thought you guys drafted a pretty straight-forward/basic comp, you have Sejuani to engage and you have Sivir to ult then Yuumi to speed her up and Orianna in there as well. Did you draft this to help Ruin settle in to the LCS, or did you just draft it because it is a good comp?
‘I actually didn’t feel like we won the draft I feel like it was more of a 50-50 draft. Definitely got the Yuumi. But besides that I felt like the draft was even, they definitely out scaled us and we have the early mid-game strength as you said. With the Sejuani and Sivir ults to just run at them, we didn’t give them a chance to come back into the game. After that I feel like we ended the game pretty cleanly.’
Yuumi…that champion, how do you feel about her?
‘I don’t know, especially in solo queue it’s really annoying. You can never really kill her. But in high elo I’m pretty sure she is always first picked or banned because she can do so many creative things. For example, she can ward, jump back to the AD carry, and she can tank certain spells for example, a combo on LeBlanc is you W onto the enemy, Q/R, and pop the chain. But Yuumi can jump out after you use your QR, tank the chain and go back on to the ADC so you’re actually unable to pop your most damaging spell. So yes, I think she’s really strong, but you also have to be really creative.’
Darshan has been in NA for as long as I can remember, with his absence, it kind of makes you the veteran on the team, can you talk a little bit about how you have filled in that role?
‘Well definitely. We boot camped in Korea for pretty much the entire offseason. I felt like in Spring split we were just not close enough as a team and we didn’t bond together as a team. I feel like you could clearly see that in our gameplay, like we didn’t take fights that we should have or take engages that we should have. And in general we weren’t confident in ourselves as a team. When you boot camp in Korea, there’s no real life. You’re always with each other. There’s no girlfriends and no real free time you just play games. And after you’re done with your games you just talk with your teammates, it was really easy to get together and we came out of Korea as a completely different team. And obviously with the addition of Ruin he’s bringing a lot to the team. He’s helped me out a lot and I think he’s really mechanically good because of that we started wanting more scrims and I just felt better going into each day. Every day we have pretty good scrims and even if we lose you can learn a lot more so it’s just a better experience for us.’
I know it’s early in the split, but where would you rank CLG as a team?
‘Actually I don’t want to rank us because we just got back from Korea a week ago. So we have only played against two or three NA teams maxes. So yeah, I actually have no idea. Today we went to the game obviously we had scouting reports and analysis but we didn’t actually know if we were better than them. We hadn’t scrimmed them once in the past two months so we kind of jumped in blind which is an advantage and a disadvantage at the same time because it’s the same for them. It will be easier to rank us once we match up against every team.’
So my last question is about the meta, and how I personally think it favors you. So I mean, in Solo Queue you’re seeing a lot of cheese type things which is something you pull out sometimes in LCS (Nashors Tooth Orianna), and you have on hit TF mid, along with running smite mid with spellbook on LeBlanc and Orianna, two champs you like to play normally, do you think there is any chance you are going to pull something like that out?
‘Well I definitely like the creative stuff you can play like Smite mid right now. Or this new Twisted Fate item build. I’m someone who really likes to play this cool new creative stuff and like to experiment with them. So there’s a pretty good chance you will see me on one of these champions. Despite that it’s hard to ignore, the other overpowered Champions right now in mid lane. Sylas, Irelia and Akali are champions that are just so broken and most of the time you need to first pick them if they‘re open. That’s why most games they’re banned or traded off so I feel like if this meta starts changing, like they are getting nerfed or banned then these other Champions will become really strong.’
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