Magisk: "Winning one tournament is a good thing, but we also know that we can do better"

Vitality look to close an inconsistent year for them with a good performance at BLAST Premier World Final.

The additions of Emil "⁠Magisk⁠" Reif and Peter "⁠dupreeh⁠" Rasmussen were supposed to cement Vitality as one of the top teams for 2022. Instead, they are approaching the last big event of the year with just one trophy in their cabinet.

Lotan "⁠Spinx⁠" Giladi's arrival in the summer propelled Vitality to victory at ESL Pro League Season 16, but their peak was short-lived. Disappointing exits from the IEM Rio Major and a failure to qualify for BLAST Fall Final have brought the European squad back down to the No.9 spot in the rankings — the third lowest at the Abu Dhabi event.

Magisk sat down with HLTV on the eve of the tournament to talk about Vitality's inconsistency throughout the year, the Dane's thoughts on the new patch, and their upcoming match against Natus Vincere.

We're at the season's closing event and it's been a bit up and down for Vitality. How is the team doing now and how do you see yourselves going into it?

Coming into the year we knew it would be tough because we have different play styles, different cultures, and everything, so we had a lot of focus on putting the team together as a unit. I definitely think we succeeded with that, in terms of us being together as a team. It's one of the nicest environments I've ever been in. As a team we have expectations to win and we want to win, so winning one tournament is a good thing, but we also know that we can do better. That's definitely the goal. This year has been about consistency for me because we've shown we can beat the best teams in the world. We can do it, but we also have a tendency when we play against underdogs to lose maps or games that we shouldn't. That's our big struggle right now, the consistency is not high enough.

That's also why we decided to bring on Spinx, we knew that we needed a bit more firepower and a bit more raw skill. He has it in him, but as we've talked, it's tough to fit into a new team. Playing with ENCE is different from us, they're more YOLO and taking duels all over the place, where we're a bit more structured on the tactical side. So he needed time to adapt. That's something we've been seeing, he's still a really good player, but he feels a bit uncomfortable sometimes because it's new for him and stuff like that. It's something we've been working quite a lot, to give him all of the space and freedom he wants to be comfortable. I think that the last few weeks he has been doing really, really well in practice. I know practice is one thing compared to officials, but I definitely see improvements in terms of the way we want him to play and I know and believe that he will go back to his old level because he's such a good player.

Obviously it's not only Spinx, we all have something to work on. Everyone except ZywOo needs a bit more individual consistency. Me, dupreeh, and also apEX even though he's the IGL. We all have something we need to work on to become more consistent as individuals. That's also going to help the team side of it because the more consistent you can be, the more you'll help the team. You have more overview, more freedom in your mind to call for flashes or all of these kinds of things because you're not only focused on your crosshair. So yeah, it's a mix of all of these things and I know we're going in the right direction, but everything takes time and we'll see how it goes.

You say Spinx is doing well in practice and how practice is not the same as officials. When we take the end of the season, from the summer break until now, there have only been a handful of events. You don't get that many maps in the bag as back in pre-pandemic days anymore, so how is it for you integrating a new player?

That's what I mean by everything takes time. You need official games to understand what level you're at as individuals and as a team. It's not always one tournament that will determine how good you are individually, but as a team you get a good idea of how good you are when you go to tournaments. How good is this map, how good is that map, what are we lacking, and all of these things. Then the deeper you go into a tournament, the more knowledge you get, because the further you go the more people have statistics on the same map. The more you play a map at a tournament, the more people will know about it and that's where you learn how good it really is. That's where you also learn what you're lacking. Even though you may still win on the map, there's this learning curve, and you can say 'even if we're winning this map, we're still missing out on something.'

I think that us not going deep into the Major and going out in the group stage for the Royal Arena, we lost out on a lot of this experience that we could have gotten. As a team we haven't played that many official games because we didn't go far into tournaments except ESL Pro League. That was also a really early stage with Spinx, so we kind of lacked information about our map pool and how good we really are, which was the same going into the Major. That's definitely something that's tough because one thing is practice, where we feel comfortable. We even played a best-of-one against Outsiders on Overpass because we felt comfortable on it... Well, it turned out to be one of their best maps and the map that carried them all the way to winning the Major.

So for me, you don't see these things in practice the same way you do in an official. You don't see the flaws and that's something we needed to become a better team in my opinion. That's why I said it takes time, you need that experience as a team and individuals to figure out what is good for us and what is bad for us. Well, now we have a new map as well and we're even more in the unknown. One thing is being really good in practice on it and another thing is in officials, because we have no idea how other teams are playing on the map except people we practice against. It's all a big question mark, so it's tough.

What do you make of the new patch?

I'm still stuck between playing the silencer and the big M4 because I still think the big M4 is better in terms of killing people. It's a bit more balanced, but the big M4 is better because you have more bullets. I don't think it changes much, I still think people will play the silencer. Not on my team, but in general I think people will play more silencer than the big one. In terms of the new map it's been really fun to play it because you can put in a lot of hours to get an edge on other teams, that's something we've been doing. At the same time, we don't really know how good we are on it. One thing is to practice, where we played a lot of the same teams, but playing them might not be the same as playing all of the top teams in the world who might play it differently. You might learn something new from them and stuff like that.

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Anubis and weapon changes to feature at BLAST Premier World Final

I definitely think it's going to be something fun to watch in the beginning, but I'm obviously sad that they removed our best map. That's the funny part about removing maps, everyone is so biased. Everyone is always like: "Don't take out this map!" or "Mirage is so bad, remove it!" Then you look at the stats and it's their worst map! So I'm always crying inside a bit because every time someone tweets about it, it's always talking about removing their permaban. Yes, of course you're talking about that! Of course you're going to be biased! It's so stupid, I hate it, people always want their permaban removed. Although honestly, in Astralis, we were really lucky and always had our permaban removed, so I can't complain too much. It was funny.

You're kicking off your run here in Abu Dhabi against NAVI. What do you make of that match-up?

NAVI is a good team, but I also think that right now they're not the same NAVI as last year. I think that it's tough for them with everything going on in the world. They're not as scary as they used to be and we've showed that we can beat them, but they also have the individuals that can show up and pop off. They have s1mple, electronic, b1t, all of these star players.

Date	Matches
BLAST Premier World Final 2022
14/12/2022	Natus Vincere 19:25 Vitality	Match

For me it's about finding our consistency in the best-of-three. I know that if we do that we can compete with them, but if we don't find the consistency then it's like playing the old NAVI that just rolled you over because there's no room for mistakes. They have the experience and they use it and win rounds because of it. The match-up has to be a 50/50 for me because I know that we can find the consistency, but we also have to show it in the BO3 if we want to beat them. At the same time I don't fear them like I did last year, right now I don't feel like they're on the same level.