FUR Thinkcard: “It’s incredibly obvious to us that teams don’t think we’re good at League of Legends, which is pretty funny.”

Q: Alright, how are we feeling? How’s Vancouver? 

Thinkcard: Honestly, I love the city. I was here in 2017, so it’s good to be back. Beautiful city – very clean, food is good. No complaints. 

Q: Coming in, you might unanimously be considered the weakest team at the tournament. How do you feel about that?

Thinkcard: It’s incredibly obvious to us that teams don’t think we’re good at League of Legends, which is pretty funny. 

We know that we’re good. We beat a lot of teams in scrims – teams that people I see on Twitter think are a lot better than us. We’re smashing them in scrims. So it really means nothing to us, and we’re just excited to show what we can do on stage. 

Q: Are you willing to talk about that more? 

Thinkcard: Even TL, after Split 1 when they won LTA in Brazil — even they had a postgame interview where they’re like, “Yeah, holy shit, we got absolutely smashed by Furia a few days before.”

So that’s something that we’ve always done really well in scrims, and it was always a matter of, “Can we translate to stage?” And Split 1, we were not able to. Split 2, we were able to. And that’s why we were kind of able to destroy teams in playoffs. 

Q: Your jungler, Tatu, mentioned that you believe more in Furia this year than you did in NRG at Worlds when you guys made that run. Is this accurate, and can you elaborate? 

Thinkcard: I did tell the players that. I think it’s no secret that when I was coaching NRG, while I did love that team and I was very confident in the players, I knew onstage we would always do well. We didn’t do very well on scrims, so it’s kind of hard for me to gauge how good we actually were. It’s hard for us to gauge how good our improvement was. And then, onstage, we did win. We were the underdogs a lot of the time, [but] we were able to come out on top in LCS, and then we were able to upset G2. So that was very cool.

Whereas this team, it’s very easy for me to see the improvement we’re doing because we’re winning in scrims. We’re able to noticeably improve on things in our gameplay, and then show that onstage. I think overall, it is just kind of a more disciplined group of guys, and it’s something that I’m really excited for. Because ever since the start of the year, when I saw what we can do, I was really excited at the thought of playing internationally. Because I think this is one of the group[s] of guys that can actually compete with a lot of the teams in the world.

Q: A lot of people have echoed the sentiment that FLY, C9, Pain and Furia should have played to qualify for MSI like in Split 1. With your confidence, would you have preferred that?

Thinkcard: I think our best of five against C9 would be a lot closer than people think. I do think they are a very good team. I think FlyQuest is an insanely good team. I’m not gonna say we’d crush FlyQuest or C9, but I do think it would be a closer series than people think. 

That being said, if you want a second team from LTA North, then have LTA North be able to send two slots. It’s not fair to the world to not send a team from South America and to send two teams to North America, when we get 300,000 viewers watching our games. […]

But, also, like, what’s the point of sports? The whole point of sports is that the underdog can win sometimes. Those make the best stories. 

Q: How strong do you consider FlyQuest? Can they push the LCK/LPL reps?

Thinkcard: I think they can. I think FlyQuest is better than the European teams. I think they’re just a very good team, and we’re able to see it at the last international tournament at Worlds. They’re able to take some games.

I think until you actually win a best of five, you can’t really talk that much, but at least they’re able to win one or two games. I think this year, I think they’re even better. And it’s not like they absolutely destroy us every time we scrim them. We do pretty well against [them], likewise. 

I even saw a tweet, I think, where Andy Barton tweeted out all the win rates of their scrims throughout the entire year. And if we were up there, we would have had the second highest win rate of all of LTA. So we respect them a lot, and I think the world probably does underestimate FlyQuest quite a bit.

Q: Could you go down your list of players and say your favorite thing about each one?

Thinkcard: Yeah, okay, sure. Just top to bottom. 

Guigo’s playmaking. There’s a lot of games that we won, especially when he’s on Camille, where the game is kind of not in a very good spot, and he finds one angle, and we instantly win the game. Happened two or three times this split. So I think for him, it’s his playmaking ability. 

For Tatu, it’s his confidence. This guy is 19 years old, and it seems like he’s won four to five world championships by the way that he carries himself. He’s confident against everyone, and it’s kind of like a superpower where he just doesn’t really get nervous on stage.

I think Tutsz is very calculated. He is the guy who’s always watching VODs and kind of learning and being like, “Oh, they should push an extra wave here. I like how this team did this, this team did that.” And he kinda brings that to [the] stage. And you can kinda see that in our series against Keyd, where he was really 1v9 in the sense of understanding how much time he had to cheat certain waves and kind of abuse the macro a little bit. 

Ayu – everyone knows it’s his mechanics. I mean, this guy is a mechanical god. When he boot camped in Europe, I think he got Rank 1. I mean, I haven’t confirmed this, but I’m pretty sure he got Rank 1 while there was an international tournament going on. Maybe it was an MSI, so all the best players in the world were playing solo queue, and he got Rank 1 in two weeks. So this guy is incredibly talented. 

And then JoJo, I don’t wanna say calculated again, but he’s just very smart about the game. I was surprised when I first came to Brazil that he already understood tempo research really well. Getting his words down and understanding how to abuse tempo on support, which is something I had to teach. And Master Yi – we had to teach Ignar, at least on NRG, and we had to teach Poome and all these supports that we worked with in NA. 

It’s usually something that we really have to get on them [for]. Like, “This is a base timer. Now you have to go here.” […] [Basically], how frequently you’re really hitting those bases. JoJo just has a really good game sense, and it shows. I think he’s in the right place a lot of the time. And it’s a reason why we kind of outclass the other [teams] in LTA South, because we kind of understand jungle support a lot better than other teams.

Q: How long has it been since you guys got to Vancouver? A week? 

Thinkcard: No. *laughs* We got here the 23rd, started scrimming the 24th. The schedule is really not very favorable. At least for us, there’s not a big time difference. We scrimmed the 24th, 25th, [and] today’s the 26th. 

We have a lot of Riot obligations as well, so there’s really not that much time to scrim. Not much prep time at all, so teams are just legitimately fitting in as many scrims as possible. Some [are] scrimming until, like, 11 p.m. at night. We started scrimming this morning at 10 … so we’re just trying to get as many games as possible. 

Q: How is the environment? It feels like it can be pretty breakneck and stressful, especially for some players. It’s Ayu’s first international, right?

Thinkcard: Yeah. It was stressful. I think the first day, we did pretty well. 

I don’t wanna say who we scrimmed, but we scrimmed a good team, and we did very well against them. Yesterday, we scrimmed an incredibly good team, and we kind of got punished. And then today, we scrimmed that very good team again, and we beat them. 

So we definitely had our stressful moments, but we talked it out as a team. We took a deep breath. We figured out what we need to do better, and we wrote it down. Like, “Alright, see you guys tomorrow. We really need to be on these things [and] make sure we’re focused on these.”

And today, we got rewarded. We were able to beat … a very, very good team. And, I’m just hoping that we’re able to play like we do in scrims onstage. 

Q: From 1 to 100, where would you put your chances of making out of play-ins? 

Thinkcard: The interesting thing that I’ve been thinking about is, say we do beat G2, and then we go against BLG. I don’t know how strong BLG is, [but] I’ve heard they’re very, very strong. Say [BLG] do beat us. Then we’re probably just gonna be playing G2 again – I’m pretty sure, based on the format, if I’m not mistaken. 

Say we beat G2, and BLG beats GAM. Then G2 and GAM will play each other. GAM has two losses. So G2 goes back up, and then we just play G2 again. So we might have to beat G2 twice. 

Q: So you either have to beat GAM and G2, or beat G2 twice. At least, if you’re not expecting to beat BLG. How possible do you think it is to take the set off of G2 in a scenario where you have to beat them once? 

Thinkcard: I’m definitely confident. I mean, I’m confident for our first best of five tomorrow. I think if we do beat them, they’re gonna do a good job adapting, and the second time is gonna be a little bit closer. 

Q: You count as our KOI, NA’s one-and-a-half seed. You guys fill out the rest because you’re there for us. So we’re gonna still count it as NA having two seeds. 

Thinkcard: Yeah, I mean, we each have Jojo on our team.