Snappi: "The atmosphere in the team is finally good again"

HEROIC kicked off the tournament in Cologne with two defeats, a close one to FaZe on Inferno and a blow-out by the hands of fnatic. The Danish squad bounced back on day two, defeating the Poles on Cobblestone to eliminate them from the tournament.

Snappi is set to prove that Heroic is more than just valde

Following his team win over Virtus.pro, we sat down with Marco "⁠Snappi⁠" Pfeiffer to hear about replacing Valdemar "⁠valde⁠" Bjørn Vangså with Patrick "⁠es3tag⁠" Hansen and who the other option was, as well as how the team has been faring with the new lineup.

You as a Heroic have had a good rise since the middle of 2016, but the last three months have maybe been the worst period of the team, with DreamHack Tours and the EU Minor qualifier, you've failed to do much there. Tell me a bit about that period, what was the struggle at that time?

After Katowice, we played in Austin which went quite well but we lost the third map to Immortals in the semi-final. That really created some bad atmosphere in the team, something that eventually couldn't be fixed. So, we had a really tough period so we brought in a new player and I believe that the atmosphere is finally good again. We talk about every mistake now, before we basically couldn't fix our mistakes because people were too stubborn. But people have realized we need to work together and even if you are stubborn for 10 minutes, if you can't realize your mistake then we can't get better as a team.

At this event, we played at the first event and we had a close loss against FaZe which could've gone both ways, and we lost quite big to fnatic. But instead of just going home and being mad at each other, we actually went straight into the server and tried to fix the mistakes. That is something we never did before, because the team now has a better atmosphere than ever.

When you were picking up the new player, was es3tag the only guy you were looking at? There is a lot of Danish talent going around...

It was between him and cadiaN. I actually think that cadiaN is an amazing player, he gives good input to the team and he is a good AWPer. We actually thought about making him our secondary AWPer, removing me from that position. The problem was, we felt that in the end, we would rely too much on playing the double AWP. All in all, es3tag is a better rifle player, but cadiaN has some skills that a lot of teams would need.

So it was between cadiaN and es3tag, but in the end, we chose es3tag because niko and JUGi played with him before and they said that he creates a good atmosphere, he knows that you need to fix the mistakes, not argue about them. Also, he is a really good rifle player that is aggressive and that is really something that we could use.

Touching on the FaZe game you mentioned at the start, it seemed like you were forced to save on the CT side almost every round. Can you tell me a bit about that?

We won the gun round, and afterward, they did some split on A that they won. So I and es3tag saved. They got a lot of rounds by going arch on A and splitting A through that. And we had a struggle holding that, we just switched up the positions. Usually I would play on the roof area and site, but we put MODDII there instead so we could play double AWP on Inferno sometimes with me on B. It felt like we had some miscommunications and our setup wasn't quite clear, that is why our CT went wrong. They wrapped a lot as I said before, that is something we didn't experience a lot in practice, so I don't think the guys on A were that ready for that situation. That is why we eventually didn't get any CT rounds.

T side, we knew our T was good, we have good executes on both B, arch, and halls, so that went quite well. At 14-14 it could've gone both ways, it was a 5-on-5 and we went for our B execute, but apparently, we missed a flash and a molotov which made NiKo shoot two of us. That is something we worked on fixing after the game, had we won that round we would've probably beaten FaZe, so I don't think that game wasn't that bad. We just got crushed afterward against fnatic.

cadiaN was someone Heroic considered for the spot that was eventually filled by es3tag

Against fnatic on Mirage you were blown out, what went wrong there?

Usually, in practice, we've been really good on Mirage, but we also had a lot of economy as CT which made it possible for us to do our double-AWP setup, with me and JUGi. We didn't practice a lot with five M4's. In that match, we struggled even getting an AWP on JUGi. I think the guys didn't experience that before, so niko, JUGi and es3tag who are holding mid didn't show enough presence in mid, fnatic could just walk on us, through connector, and split A. They went split A all the time and we struggled to hold that.

In the end, we found a setup that worked, but it was way too late at that point. And then we lost a 5v2 in the second round as T which was just really bad play. We had a mistiming in the tactic and also I did a mistake on short and afterward they played a 2-on-2 really bad.

After that you are 0-2, coming into the second day you draw Virtus.pro. Did you expect Cobblestone, they played it against the Immortals? Where there any preparations, because we saw VP doing some fancy execute yesterday?

The only thing we actually were prepared for was that execute because it was on reddit, so we saw it there. But apart from that, there wasn't really anything, we got the opponent at like 1am and we had to play at 12 so we didn't do any research before, we simply didn't have any time, we need to sleep. We didn't do any preparation, but we expected it to be either Cobblestone or Nuke. But we thought that they might be scared of Nuke.

Moving forward, what are you looking to do here at the tournament?

Right now, I guess we just have to take one game at the time. We had a really bad start and now I think we are going to be underdogs no matter who we face, except maybe TyLoo if they go on to win against Cloud9. But except for that match I think we are going to be underdogs no matter who we face. We just have to prove ourselves, because a lot of people have said that valde was Heroic, but that definitely isn't the case, and I believe that this team is better.