ZooMaa Column: What went wrong and how we’ll bounce back at CoD Champs

Before the New York home series, we wanted to come in and make a bang. Going in with a new meta, we changed roles around. The subs got worse, while the ARs got better, so Mack, one of our main subs, ended up being one of our main ARs. Donny, Mack, and Lamar were running ARs while Dylan and I ran the subs. 

Getting someone like Mack, who can just run around and get kills, on an AR was good because he can play a do-whatever-you-want role, where he just goes wherever he needs to pick up kills. For me, as a sub, I realized there were certain things I couldn’t challenge and certain routes I couldn’t take anymore because the MP5 wasn’t as good. 

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I just had to focus on playing smart and making sure I was taking the right routes so that I could get spawns for my team and do a little bit of the dirty work to help them out. With the MP5 not being as good, you wanna be sneaky, you wanna be moving around trying to finesse around the map, using your movement to your best advantage. 

We had a nine-map winning streak going into the London Home Series, so we were very confident. But when you come off an event win, all eyes are on you so teams are watching your VODs and trying to steal or copy whatever you’re doing. And I think that’s exactly what happened, teams just watched us play and they saw what we do, or how we play, and they blind-countered us, especially in SND. 

What happened in London?

A little too much confidence

We were probably a little overconfident. We were doing things we shouldn’t have been doing, making mistakes we don’t normally make, and we got punished for it. Paris is a good team while Dallas has good chemistry and some of the best pacing in the league right now. There’s a lot of good teams in this league and they’re going to punish you for mistakes that you make.

• Read more: CDL London Day 2 recap: Subliners suffer upset, playoff bracket set

In the respawns, I just felt like we weren’t on point as a unit. Our communication was off and we were too slow to our spots, we weren’t the oiled machine that we usually are. In SND, we got blind-countered for sure here and there. But that’s on us, we know that they’re watching our film, we should be picking up on that.

The meta shift

Another thing with the London Series was the meta change. From New York to London, 10mm was brought back, which made the MP5 a little bit better. So, instead of three ARs, it started to become more of a two-AR meta. 

We were going through a little meta crisis and thought maybe our pacing was a bit off. So, in the middle of the London Series, we ended up making a switch where we put Donny back on the AR. One thing with our team is keeping up the pace and making sure we’re constantly applying that pressure on other teams. So we felt, because of Mack’s fast playstyle, that Donny should be on the M4 because it might fit better. 

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We had some people switching guns, some people feeling uncomfortable on certain guns, so we just tried to make everybody feel as comfortable as possible. It didn’t work out that weekend, we had a bad weekend of CoD. And that happens. As a professional who’s been doing this for years, you go through ups and downs. CoD is CoD. It’s day by day. With anything you do you’re going to have good days and bad days, so you have to just learn from the bad days and try to move forward.

Looking forward to CDL Champs

Trying to figure out what fits best for our team is going to be important in this new meta. It didn’t look too good for us in London, but we have so much talent on the team and we already won an event so we know we can do it again. We just need to figure out the formula. 

The MP5 is harder to use now and the M4 can pretty much do it all, so the MP5 to me in this game, going into Champs, is more of a dirty work type gun.

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You’re the dirty work player, trying to get the spawns, hit the pinches, and hit the long routes. Of course, you can still go off and get a bunch of kills, but the M4s are going to be the ones dropping big stats. 

We’re going back into scrimmages now and trying different things out, including Mack back on the AR. If we get smacked because we weren’t taking practice seriously and acting cocky as hell because we won a tournament, well…that would be annoying. 

But that’s not going to happen. We’re disciplined and passionate. We take this stuff very seriously. We get on every single day, practicing, watching film with the team, we’re ready to go. We’re preparing for this and we really want to show out. Hopefully we do.