Project Eversio CS:GO Post MCS#4 - Interview

Many of you are very familiar with the interview we carried out with Nathan "Zelli0N" Bonello, an amazingly competitive youngster following his team's victory over Project Eversio at the Malta Cyber Series #4 - one of the most surprising tournament outcomes of the event. Following that article, we were approached with inquiries to interview Project Eversio, so that they could hear the flipside of the tale, understanding both sides. We reached out to the organization, and they happily answered the following interview through the replies of one of their player Mathias "raz" Johansen. Dig in. 

1.) What were your thoughts heading into the Malta Cyber Series #4? What were your goals and expectations for the event? 

Going into MCS #4 we had our goals set to win the tournament, though we knew Cinco's foreign players would be a challenge for us. Expectation-wise, we thought we could win the tournament if we played our individual play-style as usual and pick the correct maps.

2.) Project Eversio began the tournament in still by sweeping the Group Stage flawlessly. At this stage in the tournament, what were your confidence levels like? From which team from Group B were you awaiting the toughest game?

We saw our bracket for the Group Stage and knew that the teams in our bracket wouldn't be an issue for us. The only team from Group B that could challenge us would be Cinco as the foreign players have basically been involved with CSGO on a high level for quite some time, though Cherry from Anarchy has been playing pretty good in MPL, so they would for sure be the runner-up team. 

3.) Of course, bracket play was also a breeze until you faced of Iconic Cinco, who managed to take the series 0-2. What are your comments regarding the result?

The first bracket match we had versus Cinco was really bad from our part, we underestimated them a lot since we had looked at a few matches they played and they didn't seem to communicate well at all. 

We thought we could just roll with focusing on their weakest players Zellion and nax, but the retake level from the foreign players was really impressive, and it seemed like they knew what our strategy was going into the maps.

On Mirage, we lost a close game that should have been ours. This is because there were a million restarts which meant we gave away money advantage every time. It just messed our flow up too much and we were never able to bounce back from it. 

4.) Project Eversio remained in the competition despite their loss, as they crawled their way back in to the competition’s grand final where they would rematch Iconic Cinco. What were your thoughts heading into the rematch? What were your expectations?

Climbing up wasn't our biggest issue, but playing versus Cinco in the final where they had the map advantage was hard for us as the challenge we had was finding out their map pool. This is a challenge when you play against teams you have no information on, you just pick comfort picks in a dark room where things can go anywhere - analyzing teams isn't really a thing in Malta as of right now at least.

In terms of expectations, we knew we would have to step up, and basically overcome a tough challenge. At least we had a bigger understanding of their map pool.

5.) An absolute nail-biter ensued and the series went 3-2 in favour of Iconic Cinco. Some maps were heavily in favour of one team while others were incredibly close. Describe the series and its outcome. 

We had to widen our map pool going into the grand final where Cinco had map advantage and we put our money on the thought that we could find a pattern in the kind of map they played bad on. 

This went on to be more or less half-successful for our series.

Cache: 

We picked Cache as it's a rotate heavy map, we knew they would probably place Zellion and nax on each site and it would be easier to make good executions, as if one of them die early they would have to rotate fast as it's harder to do retakes. 

Not much to say though, we played our individual playstyle and we managed to close it out at the end which gave us a bit of hope going into Mirage for the next map, but at least we knew we had the possibility of performing compared to the first bracket match.

Mirage: 

As we lost Mirage in the bracket stage (which we should have won), we thought we could close it out in the Grand Final. However, we just played horribly overall with our execution and communication. We tunnel-visioned too much on our original play-style and some of us just didn't perform up to our normal standards.

We also lost an insane amount of 1vX situations that just tilted us further.

Inferno: 

We really didn't know what to do on Inferno at all, as we didn't practice it and went in without strats or anything, but it seemed like everything started to click with getting entry kills and not letting people do whatever they wanted by taking over areas to gain control over map areas. 

After Inferno we were pretty confident going into nuke as its one of the stronger maps for some of our players. 

Nuke: 

We all knew after the first round of nuke that we should have done this pick differently. Nuke is a map that requires a lot of team synergy which we didn't really have a lot of. We won the knife and decided to pick T-side as we performed a lot better on T-side on every other map and thought it was our best bet. This just proved to be a bad situation for us. 

6.) How has the team reacted to their first local loss in a while? What will you be working on for the future? 

After our loss, we took it pretty well overall, although we all had different feelings. For some, it was exciting as there was finally some good players that could challenge our setup and would lead us into playing with more motivation. For others, it was just disappointment as this was something we should have won if we played to our normal levels.

7.) Despite the loss, would you still consider yourselves the best local team or has Iconic Cinco taken that title from you? 

I'll leave that up to the community. People saw both of us play and they frequently see us play in MPL or on stream so they can base it on individual levels.  Cinco is a very new team that now has been going with roster changes so who knows what kind of impact this will have on their performance.

8.) Here’s our last question. Is there any message you’d like to leave for the players of Iconic Cinco and for those doubting Project Eversio’s CS:GO? 

Competition is good for the scene. We were used to attending local events without practising, so the silver lining of our loss is that now people will stop saying “It's useless to attend LAN because Global5/EVERSIO wins every time, and we're actually more motivated to practice. You definitely haven't seen us playing at our best!

It does seem that Project Eversio are excited for a rematch. "Analyzing teams isn't really a thing in Malta" - I'm pretty sure, that both Iconic Cinco and Project Eversio will be checking each other out in terms of strategy for the next match-up. The Maltese CS:GO scene is officially shaken up as a top-dog remains uncertain. 

"I'll leave that up to the community." - based on this comment made by raz, let us know in the comment section whether Project Eversio are still the best CS:GO team in Malta!