Swisher: "malbsMd doesn't deserve those roles [in G2], he should be in ones he shines in"

The M80 rifler believes his former teammate deserves the chance to play his favored roles in his new team.

M80 were hamstrung coming into the Fall season after losing Mario "⁠malbsMd⁠" Samayoa to G2 during the tournament break. The Guatamalan rifler had been in blistering form in 2024 and deservedly got the call-up, but his departure left a gaping hole in the American team for both firepower and sheer impact.

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The team looked homeward and added Mason "⁠Lake⁠" Sanderson, a blossoming prospect in North America but one entirely untested internationally. With just five days of bootcamp in Europe under his belt, the 19-year-old was thrown into the deep end as he made his international debut against Vitality at Esports World Cup, where M80 narrowly let their Vertigo pick slip and ultimately lost the series 0-2.

A comeback against Complexity in the Last Chance Stage saw M80 eliminate their domestic competition, led by a star performance from Lake, but the team struggled to fend off The MongolZ and had their EWC run brought to an early end.

HLTV spoke to Michael "⁠Swisher⁠" Schmid after M80's elimination to discuss the team's run in Riyadh, the loss of malbsMd and potential of Lake, and how it felt to take down Complexity before bowing out of the event.

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You just got eliminated from EWC. Considering the change that you’ve made recently, did you have any expectations from this event?

You always go into an event with some expectations, but realistically, not very much at all [here], especially with Vitality in round one. We knew that Vertigo would be our biggest wildcard against them because they didn't have much practice before the player break and we assumed they didn't practice at all during the player break. We could have won that map, it was in our hands.

Beating Complexity was a nice win, and then we could have had this game, we lost both pistols. There was still a big 9-8 round that we could have won that could have swayed the game, but those MongolZ are good man, they fought hard and we fell short. But still a pretty good showing from us.

Regarding the Complexity game — it was a close one. How happy are you that you managed to make it go your way considering it's an NA derby?

Obviously super happy. I don't think we have ever played them on M80, so that was the first time we've ever played them. We've scrimmed them a ton.

Everyone has always asked the question of 'Who is the best team in NA?' and we're like, 'Oh, we're pretty good, we're pretty high up there' and everyone and COL is always like 'LOL.' So it's nice finally playing them and beating them the first time we play them. It's a great feeling, we stayed resilient from being down 7-1, so it's good.

Do you think you can double down in a best-of-three against them?

You'd hope so. They are a good team, and if it was a different day there was equal opportunity that they beat us in the same way, but I believe so — that we'd them in a best-of-three as well. Maybe not at this current moment due to our map pool being limited with only five days of practice, but give or take a month and I would say yes.

Recently, you lost malbsMd to G2. Before it happened, did you expect that he might eventually get signed by a bigger team?

It was pretty certain that he was at least going to have eyes on him, like it was donk and him who were first and second for entries kills [on statistics leaderboards], having a ton of impact.

Obviously we were skeptical whether or not he would be on the team going forward for this next season, so when he gave us the news that he got an offer from G2 and he was going to take it, we were all super happy for him because that's a huge step up. So yeah, we kind of expected it.

When you learned about him making the move to G2, what was your reaction considering that later, it was revealed that he would be taking more anchor roles? How do you think it will work out for G2?

I'm hoping for the best, especially for him because he is one of the best friends I've ever had, the best teammate I've ever had. He doesn't deserve to be in those roles in my opinion. He should be in the roles that he shines in. I feel like there is a pretty big overlap with him and NiKo, but I think he would have shined in similar roles to what huNter- has on CT side.

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His T side roles are almost identical so that's where you see him shining more like how you saw him performing with us, but obviously he is going to get less impact and less duels which he excels in, especially anchoring on certain sites.

Your team went to sign Lake from M80 who’s an American player. What are your first impressions of playing with him?

He is super vocal, which is a big thing. Like in our match against Vitality, he was not having a good game, his very first match ever against a tier-one team on LAN is against ZywOo, he's probably seeing stars.

He didn't have a good game, but the biggest thing about him was that his voice never dropped and he was always there, so that's super resilient of him as an individual.

He's definitely behind in the tier-one meta of decision-making, utility usage, not panicking in certain situations, so that is just a learning curve that he has to adapt to and he obviously is. He's made big leaps forward and made a lot of good individual plays against Complexity today which led to our win. He's doing good.

Is his performance against Complexity reassuring in the team's choice in him, that he has a bright future in M80?

Of course. He was playing very well domestically against NA, and I'd never spoken to him before he joined. He had good performances in scrims and stuff, but him putting up the numbers when we needed him to do a star performance against Complexity and step up big in those OT rounds was huge, and that's exactly what we need.

I'm not sure how involved you were in the process, but I'm really wondering, was it an obvious choice for your team to get him, or were there other players that the team was considering?

I wasn't very involved, but I believe there were a couple of other players that we spoke to that M80 wanted to go with. [We went with] Lake due to him just being younger, more unknown potential, and being able to grow him as an individual kind of like what we did with Mario [malbsMd] in our system and have him shine.

The few other players we've spoken to, we've kind of already seen what they can potentially bring to a team, and it's kind of that question mark that nobody really knows, so we went with him.

You’re playing BLAST Showdown in late August. What are your team’s plans until then?

We're going back to NA to play ESL Challenger League. They did something with the system so you can't block out time on the schedule now, they force you to play throughout the system, so we're going to have to forfeit a lot of matches, unfortunately.

I don't know why they did this but they did, so we have to go back to NA to play ECL matches to hopefully get first or second and qualify for the next season of ECL. Maybe play one or two qualifiers, look forward to hopefully getting the invite to the RMR in Shanghai, and then travel to BLAST.