Photo by Stefan Wisnoski/Riot Games
After notching a 9th-10th finish in Americas Stage 1, ENVY has gotten off to a sluggish start in Stage 2. After blowout 2-0 losses to Evil Geniuses and MIBR, the team is working from behind.
While there were positive moments in the team’s opening match of the stage against EG, a combined seven rounds against MIBR made the match one to forget.
Ult Orb interviewed ENVY head coach Dakota “Stunner” MacLeod, who spoke on his two most recent signings and expanded on the team’s issues not just in its most recent loss, but this season as a whole.
“When you’re losing that bad, there’s a lot of things that are going wrong,” Stunner said. “For the fans, we’re flatlining our defense, you guys can see that. We’re not getting in the right places because of it. We don’t have information, and when you don’t have information in the mid-round, it’s hard to make the right decisions.”
Even beyond mid-rounding, Stunner also said the team’s micro has been a concern.
“When we were in the right position, our micro is just horrible,” he said. “We’re losing on a micro level. Our communication is not at the level it needs to be at in Tier One play. We’re not communicating who’s throwing utility first… we’re not communicating who’s breaking dart, just the simplest things. The communication is just too low, and the plan-making in those situations is too bad right now.”
The issue seems to be hitting the hardest on defense, where ENVY has won just eight rounds across both matches. Against MIBR, Stunner says a lack of communication led to ENVY ceding map control.
ENVY, in all fairness, looks a lot different than it did to start the year, but Stunner says the team’s poor performance has nothing to do with roster turnover.
“I don’t think it’s a roster change issue,” he said. “It’s been a problem all year. Those action comms are missing. The plan-making, we’re just too slow or sluggish. I mean, even when we had action comms today, and we’re in the right positions to be able to take the fights that you need to, we’re like three, four, five, six, seven seconds delayed, and that can’t happen.”
He added: “It’s too slow. It’s too slow. And it’s no one person; it’s the team as a whole. It was missing on the day today, and it’s been a constant topic all year. All year. That’s our battle right now.”
The root of the problem, Stunner says, swings between two extremes.
“I mean, it’s just constant, it’s just constant, like it’s either we have too many people making plans and not listening, or it’s the other side of the coin, which is nobody’s making plans and then we’re sitting there, and the comms are late,” he said.
GLYPH and nightz on-stage with ENVY against MIBR. (Photos by Heaven Wolf/Riot Games)
In the weeks leading up to ENVY’s Stage 2 opener against EG, the team added two players, signing former Gentle Mates player GLYPH and rookie nightz. Stunner had nothing but praise for both players, with both players helping the team out in different ways.
Related: ‘I didn’t feel any pressure’: nightz recaps VCT Debut with ENVY
“nightz says things how they are, and because he’s a rookie and he’s like a star player, everyone on this team looks up to him,” he said. “They all want to impress nightz. He holds a lot of power with his words, to be honest… He can say things and people are like, ‘Oh, okay,’ and then they try and apply it. That’s super, super powerful because sometimes I don’t even have that power as a coach.
GLYPH, on the other hand, has been described by Stunner as a player who looks to raise the team’s floor.
“He’s trying to fix those little details that add up, a lot of those micro situations,” he said. “He’s also giving us a better idea of how some of the European teams played.”
While detailing what GLYPH has brought to the team, Stunner circled back to the issues that the team has had, which GLYPH has been working on fixing.
Stunner described the fixing process as flowchart-esque, with ‘if, and’ logic, which he says can be rewarding in the long term but can have an adverse effect if everyone is not on the same page.
“It basically makes the game robotic, and if you’re robotic against the top teams, you’re not going to win,” he said. “But right now, we’re struggling in general, so it can only help.”
Stunner recalled a moment on Sunset, in which the team should have re-hit B, but no call to re-hit was made. He attributed that to the team being too caught up in the formula.
“It’s like, ‘We’re doing X, they do Y, they over-rotate, and then we go back to do Z,’ — it becomes this mess,” he said. “That’s how you get out-played. That’s horrible. It’s horrible to play that way sometimes, and right now we are super robotic. We are, like on both the micro and macro level, we are robots.”
While figures like nightz and GLYPH have been brought on to fix in-game issues on the macro and micro levels, the battle for Stunner now seems to be whether or not there is time for his team to not be like robots.
“I’m trying to have a positive mental attitude,” he said. “That attitude is going to project on the players. I’m a big believer that you can turn around your season in seconds. Like you can literally turn it around in a single day, and it’s all about your mindset. If you want to turn around, you will.”
“Right now, we’re in an uphill battle of implementing new ideas and the teams are already progressed halfway through the year and we’re still implementing our floor, which is just horrible,” he said. “I hope we can raise it by the end of the season and hopefully get to a position in Play-ins where we can go on the run, but it’s up to us.”
Stunner and ENVY have their work cut out for them, as their next match will come against Masters London winners LEVIATÁN. Even after LEV, the team is tasked with matchups against Kickoff champions FURIA and defending world champions NRG.
