Envy’s crashies: ‘FaZe is pretty unique in their playstyle and pretty unpredictable’

by Jessica Scharnagle

After an intensely tight match, Envy squeezed out a win against Gen.G on Thursday to open their North American VALORANT Masters run. On Sunday, Envy will take on FaZe Clan, who have the momentum of a freight train after plowing through the upper bracket of Challengers 3 and beating XSET easily 2-0 on Thursday.

Envy need to prepare for a completely different playstyle when going against FaZe. With Andrej “babybay” Francisty flying around the map and taking very aggressive fights and the rest of his team hitting incredible shots, Envy have a lot to prepare for.

Read more: Luminosity Gaming’s thief: ‘TenZ was just doing whatever he wanted’

Nerd Street Gamers talked to Austin “crashies” Roberts and Jake “kaboose” McDonald to see how they’re feeling after their matchup against Gen.G and how they’ll prepare for FaZe.

Nerd Street: What do you think went wrong and what do you think went right against Gen.G?

crashies: On Haven we were prepared for them to pick Haven and it’s one of their stronger maps, so we were really prepared going in, and it’s kind of our sleeper pick so we were really confident on that. We had 10 rounds in a row to close it out.

In Icebox we were super confident … and we knew that they really weren’t that strong on it, but they played really well actually, and they had a lot of good rounds and we lost some dumb rounds. I think I would chalk up Icebox to them playing pretty well.

On Bind we were super confident and we just played our game … The rounds we were losing were so silly, but at the top you have to have composure to come back from that. All four of my teammates had composure, so that’s why I think we won Bind. There were no nerves, it was pretty clean.

kaboose: We had a slow start. Icebox was very interesting, they had to ban Split, because it’s our best map and they don’t really play it, which means that we get to pick Icebox, which is a map they also don’t really play that much. I think maybe we were a little too over confident going into it, but they played the map really well. It looked like they had been playing the map for a long time, even though they haven’t played it in any matches. It really caught us off-guard, they played the map pretty perfectly and we made a lot of mistakes in crucial rounds. That’s just not something you can do in a game like VALORANT where you only need 13 rounds to win.

I think we just made too many mistakes on Icebox. Bind was a little closer than we would have thought. We planned our game plan, made a couple mistakes on some pretty big rounds early on, but same thing is Haven, we regained control at the end.

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Nerd Street: They switched to Sage on Icebox. Do you think that was the deciding factor of your loss on Icebox?

crashies: They switched to Sage and they usually play Cypher and they played Killjoy. Sage on Icebox, we’re starting to learn that you kinda need a Sage to plant B, otherwise it’s so hard. We tried to plant B multiple times — you could just see us getting stuffed — so yeah, I think Sage was a big benefit to them.

kaboose: I don’t think so, Sage is an agent that pretty much every team we scrim against runs on this map so we know generally how to play against this agent, but the way the other agent played caught us off-guard. They were taking fights we didn’t expect them to take, they were pushing into areas we weren’t expecting them to be, and a lot of that stuff caught us off-guard when we were trying to counter the Sage.

Before making the switch to VALORANT, kaboose played CS:GO and competed in several editions of Fragadelphia. Photo by Nerd Street Gamers

Nerd Street: When you started down on Haven, how important was it to you to get your momentum back to win the map?

crashies: Even when we were down 2-6 I remember telling the team that our attacking side is really strong, let’s just finish strong, try to get 6-6 and we’ll be really good. We did finish strong and we got the last four rounds, and then I think we ended up winning the pistol round.

kaboose: Momentum is huge in this game. I think it’s one of the biggest things. You’ll always see teams winning four or five rounds, and the next team winning four or five rounds, it’s rarely ever back to back. To get the momentum in the first place is really strong, but to hold on to that momentum is really how you start to take over games and become dominant in them.

Read more: Rawkus talks FaZe’s rapid improvement, people underestimating ex-Overwatch pros

Nerd Street: You’re playing FaZe next. Do they worry you?

crashies: Nah. I really think we have the easier upper bracket. I’d rather play XSET because we match them pretty well, and I think they’re an easier team to read and match compared to FaZe. FaZe is pretty unique in their playstyle and pretty unpredictable so it will probably go three maps against them to be honest.

kaboose: It’s definitely a concern to think about. A team like FaZe, they say it themselves, they play this really aggressive PUG-y style. They look for these duels and whatever happens happens. I think a playstyle like that in VALORANT will always be in the pro scene, teams will always have that style, but I think it’ll just always be, never a top team. It’ll always be they’re feeling really good this day, so they can beat anyone, but they’re feeling really bad these next two or three tournaments, so they’ll fall off.

I think it all depends on how they look in this first match. If they’re carrying this momentum in, when they’re feeling confident, they could beat any team in the game, so it’s just going to come down to our teamwork and stopping that aggression.

Lead image credit: Riot Games

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