MODDII: "We needed some kind of a change"

HEROIC secured their first win of the tournament today, getting a 2-0 victory over HellRaisers, who played with a stand-in in form of Kevin "⁠HS⁠" Tarn. Kyrylo "⁠ANGE1⁠" Karasiow's team still put up a decent fight but weren't able to overpower the Danish squad.

MODDII was happy they broke their bad streak against HellRaisers

We talked to Andreas "⁠MODDII⁠" Fridh following the game and heard about their current form, changing Patrick "⁠es3tag⁠" Hansen for Ruben "⁠RUBINO⁠" Villarroel and Luis "⁠peacemaker⁠" Tadeu's contributions to the team.

You had a pretty good start to the season, I think that ever since you started with Heroic in 2016 you have been having good starts to the seasons. Is that something you think about at all, going into bootcamps early on to get in form while other teams struggle early on in the season?

I don't think we think about it that much, we just have important qualifiers because we are a "small" team, so our thinking is that if we bootcamp during these tournaments we learn much faster and we are all going to really play, people can't cheat and say that they are going to play and then not do it. So it's easier to get everyone playing, people listen when we do strats and it's overall just easier to do it that way.

The first LAN you had this year was cs_summit 2, you finished top four and beat NiP and North there, what do you think about that tournament and what you managed to do?

I think that event was a rollercoaster because we were playing with another player and it was kind of messy how all the things went and what happened. But we started by playing Cloud9, they are a really hard opponent and they kind of crushed us. I think we always get the hard way, we ended up in the lower bracket and faced NiP, who we always play really close games against, they win, we win, back and forth. We have been playing really good on Train lately, so when we picked that map we were really confident we would go up 1-0, and that happened. Then we just lost on Inferno, we struggle on that map now, and we were going to play Nuke.

Nuke is not played that often but it is one of our strengths. We were down 13-5 and we did a really good comeback, got the confidence. The other series was North, and just a week before that we beat them 2-0 in the Katowice qualifier so we were pretty confident. As the results show, we won 2-0, 16-9 and 16-9 which was really good for us because they are our rivals, it's the Danish derby, [that victory] was fucking amazing.

After summit the player change happened. Can you touch on changing out es3tag and why you decided to pick up RUBINO? 

That's a hard question, we felt that we kind of needed something new. All credit to Patrick, he did an amazing job for us, he took everything really cool and he is a talented guy, but I just think that we needed some kind of a change in how we played and we needed something to get better as a team, climb that ladder to become a top 10 team. I think it was necessary in the end.

Does it feel good to not have your talented players picked off, that was happening a lot before in the Danish scene, Astralis and dignitas picking up talent from the lower teams?

I think it's amazing. We have a lot of talent in our team, everyone is amazing, we have jUGI, the best AWPer in Denmark in my opinion, and one of the best AWPers in the world, I'm glad we could keep him. We also have niko, he is a really good guy and a really skilled player as well. I'm just happy we could stay with this team.

Let's touch on the HellRaisers game, just coming in, they are playing with a stand-in, what was the feeling like?

The feeling before the game was "oh no, not again", because we have been playing HellRaisers quite a lot in the past and they always manage to win versus us, I think they have a 9-0 record against us in the past six months or so. So I knew it was going to be hard, even though they play with a stand-in, because ANGE1, their in-game leader, always manages to do some good things for the team. So I'm really happy that we managed to win 2-0 against them, it gives us a lot of confidence moving forward in this tournament.

On the second map you started 6-0 but only got 8-7 for the half, it seemed that you as a team were getting a little frustrated? What was the atmosphere there?

We were really cool actually, we knew that always happens when we play versus HellRaisers, we go 6-0, 7-1, 8-1, and then we lose the half anyway. That has always happened against HellRaisers, I don't know why, I just think that they are doing a really good job figuring out what we are doing, that's just to their credit. We weren't frustrated though, we had a gameplan, we tried to do it. It worked... kind of, so I'm happy.

I want to touch on peacemaker, he has actually been with you guys for quite a while now. As you communicate in Danish and he obviously doesn't speak it, how is that dynamic been working?

It's going well actually, when we are discussing problems, tactics, new things we are doing it in English, but in the game we are talking Danish of course. peacemaker is always trying to help us, if he sees something he takes a pause and tries to help us do something from our strat book to help us win the rounds. He is helping us a lot with, for example, with Cobblestone. Four months ago we didn't really play Cobblestone because we weren't really confident on it, but he helped us a lot on the map so it's back in our map pool. That's all on Luis, he is doing a really good job, helping us with all the maps and such.