After day 1 of MSI Fnatic’s top laner Bwipo took the time to talk with our reporter Alexandre “DrPuppet” Weber to discuss wests poor performance at the first day of MSI, explains where the team lost to RNG and why they played Yasuo.

DrPuppet – How does it feel to play your first big international event?

Bwipo – I don't feel too much different from LCS I feel like playing in the finals and LCS is a very similar feeling, probably since we are here at the studios. So I have some experience playing here already. I think it is a big opportunity to show what I’m capable off, but so far today I think I disappointed.


Do you think the pressure feels different due to playing in Europe?

I think the pressure is the same, the only thing that changed for me I’ve been selected as the starter so there was more pressure on me to perform. I feel like I need to backup the reasoning behind that, right? The staff didn’t make this decision because of something I said or who I am. A lot of people don’t understand that this is a decision made because we as a team think it is better for us. Now unluckly my performance wasn’t that good today so I couldn’t show it today. We’ll see what happens tomorrow, I think we have a lot of things to discuss, I hope whoever plays me or sOAZ will be able to pickup the pace and hopefully pick some wins up.


So, where was the Fnatic we saw at the EU LCS finals? Today you guys seemed a little bit off, do you think it is the combination of the environment, preparation, and event or is it the Meta? Since Rekkles played Kai’Sa and Jhin today, do you guys need Rekkles on a hyper carry?

Our biggest strength was indeed that we couldn’t lose against those players at a certain point since we would outperform regardless of picks. So now that picks come into the equation I think the competition is more difficult and now that the competition is more difficult it is more important that we have scaling picks that outperform. So it is much more crucial that we get our team to that stage, so in my opinion that our performance is the worst is because of a certain pick ban changes and style. I was put on two mages that are more follow up other than the Sion, so this might play a role in it.


So that you don’t have the power to initiate the fights?

Perhaps, this could be a reason, I’m not sure there are a lot of issues to fix.


So do you think this was the reason you guys were more passive, even though you guys had the pick off composition around the Jhin?

Yeah.


So do you think this was the main reason it didn’t work out? Since you couldn’t follow up or initiate properly.  

I mean it’s difficult to really say what went wrong in the game, due to a lot of things not working out. Flash Wolves lost a lot of initiations too, but I feel like we were slow in the punish. We didn’t find the right opportunities to punish them while they were on cooldowns. It was just a really strange game. The way they played was very unusual, Ornn stayed for the most time with the rest of the team, I don’t think he went side for a very long time in this game. It’s just a different way of playing, I don’t think it will be a consistent thing from the other teams but this game it worked because of champions not being good against that certain champion. So they found a lot of good picks against ours in the pick and ban so we ended up playing their game instead of ours. I hope that we can fix that for the future.


Despite most fans being hyped for the Uzi vs Rekkles matchup in the bot lane, during the first game, you decided to bring out the Yasuo. Yasuo has been expected to be picked up due to a recent mastery change. Still, do you think he is finally more meta viable or is it still a niche pick?

I’m not a 100% sure, it became more popular since conqueror got introduced, so the addition of conqueror made Yasuo a more viable pick. Now if the other teams have practiced it or not I’m not sure. I don’t know if other teams take the pick as seriously or consider it as much as we do. I’m not even sure we will see the pick be picked again. The pick can be strong, in the right matchup he can do a lot of things, but in the end, it really comes to how skilled you are on that champion. The better you are with Yasuo the more you can do with it. Caps has those skills on Yasuo I don’t know if the other mid laners are able to follow suit.


Let’s talk about the last team fight against RNG, you guys wanted to ambush them, but at the same time it seemed that you weren’t really expecting RNG to walk up this way and it ended up in a possible miscommunication if you should take a fight or not. What exactly happened there?

It is a difficult situation to discuss without giving away too much. So what happened there, we had a lot of gold in our pockets and some of us wanted to recall and some of us wanted to go. So when the team fight came it was a very difficult situation to actually see if the ultimate is a good one or not. So a lot of people will criticize it for caps to go in there and it is what decided the fight after all, but it is very difficult to see if the ult is good for the Yasuo player, if it is a long range ult, max range ult and so on. Generally speaking, if the call was to go, the Yasuo would ult on the first knock up he can get. If I recall correctly we were intending to fight due to the Cho'Gath death timer and we can ult off the Trundle pillar. Since we saw them walk by we had the idea to see them on the pink ward and pick them there.

However, the pink ward was set a bit awkwardly and we couldn’t see them across mid lane. And if we had been able to see them across mid lane, we could have set up with the Trundle pillar out of the bush and fight while the Cho'Gath was still dead. This was the idea and it didn’t go as planned and it ended up looking a bit silly and stupid. Well, we threw a game with a lot of gold in our pocket and we even had the better scaling. So it was quite painful to lose there.


Those mistakes happen sometimes sadly.

Exactly, being able to pick up the pace from day 1 is important. Unfortunate we lost both games, they were difficult for some of our members due to our drafts but definitely winnable. For example, game 1 was definitely difficult for Rekkles to play, it was a difficult draft for him to play and definitely difficult to execute the Kai’sa in that game and for me, it was very difficult to play Swain in team fights against the Soraka, Varus, and Trundle. This trio is very hard to break as a Swain. So this made teamfights very difficult. There was a lot of things we could have done better and a lot of things we could have done worse. In the end it was an unfortunate day for us, but as long we show some resilience and come back tomorrow stronger, we should be able to make it out of groups.


Any words to your fans and Fnatic fans out there?

I know I disappointed today and a lot of people had already question marks of why I was playing and the whole sOAZ thing. We came to this conclusion to start me as a team and I’m very sorry I couldn’t show to the fans why we decided to play with me as a starter at least for MSI. So sOAZ can recover, but don’t be scared if needed he will be playing instead of me. My performance definitely indicates that, so to all the fans wanting to see sOAZ, there is a high chance he will if I continue performing this badly.