SR Contractz: “Probably 100 Thieves [is in our way for qualifying to Brazil], they’re around 4th-5th.”

Q: Favorite food?
Contractz: People are gonna hate me for this, but I’m not actually a big fan of food. I kind of just eat to eat. I’m not picky, but I am allergic to shellfish, so not that. If I had to choose a favorite, it’d be an omelette.

Q: Any main hobbies?
Contractz: I like watching football, like the NFL. I’m a 49ers fan. Recently, I also got into the One Piece TCG, so I’ve been buying a lot of booster packs for that.

Q: I imagine Brazil is your goal. Can you trash-talk the team in your way?
Contractz: Probably 100 Thieves; they’re around 4th-5th. […] River’s probably just playing Lost Ark all day and Snipers just typing in all chat and DMing girls.

But seriously, their playstyle is very unique. They’ll level 2, level 3 invade, River will disappear for a minute and show up out of nowhere. They really like to push their leads; they play like NRG 2023. If you’re confident in your game plan and snowballing, they’ll push that advantage. But if they’re behind by a couple of thousand gold, they’ll keep running into you and int, which is kind of what we did today, in a sense.

Q: What went wrong today?
Contractz: I think we were kind of just tripping over our own feet. We were in advantageous positions during many parts of the early games — specifically game 1.

I think I was late to the top dive on the third wave stack. So I have to path better — I think that since they haven’t shown that Rell is in base, that Urgot is a free kill top. So that I misexecuted.

That was kind of the turning point for the game. I think Cass got like three kills, we got pretty much wiped in a mid-fight when we had yot advantage. We had the advantage, but after that point in the game of throwing these small leads over and over and over again, especially with the way that my champ interacts with Ashe, Ivern, and Cassiopeia the game gets pretty challenging. I think we got overzealous for kill angles — even though we would get one or two kills, they would get three waves or they would get plates on turrets.

We were just undervaluing a lot of our map movement and it’s a good learning experience. FlyQuest is the reigning Champion, they went to game five versus GenG, but that doesn’t mean that we really expected to lose today.

Obviously everyone else [expected us to lose] but I feel like if you just have the expectation that you’re just going to go in and lose a game, then you shouldn’t be a pro player. But I think the story of this series is that they had a lot more patience in their play. They had a calmness that we just didn’t have.

Q: What do you think of criticism of your game 1 draft?

Contractz: I think conceptually, yeah. Ivern, Ashe, and Cassio kind of turbo [counter] Skarner, but those Champs are relatively still weak, in comparison to Skarner, throughout early game, esp in lane swaps. I still think the early game is slightly stronger favored [for Skarner] until they start getting levels and items—and I think that we also combated their peel back with our poke, as well. Obviously, it’s a little bit negated by Ivern, but Varus built serpents.

[We have] Hwei Varus, so it’s like a little bit of push-pull — Leona, engage can be very non-committal as well. Their champs work very well into into our melee champs for sure. But we just thought that we could, you know, push our advantage and push our lead.

Q: What made you want to keep playing with Palafox this year?

Contractz: Initially on Shopify, it wasn’t really my decision to play with him — Reven had his list of mid laners that he wanted, but Nisqy was out of the running, then out have the available options that we had

I definitely strongly felt that Palafox would be the best out of the remaining. I mean, we’ve, we’ve accomplished quite a bit together. I think this is going to be our fourth year playing together.

You know, we won LCS, we made Worlds, we beat G2, went to quarterfinals — even though we got stomped. I’m very confident in his strength as a player, and I feel like he could definitely reach those heights. I know [Palafox] is very driven and hardworking and he’s really trying his best to get back to that peak in that form.

I’m going to do my best to enable him and grow into even better players than we were before. I think he had a decent showing today. I think we didn’t really play well around his conditions that much.