HooXi: "It's just hard to create stability in a team where people are going in and out of the door all the time"

The in-game leader hopes Astralis will build a more stable project moving forward.

Astralis beat The MongolZ and are 2-0 in the IEM Chengdu group stage, which means they are through to the playoffs and just waiting for the for the match that will decide whether they start their run from the quarter-finals or the semis.

For Rasmus "⁠HooXi⁠" Nielsen, though, the wish is that the Danish organization, now under new ownership, will build a more stable team since he feels like it's impossible to plan beyond the short term right now.

"You just... try to do whatever is best in the moment, instead of trying to create an actual style and spending a lot of time talking about the game and all this," HooXi says. "We just go with the flow in a way. It's a bit hard to describe, but it's just a feeling-based thing. The mindset is just not to think long-term."

You can listen to the interview, here.

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You're through to the playoffs; you beat The MongolZ to do it. After Bucharest, how does it feel to make the playoffs here?

(laughs) Yeah, it feels good. I dunno, I still don't think we're playing the way we want to, but it was a close game that went our way for once, yesterday and today. I don't really feel like we played against the same MongolZ that I'm usually playing against, so I'm happy, but... yeah.

You say you're not playing the way you want to, what do you need to do that, or not doing that you wish you were?

We just need to be a bit more sharp. Sometimes, when we get really huge advantages, we try to snowball it more than we should, and we still give away a lot of entries that maybe could be avoided. But yeah, we're getting there, and we just need to play more individually and sometimes shoot ourselves out of the problems.

How is the development overall going? Magisk has been in the team for a bit, and he talked about needing to feel settled and feel stability in a team with me yesterday. How do you feel like you're helping him do that?

I don't think that will happen in this team, let's be real (laughs). Like he's here on a loan, so I don't know if he will stay here after. I assume he won't since I haven't heard anything yet, but it's just hard to create stability in a team where people are going in and out of the door all the time. And that goes for him as well.

Personally, I think he's in a position where he has to show the world that he can still be a super good player and be interesting for other teams, and at the same time he has to think about doing what's best for our team. So it's tough for everyone, and we're just trying to get the best out of it.

Do you have any insight into what the long-term plan is for Astralis? You said you don't know what Magisk is going to do after his loan, are there any talks about what the plan is for that?

So far, I'm just playing CS (laughs). I have no clue. There has been a bunch of stuff happening with the organization, new owners and everything, and they might even still be figuring out what is the best. So yeah, I'm just focusing on CS, and for the rest, you've got to ask someone else that knows more than me.

Does not having that stability make a difference for you?

Yeah, of course. Like right now, I feel like what I did in Astana, when I was the stand-in, I feel like I'm doing it now for, I dunno how long, like five months now. So yeah, of course I don't think long-term as much as I would want to, but that's the situation and I just have to deal with it.

How do you build around that then?

You just... try to do whatever is best in the moment, instead of trying to create an actual style and spending a lot of time talking about the game and all this. We just go with the flow in a way. It's a bit hard to describe, but it's just a feeling-based thing. The mindset is just not to think long-term.

Building that style and system has been a part of your career, you were on G2 for a long time, on Copenhagen Flames for a while. How have you shifted, not in the approach itself, but in the way you've had to change your calling with that?

So many things have changed since Copenhagen Flames and even G2. A new game, I learned a lot as well over the years, and in G2 I had nobody with me that knew my style. Now I'm back with jabbi, for example, who knows how I play, and it just makes it way easier that I just have one guy who understands me in that way (laughs). So he helps as well with creating the style, and as I said, I'm looking forward to having something I can actually feel like is something I can work with for more than six months or whatever.

As I said earlier, you're through to the playoffs. It is an important marker as we lead up to the Major, to start getting these kinds of results, so what does it mean for you and Astralis?

It means a lot, just in terms of confidence and knowing that our hard work- we spent like two and a half or three weeks practicing before Bucharest and it didn't pay off, we had an unfortunate ending to it with device not playing with us. We don't know what could have been, like if we beat Aurora there, then we might be in the final instead of them, you know? So I'm just happy to see that it pays off a little bit now, and we'll see what happens at the Major.