G2 Zven: 'The most important thing here is that we got better as a team'
After Day 2 of the 2017 Mid-Season Invitational, G2 Esports are 2-2, tied with Flash Wolves, and Team WE, but underneath SK Telecom T1 at 4-0. Yahoo Esports caught up with G2 AD carry Jesper “Zven” Svenningsen after their victory over the GIGABYTE Marines to talk about G2’s performance thus far.
Yahoo Esports: Congratulations on the victory. How is the team feeling after Day 2, and how are you feeling?
Zven: I think the team atmosphere is okay. It was better at the beginning of the day but it turned out fine in the end. I think everyone is okay with the results today, 1-1 is a fine result for today’s matchups. Personally I feel a bit down on my performance but overall the team was good.
Beyond comparing regions themselves, the general consensus is that it’s SKT at the top and the rest of the teams. How do you think G2 matches up against the rest of the competition?
Like you said, it’s pretty much SKT and everyone else. I think the Marines were very underrated, unfortunately. Everyone put SKT first, Marines sixth, and everyone else in the middle, but Marines are a much better team than this and they have a different playstyle than the rest of the teams. I would agree that the safe assumption is to put SKT first and everyone is somewhere else in the middle. I think that’s where we are as well and we can beat everyone in the middle, but SKT is really strong right now.
For today, you had a Lulu/Kog’Maw/Nunu priority in your draft. Why did G2 decide on this specific composition? How do you think your drafting was today?
Lulu and Karma are already prioritized supports. We’ve practiced a bit with these Nunu comps where we don’t pick jungler early and then we can have one more role to pick in the pick phase. The two games were very different.
Against WE we got snowballed against very early on from just one single mistake when we got ganked Level 2 by a cheese jungle path, but we couldn’t avoid it. This gank set us really behind and they snowballed it really fast.
Against the Marines, we were playing against a comp we’ve never played against, Ziggs, Bard, Taliyah, they had a lot of mobility while we had a 1-3-1 comp that had Kog’Maw/Lulu. But we didn’t know how to play this game. Their lane swap was better than the EU one, the Fnatic one, it was much better and much more reliable. We didn’t know how to play our mid game against this comp that was so mobile. I think we were playing our comp against teams that maybe we shouldn’t play it against. We should play it against teams with different stuff, but in scrims it worked really well for us, so that’s why we picked it.
A lot of people have tried to pigeonhole G2 as a scaling team with Trick farming early and scaling into late. How would you categorize G2 as a team?
I think we’ve tried to progress from being just an early game team that just was winning lanes or making plays on whatever side of the map. We tried to be more of a macro-oriented team. At first we didn’t make plays at all because we didn’t know how to do anything or prepare macro.
Now that we’ve learned, we’re trying to be somewhere in the middle, where there’s room for making plays but also, the most important thing is playing the macro part of the game where we become a late-game team. We don’t want to make too many risks so we just ended up being this kind of team. Right now in the meta, given the champions that are played, it tends to be that hard-carry comps are just better. Graves is popular. Ivern is popular. Tanks are pretty good. Carries top are a thing but they are risks sometimes. We’re somewhere in the middle but we can play both styles. Against SKT we picked an early game comp and it was working really well until our laneswap. Our first 15 minutes were perfect but then we had a bad laneswap.
Where do you see G2 ending up in this tournament?
Right now I just want to make playoffs. We’re 2-2 right now and against TSM tomorrow and Flash Wolves. If we get those wins then we’ll almost be out of groups which is right now our goal. Then we can work more on ourselves afterwards. I think everyone will be happy if we get out of groups and then we’ll take it from there.
G2 as a whole seems a lot more calm and prepared at this tournament compared to the 2016 World Championship. What has changed for you and the team since Worlds.
We are more down to earth now. I still think that the most important thing is not that we changed our mindset or how we approached things, it’s just that we improved as a team. Some players matured, of course, after Worlds. But the most important thing here is that we got better as a team. We didn’t lose because of choking or whatever people try to say. We lost because we were a worse team than other teams in our group.
That sucks, right? But we were worse than them. Now we’re actually a good team. Sure we struggled against Marines and Flash Wolves, even though we won both games, and got stomped against WE, but the main difference from now and then is that we’re a good team, or a better team at least.
Emily Rand’s love of the 2013 KT Rolster Bullets will never die. You can follow her on Twitter.
