Hey, Akaadian, thank you for sitting down to talk after your series versus Evil Geniuses. To get into it, you joined this version of Dignitas rather late in the season. What did you think of the team’s playoff chances going into this first match?
Akaadian: I think I was just interested to see if what we had prepared was going to work. Personally, I was just excited to play in a playoff series. Playoff series are always really fun .
Yeah, I believe this was your first playoff appearance since 2019. How did it feel to be playing a Best-of-five on the main stage again?
Akaadian: I think a little bit of it was definitely taken away from us because there’s no fans. I mean, it’s still exciting but I think the fans change it a lot for me. Playoffs are just fun though honestly, in a playoff series it’s really cool to prepare everything that you have and try to problem solve as the series goes on. You just get to test your skills over and over again against another team.
I mean, we do this all the time in scrims. Usually in a best-of-one if Evil Geniuses just stomp us in game one then we’d never get to show the game two we had, where we actually won the game and looked pretty strong. So, I like the series because you always get a chance to play again.
Getting into the games, game one obviously saw a bad start for Dignitas, but could you tell me about how this series started from your perspective?
Akaadian: Yeah, in game one I realized that everyone was feeling nervous. We just missed talking about our composition and when it was at its strongest. We shouldn’t have been fighting in the early game in that first match. We just opened an early game fight, like it was us starting it and EG just double TPs in and stomps us because their champions are just way better in the early game.
We just forgot to talk about when we want to fight and how we should generally be thinking. I remember that from past series I’ve done well in that it’s something that we need to bring up in every game. You just have to ask questions like ‘when do you want to fight?’ and ‘what’s our general mindset gonna be and who are we going to play around?’ That’s just stuff we didn’t talk about in that game, and the early game is not our strong suit and we should’ve have been fighting in botlane.
And you attribute that lack of communication mostly to nerves?
Akaadian: Kind of, I think that there was definitely a lot of nervousness from my team but mostly for me this series against EG was just a reminder that we need to talk things through more before the game starts. The rest of the series we always talked about those things.
What was the conversation like after that first game and did you expect that your team could recover after that first loss?
Akaadian: To be honest, I did not. I fully expected us to be able to come back because I knew that we had some good stuff prepared but I thought everyone was nervous and I just wanted to see if everyone could come back.
Dignitas definitely had a better showing in game two, you specifically were especially proactive with ganks in both mid and botlane. What do you think facilitated this much better start?
Akaadian: Just better play. It was really just good play and good planning. We recovered from how game one went and we played normally.
Evil Geniuses definitely didn’t go down without a fight in game two. Could you take me through some of the decisive moments in this game?
Akaadian: I think we were dealing with some nerves in both game one and game two, they definitely were present. It kinda felt like our emotions were in play and it showed up, like we realized that I could just engage and the rest of us could run them down and there was nothing they could do about it.
Before we realized that, the enemy team had been controlling the game for like eight minutes or something. It definitely should not have worked out that way, we should have been fighting them like we did to end the game. For the last five minutes we just took every fight and stomped them. We should have already been doing that though. We just needed to realize that we could have won like that and make it simpler. There were just a lot of nerves happening in the games.
Moving on to game three, this definitely seemed like a difficult game from your perspective. What was jungling like when Dignitas seemed to fall behind so early?
Akaadian: Yeah, it’s not fun playing Volibear with three losing lanes, I’m not gonna lie. We didn’t expect to have three losing lanes. I think that Jiizuke played the mid matchup well, because it just normally doesn’t go like that. Whenever Yusui had to base level two, then I guess it was just nice laning from Jiizuke, right? We had never experienced someone who had done that to us before.
It was hard and I knew that it was going to be hard. We have Braum, Volibear, we’re losing our lanes and they have Varus, Thresh, Lucian. They could just play at range and we could never go on them. After the early game hit, I was doing my best but it was very hard to win. The angles were just not there, ever. Throughout the game, just nothing ever came. We got one kill bottom I guess when the enemy team was doing herald. It was just really hard.
Game four continued the trend of active early games, found in most games this series. How do you think Dignitas does in these fast-paced, skirmish heavy games?
Akaadian: I think that in general, we’re pretty good at it. I think that Evil Geniuses are also a team that thrives in chaos. They seem to make their games like this a lot. It’s just how they play. We play that way too so it’s natural that games can blow up really fast in terms of a lot of kills everywhere. It’s just about constantly taking stock of where we are once the craziness stops. It’s like two to three minutes of fast decisions and then we kind of figure out where the game is at now. Yeah, I think we handle it pretty well. We have people we can call in fights pretty easily.
You spoke earlier a bit about the compositions you had prepared. We saw some unique picks, most often in the midlane with Yusui picking up Yasuo and Kindred. Can you tell me a bit more about these selections?
Akaadian: Yeah, I mean in our experience, Kindred always wins the lane against Lucian. She wins inside and just wins the lane in general. Like I said though, Jiizuke played pretty well in lane, so Yusui had to base level two. With the Yasuo, it’s just Gragas and Yasuo. Their combos seemed pretty powerful in team fighting. I’m sad we didn’t get to show some of the other stuff we had prepared because we have a lot of random champions that we play which I’m sure would be fun to watch.
Thankfully you guys aren’t out of the playoffs yet and have another chance to show off some of your other compositions! Do you have any thoughts before starting your lower bracket run?
Akaadian: Honestly, I wasn’t sure how good EG was going to be and I wasn’t sure if we had the correct read on the meta. I’m sure we’re going to take stock of what happened in this series and try to change some stuff and move forward. I definitely learned some stuff from this series already, just in terms of what I want to do in terms of picks and what feels strong on this patch. Of course the next series is going to be different but I just hoped everyone enjoyed watching the games at least.
Thanks, Akaadian, and I look forward to seeing Dignitas lower bracket.
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