Magisk: "I've never won a BO3 against SK [...] I really want to break that curse now"

Astralis come into IEM Katowice on the back of a quarter-finals finish at StarSeries, where the Danes fell short to Natus Vincere in the playoffs. In Poland, they passed the first round against Renegades despite a poor Terrorist side on Train, coming back from a 4-11 deficit with a great defense.

Magisk shared his thoughts on ESL's new format, among other topics

After the first round of matches at the Spodek Arena, we caught up with Emil "⁠Magisk⁠" Reif to get his side of the change in Astralis and how he feels within the team after their first tournament at StarSeries. 

Let's begin with StarSeries and your debut there with Astralis - how did you feel at your first tournament, fitting into a new system after coming in from OpTic?

I think we did okay, actually, we didn't have so many days of practice, we maybe had a week and a half where we actually could practice, but we used our practice really well. We have improved a lot in just a few days of practice, everyone on the team was actually surprised by how fast I got into it. I think we just focused on playing basic CS and just getting a few tactics on each map, doing a few setups on each CT side, and just practice that all the time and get used to it, get me into the role in the team and play as much as we can.

At Starladder you could feel we only had the basics, we didn't have as many strats as you'd normally like, and setups and stuff like that, but I think we did really well compared to what you could expect. I think we had a good chance to go to the semi-finals as well, we maybe even should have on the second map at least, on the third map Na`Vi did destroy us, to be fair. I think we're happy with the improvement at StarSeries and I think we learned a lot from that tournament, what we need to fix. We watched every single match together and we wrote down a few things from every match that we had to improve on.

On certain maps we had to change the playstyle, as an example on Inferno we changed our CT side on B quite a lot, because when you take banana control and people don't contest it you use all your nades for no reason almost, then when people executed on B we had almost no nades and it was very tough to hold them back. That's one of the things we changed for this tournament.

Speaking about roles, with OpTic being a very different team from Astralis, how would you compare your role between the two teams?

In OpTic I played a lot of different positions than I'm used to, but I think it was more because they trusted me to be the star player, or the key player that could make a big difference. I think I had a bigger role in that team, so I was more of the star and I could do almost anything I wanted to and I could just tell them to do this for me and they would do it. It also made it a lot easier to be good individually when you have a team play for you almost.

My role in Astralis is quite different, it's more like the laid-back player, the outer positions, like on Mirage I play B apps, on Inferno I play banana, that's quite a good position, but I just think in general it's not that I have the positions people didn't want to play, but we made sure dupreeh got the T roles he really wanted, because he's been wanting to get into some of the roles Kjaerbye played a lot, so we gave him what he wanted. On almost every map I kind of play the same spots as I used to in North and dignitas, so I played them a lot, I just have to get back into it. That's going to take time, but it's already getting better with each match, I think. I feel like for each match I play with them, it feels better and I feel more confident in my role.

Getting into IEM Katowice and your first match against Renegades, the first half on Train was quite rough and it looked like you had a lot of problems with taking control of pop dog, which they stacked with two people a lot of the time. What was the problem there?

I think the problem in this match was the fact that normally when people play inside pop dog we still destroy them and get a two for one advantage, but today they played it really well, actually. They might have countered the way we take control and we didn't really find a solution for it. We kind of got screwed in that way, because we didn't know how to react to it and I think that's kind of what destroyed our T side, we felt like we needed the control in pop dog because they were playing there all the time, but they just completely outplayed us in that position. That really destroyed our gameplan on the T side.

Astralis had issues dealing with Renegades' pop dog stack

What about the CT side then, which seemed very comfortable?

The thing with that is that when the half was over, we said "okay, boys, it was a very bad half, we didn't play well and they played well, now we just have to focus on playing our own game, play the way we normally do, have good communication, take initiative, make a plan" and we did that from the pistol round and it worked really well from there. 11-4 on a CT side and if you win the pistol, it's 11-7, so you're not that far behind, actually...

It's the zonic rule, isn't it?

Yeah, that's what zonic calls the "dangerous lead", 11-4 is where it always goes wrong (laughs). We won the pistol round and from there we just felt really confident, we played our own game and it felt like they didn't hit their shots on the T side as they did on CT, we stepped up individually as well and played well and that helped a lot. But yeah, CT side can be really, really easy sometimes if you get money control as we did. And we had the money control, just like they did.

Only three teams will go through and with the level of teams playing here, it's going to be tough making it there. What do you make of your group and the format?

I think the format is quite interesting, I don't think I've played a format like this before, it's going to be fun to see if it's going to be like Swiss where sometimes it can be random, but I think it's a good system so far. As long as the favorites win, it's always going to be a good system, just like in Swiss, Swiss would be very good if the favorites always won, but that's not how it is.

If we win against SK now, we still have to win one more best-of-three to get into the semi-final, but I think it's pretty cool, it's good that you play more best-of-threes than best-of-ones. When it's a best-of-one that's where the underdogs can win, because in best-of-threes you're almost certain that your map pool is better than some of the underdogs. It's tough to say right now how good the system is, because no one has played it before, but I think it's going to be good and I actually think this might be used more in the future.

Like you said, you're going to meet SK, who aren't looking as confident as they used to, in the next round, how do you feel about the matchup?

That's the thing with SK, even though they seem to play badly, from one tournament to another they can be the best team in the world again. That's the dangerous thing about SK, you can never underestimate them, they're really good, their individual players, they have so many good players on the team. But I think it's tough to say for me, because I haven't played SK yet with this lineup, but I mean my statistics against SK in best-of-threes are not good (laughs). I've actually never won a best-of-three against SK on LAN, so I'm really, really excited and I really want to break that curse now. I'm going to give it my everything and I'm going to make sure the guys are fired up for the match as well.