gla1ve: "valde really showed up"

The Danish team has been riding a wave ever since departing the SK organization, as Team X and Heroic have played through the summer without taking a break, finishing second at PGL in China, winning POWER-Lan, and making it to the semifinals at Northern Arena in Toronto last week.

Lukas "⁠gla1ve⁠" Rossander tells us more about it in the following interview:

Let’s start with the creation of the Heroic organization. Before that, you were a part of SK, but the roster was removed from the organization when they signed the Brazilians, which also left you without an ELEAGUE spot, which was a rough period for you. After that, you played under Team X until you figured out what you want to do - and eventually created Heroic. Can you talk me through those few months and what the feelings were inside of the team?

I joined up with the team when they were SK, but I already knew we wouldn’t play for SK much longer, so we knew we had to look for organizations. We waited a bit, talked to a lot of organizations about signing contracts and then we had some talks with some investors that wanted to invest in Danish CS and our brand, if we wanted to do that. Some of us were not happy about how we were treated in other organizations so we were pretty surprised and pretty happy we had this offer. We decided to do that because that seemed to be the best option for us.

You were just in Canada, at the Northern Arena. The event seemed a bit rough for you, maybe you didn’t get the results you were expected, placing 3rd after a defeat to Cloud9?

It’s a tough call, I think Cloud9 is a really good team at the moment. autimatic is really good, their team play is really good, and they have some amazing tactics. Actually I was pretty surprised they lost to Immortals in the final, I thought they would’ve won. The match versus Cloud9 was tough for us, we won the first map but lost the other two with scores that weren’t even close so they deserved the win.

Coming here though—first day is over and you are already first seed in the group. First you beat your local rivals Astralis who are always a tough teams to face, even though Heroic have had a good score against them recently. How did the match go?

Valde really showed up today. I’m so happy to play with him, he’s a really amazing player and he pulled out a lot of frags. I’m really happy we managed this win and that we showed we can do this together, that we can beat the top teams in Denmark as well as good teams internationally. I think the team is doing really well at the moment.

Is that one of the teams goals? To prove that you can play on that level and take on the best teams?

I think when we had our first bootcamp, when we brought in Snappi, no one expected much of us. I think when we put Snappi in the IGL role is when we started to be really, really good. He’s an amazing IGL, I’m really happy we brought him in.

Were you leading before that?

When Magiskb0Y was in, it was me or the coach in-game leading. When we brought in Snappi we tried to make the coach take over the leading but it didn’t work out so we decided to give the role to Snappi since he was the IGL for CPH Wolves.

Coming into this tournament, what was your preparation? You came straight from Northern Arena, but what did the period before that look like? If I recall correctly, you were one of the teams that didn’t have a vacation and practiced though the whole summer?

When we made the offer to Snappi, he had a three week vacation booked. We told him that if he wanted to play with us that he should practice with us two weeks and take the third off. Finally he said he wanted to go all in and skipped the whole vacation so that’s what we did. We had one bootcamp, went to PGL in China where we came second to Epsilon, went for five day bootcamp before PowerLAN which we won, amazingly. We had two days at home before we left for Northern Arena and then we came here directly from Canada.

It’s an amazing feeling, though, I haven’t felt like this in forever. It’s even better then when I played top level last time, because it’s a new world in CS right now, it’s so amazing.

Can you run me down through the two matches you played today, versus Astralis and TyLoo? What allowed you to come out on top?

We played our own game, talked through the match about things and what we should do, what would counter them and their setups. TyLoo did an amazing comeback on us, we were leading 11-4 on CT side Cobble and usually we always do this—we have a big lead on CT on Cobble and we let the opponents get a lot of rounds, too. We just have to find out how they play as CT before we get some rounds. That's what happened here and I’m glad we managed in the end.

Since you played them last time, did TyLoo change? How do you see them? have they changed? Are they stronger?

Actually, I see them as stronger than last time, because we improved a lot since PGL and we beat them comfortably there, while today we had a close match. I believe they have improved a lot, their CT holds are strong and they have some good pushes and stacks. Their T side, I don’t know since teams always have trouble playing T side against us on Cobble.

Let’s go back to Astralis real quick—you played with them at the Major, do you think there is anything that you learned there that helped you today?

I’m not sure. It’s definitely not something I’m thinking about, maybe it’s in the back of my head when I think about what we should do in certain situations. It’s not like I’m trying to anti-strat them on the basis of stuff from Cologne. That was a weird event because they played with zonic, and even though I just filled Kjaerbye’s spots and roles I think they swapped some after that. So there was no anti-strating in that sense.

Finally, what are the goals for the rest of the tournament and the team in general?

The goal right now is to get into the Top 10 on HLTV, and that has been a goal for us since we started this team and since we had our first good results. We also hope to go to the Major in January, that is going to be tough but we are excited about it. We are sad about not being able to qualify for ELEAGUE, since we were traveling a lot we couldn’t play any qualifiers for it. We missed the New York qualifier so we can’t go there either, but there were very good teams so that would be very hard anyway.

Our next goals are just to keep playing, keep winning qualifiers, go to some nice events and have fun while playing.