DIG Palafox: “I think most players would do pretty bad when [everyone] stops playing as a team”

Q: A lot of people didn’t expect you in LCS this year. Was the negative reaction surprising to you?

Palafox: Am I surprised that people were surprised? No, I think I’ve always had a lot of negative fan sentiment for whatever reason. I think it [has to do with] my play style, whatever it is.

Q: From my perspective, you’ve always felt like a “vibes” based player. Your performance is tied heavily to how cohesive the team is. Does that feel accurate in your eyes? 

Palafox: I’m not gonna lie, if you look at most players across most regions, I think most players would do pretty bad when your team just stops playing as a team. 

I’ll give a small example: Akali, right? If somebody wants to play Akali, your team – your whole team – needs to have good tempo because if the enemy support can constantly move mid or your bot lane is playing for like plates but their bot lane is playing for map pressure, then you’re just not gonna have a good time. 

I’m not saying that happened with Shopify last year, but, in general, Akali as a champion can’t really be playing those circumstances as easily. Or, like, you have to be really objective focused, right? It’s a whole team plan, right?

There’s also just, personally, I don’t like playing champions that just sit there and scale and you wait for your team to… I wouldn’t say do anything, but you play on an island alone and your team is just not playing with you. I don’t really like that play style.

Q: So you wouldn’t be a top laner?

Palafox: No no, it’d be fine if that was my role in the game, honestly. But I just don’t think that’s like what mid lane’s role in the game is.

Q: When you previously played with Ignar on NRG, he put a lot of pressure on mid and played the map very heavily with Contactz. What approach can we expect from Dignitas this year? FlyQuest last year played with a very locked off mid, with support-jungle moving.

Palafox: Busio would actually help Quad a lot. It wasn’t necessarily Busio and Inspired, it was Busio making up for Inspired’s lack of presence in other lanes. And Busio had to be super disciplined with how he used his time. It felt like the person on FlyQuest who was actually the most out of the loop on a lot of things was Massu, because Massu was oftentimes the one left alone.

Q: Do you think there has to be a weak side of the map?

Palafox: I think that in League of Legends there’s always turns. Like there’s always going to be a weak side-strong side, I don’t think that’s debatable really. Most good teams just have an idea of who’s going to be that weak side and who’s going to be that strong side.

Q: Some teams in NA feel like they have their strong side-weak side locked, while the best LCK and LPL teams are the ones that can change it from game to game.

Palafox: Ideally, that’s how I like to play League of Legends, right? I try to be adaptable where I can be strong side and I can be weak side. I guess we’ll see how that goes this year, but on Shopify, it just felt really hard to…I dont know. I didn’t really feel very good team vibes in split three. It felt more like five people playing League of Legends and no one really listened to each other. For better or worse,we have to follow one person’s plan no matter what. 

On Shopify it felt more like that people didn’t respect other people’s calls, so you would kind of have to do that play – or else. 

Q:  Last year, so many of our top teams openly collapsed from internal struggles. What do you think can prevent that from happening again? 

Palafox: Honestly, nothing. I think – as a lot of teams will probably end up finding out this split – you have to resolve the bad parts. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this, but a lot of people refer to it as like a cancer. And that’s not necessarily a person; it’s more like an attitude on the team. 

It’s actually why Damonte is a really good coach because he is good at making it so there’s no cancer or […] disease on a team. I think a lot of teams really do have that problem. There’s a lot of teams that play well, you know, like… obviously, FlyQuest was like the best team, right? But even they had those problems.

I feel like TL did really well, like they wanted Inspired, right? But, then they kind of realized that Inspired and Quid wouldn’t fit together, so they, like, went in a different direction. I think our GM, Jonathan, did a really good job of sticking to that logic.

Transcription help from @midjglsynergy