In week 3 of the LCS Evil Geniuses took on teams such as Cloud9, CLG and Golden Guardians, as they ended up going 1-2.
We spoke to Evil Geniuses’ jungler Dennis “Svenskeren” Johnsen about the current jungler meta, inconsistency within the Evil Geniuses roster and what they’ll be looking to improve going forward.
Thank you for sitting down to talk with me, Svenskeren. I wanted to start off with a few questions around the general team match up and composition. Of course CLG upset 100 Thieves with a pretty unique composition, did any extra prep work go into your matchup versus them after this?
Svenskeren: No, I don’t think we really changed anything about our prep going against CLG. We just talked about it but I don’t think we changed anything in particular.
CLG drafted an almost exclusively melee composition. Do you think this made your draft easier or more difficult to execute on?
Svenskeren: From our perspective they just had a lot of dive and I think usually when one of the teams has a ton of dive, the team that goes first will usually get the best engages. CLG just ended up going first in a lot of the fights and we just lost because we weren’t too confident going in first I think.
Talking about one of those primary divers, Kled, it seemed a lot of attention went topside early. How important do you think it was to set Kled behind early?
Svenskeren: I don’t think it was too important, Impact still got sideline pressure. Impact and Jiizuke had that small mistake where they both TPed in and died. We just had to take the game a bit slower after that, but we just kind of got outplayed in teamfights and I don’t think it really mattered that they had Kled looking back on it.
Like you said, the game definitely slowed down after that point. Do you think this slower pace benefitted EG?
Svenskeren: It’s hard to say, I think whoever wins that third dragon fight is probably going to win the game. It went really bad for us, since they got baron as well. If we won that fight and got baron then we’d probably have won the game. So it just came down to who played better at the fights.
Regarding your matchup against Broxah, this was only the second time Vi has been played throughout the year.
Svenskeren: I just viewed it as any other melee bruiser matchup. She’s pretty weak in the 1v1 so Broxah didn’t really go for anything like that. Vi’s objective control is pretty good though and they were just playing the wombo combo with Galio and Vi ultimates.
Do you think that CLG’s tactic of using picks like the Vi and Galio is something that is feasible in the long run or is it easily counterable?
Svenskeren: I think it’s good for them to play this kind of composition because it’s pretty easy. You just press R and everybody dives in. You don’t really have to do too much. Obviously it takes skill, but it is definitely easier than playing kite-back. Just diving in is easier. I mean it worked out for them pretty well.
Do you think the current jungle meta enables picks like the Vi right now?
Svenskeren: I guess you can play a lot of different junglers right now. There’s a lot of viable junglers now that Udyr got gutted. You don’t have to be forced into playing Udyr counters or banning Udyr so yeah, I think there’s a lot of good picks at the moment in the current meta.
Before, you spoke about how EG’s main problem was being outplayed in team fight situations. Could you elaborate on this?
Svenskeren: I think we just messed up around the dragon fights and if we played it better we should have been able to win the game. That’s just my opinion. Danny plays pretty well and usually gives us a lot of damage. I’m not too worried about anything after this game.
Regarding the season more generally, it seems like EG has very high highs but equally low lows. What do you think accounts for this?
Svenskeren: I don’t really know to be honest. We’re just really inconsistent. Sometimes we play really well and sometimes we play really badly. It’s hard to say, it’s just inconsistency for us. Hopefully we can take Golden Guardians seriously, not get too cocky, and we should be able to beat them.
Thank you for the interview, Svenskeren!
Also read:
- Is the oldest rivalry in the LCS renewed? Both TSM and CLG end week 3 undefeated
- Alphari benched as Team Liquid reshuffles starting LCS roster
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