USTILO: "Since jkaem has come in, we've been practicing [Nuke] a fair bit"

Just days after adding Joakim "⁠jkaem⁠" Myrbostad, Renegades arrived in Kiev, Ukraine, for StarSeries i-League Season 4. The majorly Australian team which is based in North America started off with two losses, but was able to make the full comeback and pick up three wins in a row.

Renegades were all smiles after qualifying for the playoffs

After the game, we interviewed Karlo "⁠USTILO⁠" Pivac, who had a great, 97.6 ADR series, and heard about playing Nuke, Australian talent and IEM Sydney.

How does it feel to make the playoffs here, at a big event?

Yeah, I think this is the first time we made playoffs of an actual tier 1 event. We've come close a few times but this feels really good honestly. I have no words at the moment.

Let's touch on the HellRaisers game. Obviously, you were 0-2, got to 2-2 and this was the deciding game to make it through to the playoffs. Tell me the general feeling going into the match against them, what did you expect from the matchup?

Honestly, as soon as we got them, we were pretty happy with the draw. I mean, it was probably the best draw we could've got so we were happy with that. We knew that we could beat them, we've beaten them before, a lot of times.

We sort of knew what the maps were going to be as well, we didn't know if they were going to gamble on Nuke or not, but we were prepared for it, we've been playing it a bit lately, so I think it worked out well for us.

How much actual practice could you get on Nuke, especially with jkaem coming in?

Since jkaem has come in, we've been practicing it a fair bit, because we know that not many teams in NA play it, so it is sort of a free veto if we can get good on it. So yeah, we've been playing it a fair bit and it is either that or Overpass, we've been sort of tossing up between the two.

Tell me about that map, even though I guess you both play it, it was a bit of a sloppy game, back and forth, all over the place. How did it go from your perspective?

It was obviously pretty sloppy, it was the first official on it for the both of us in the last 3-4 months or something. It's been a while since we played it, so we kind of knew it was going to be sloppy. But honestly, we just grinded out the T-side, we won the pistol, got one anti-eco for once, for a change. (laughs) Got a few more rounds there and on CT we felt pretty confident, we knew what we were doing, and they were pretty easy to read at certain times.

Last map - Cache. You already showed against Liquid that it's a good map for you. Was it expected that you would go so hard on the T-side, that it would go as easily as it did?

Yeah, I expected it, Cache is by far out most comfortable map, I don't think any team wants to play us on it, and we know they don't really play it that often. So we sort of knew it would be an easy game.

When I talked to AZR about picking up a player, he mentioned that you looked all over, that you took a look at Australian talent as well. Not asking who you would potentially pick up, but in general, what do you think about the talent there, which players pop to your mind as potential up-and-comers right now?

I mean, there is a few, liazz (Jay "⁠Liazz⁠" Tregillgas) would probably be one of them, it depends on the roles we want in the team. INS (Joshua "⁠INS⁠" Potter) is another very sharp, young player, those two are probably the two standouts that would be number one and two. But we felt like they didn't really fit the roles that we wanted, and jkaem fits the role pretty well, so yeah.

I guess it's pretty far away still, but IEM Sydney has been announced. You've been there last year but it didn't go as well as you hoped for, definitely. Any thoughts on that event, any special preparation in mind, trying to build up your form for that event?

Yeah, for sure, since we didn't make the Major we've all been talking about Sydney being sort of "our Major". Obviously, we want to make it to that arena, be in front of all those Australian fans, so we will be going extremely, extremely hard for Sydney, it's the one event that we all want to go to and do well at really badly. So we will be putting in a lot of extra effort for that.