LYON Licorice: “We almost took a game off C9 on one scrim block together. I’m reasonably confident [against] Shopify.”

Q: Oddie mentioned that you knew eachother already, did that make you want to join the team?

Licorice: I was excited to play with Oddie again, it’s nice to be joining a team with someone who I have something of history with.

I mean, it was kind of a long time ago now, but we played ranked fives together [and] duo queue. And then one of the first teams I tried out for when I was just a random solo key player was Galactic Gamers, a LAN team. They ended up going with someone else, but I was almost gonna start my career with Oddie, so it’s cool to play with him now.

Q: What’s the team looking like in general right now?

Licorice: I mean honestly we haven’t done anything yet because Hena got here Tuesday and Saint got here Thursday night. So we just showed up like, “Oh shit, we have to scrim and learn as fast as we can.”

We had one scrim block with Saint, and we had two days before that that where we were scrimming with Hena, [with Young filling in as mid].

Q: So you had one scrim block with the full team?

Licorice: Are you counting one scrim block as three games, a break, then three games? Then that’s what we did.

Q: Did you have any strategy discussions or anything beforehand?

Licorice: I mean, I think the staff has been working really hard on moving their entire company to LA, so I think they’ve been pretty busy — we all just kind of played solo queue. The idea is that if we had the best read on like the meta possible, and [found] what we thought was good, then we’d be able to do as good as possible — because the team play was just probably not going to be optimal.

Q: Now that you’re all together, how’s everyone’s English?

Licorice: [Saint and Hena’s] English is pretty good, I think we’ve been running into some problems where someone will say something, [but] they won’t like understand — or they won’t know it’s directed to them. [That] means that it takes longer than it would otherwise to communicate, so I think there’s going to be some things we have to iron out. I’m sure we’ll end up learning a few words of Korean and a few words of Spanish.

Lyonz’s [and Oddie’s] English is good.

But I also like, when I was on Golden Guardians with huhi, Gori, and River, all their English was fine. But when they were making a play together, they were just more comfortable speaking in Korean. So I imagine that with Oddie and Lyonz, they would just rather speak in Spanish if they’re trying to communicate something quickly. They haven’t so far but I imagine we might end up with a mix at some point.

Q: So, theoretically there’s a world where jungle-support are coordinating in Spanish and your carries are discussing in Korean, then you’re sitting there like “Cool, wonder what we’re gonna do next”?

Licorice: *laughs* That one’s probably less likely, but it’s possible.

Q: Sounds it’s been really stressful for you and the team in general.

Licorice: Kind of, I mean it’s been way better now than when we started, because at first we didn’t know if Saint was gonna make it in time for the match, maybe we would play with Young on stage. [But] he showed up, that was great. To actually be scrimming feels okay [because] we’re making progress. I think it feels a lot better now than it was before.

Q: What are your expectations facing Shopify next week?

Licorice: I mean, we almost took a game off C9 on one scrim block together. I’m reasonably confident that we could we could beat Shopify, right? I mean it would be awesome to be able to go to Brazil. […]

It’s kind of chill, in a way, because of all the Visa stuff. The expectations internally are kind of low — if we lose off of team play, then it’s like, “What were we supposed to do?”. It’s whatever. Like, it happened. So it’s just kind of fun to go out there and play. Hopefully we do well, I think it’d be awesome to go to Brazil. […]

It’d be awesome to go to Brazil. I love Brazil. The fans there are incredible. That’d be really cool. We’ll probably have a lot of takeaways from today’s games and I think we could win next week, and then I think we need to win one more match.

Q: If you beat them, it’s likely 100T in your way for Brazil.

Licorice: Like, that’s doable. It’s doable. And, I mean, by the time we’re playing 100 Thieves, we’ll have two weeks of scrims. […] I saw Inspired say in a quote that you just need two weeks of scrims [to be ready as a team], so then, like, we’re there.

Q: What do you think about streaming scrims?

Licorice: I mean, first is that FLY is a really strong scrim team, so I think it makes sense from their perspective that they would stream their scrims. It’s kind of like the G2 post that happens every year where they’re like, “This is our record and teams cancel this many times.” […]

[FLY] is certainly the best scrim team and then probably also the best team in the league.

Q: Would you watch the streams?

Everyone would watch. I mean, a few thoughts. One: I don’t know how copyable FLY is. They’re a fairly unique team. Even if you look at their drafts today, they’re drafting in ways that [other] people didn’t do. [Also,] the plays they’re going for are kind of like insane — they really like to take a lot of risk. […] But of course, if a team agreed to scrim them, I would watch.

And then B, it’s a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma after that. Let’s say LYON agrees to scrim FLY. Then, teams have a lot of info about FLY and they have a lot of info about LYON — so that just makes our matches way harder. As a team that’s not the best team in the league right now, all of a sudden we’re playing against people who like have a pretty good idea of our priorities, our champions, what we’re good at, the things that we’re working on, the things we’re fucking up — and they’re just like chilling watching FLY beat us.

Q: You think they get more off a scrim game than a stage game?

Licorice: I mean, I think you can get a lot of information from a scrim block, but less than a stage [set] unless we’re streaming comms and stuff, which I imagine FLY is. […] Yeah, I mean it’s interesting. I don’t know. For me, it didn’t even cross my mind as something we would do because of the [roster] issues we’ve had.