Questions for this interview by Aaron Mickunas; article written by Brian Chang





Before the start of the split, Echo Fox made one of the most shocking LCS roster moves of the year—sending star top laner Heo "Huni" Seung-hoon to Clutch Gaming and acquiring veteran bot lane duo Apollo Price and Nickolas “Hakuho” Surgent as well as top laner Colin “Solo” Ernest. Many criticized the trade, and Echo Fox was billed as one of the worst teams before the start of the split, and for a while, that looked to be true.





Now, following a miracle run and four straight victories, Echo Fox have made the playoffs, despite being tied for last just a few weeks ago. During their final four-game run, the team even managed to upset reigning champions Team Liquid, and they capped the season off with a pentakill by Apollo.









We caught up with Apollo to discuss the team’s unlikely run to clinch a playoff berth, as well as his thoughts on some rival LCS teams.

Really fun game, with a pentakill at the end. Tell me about the pentakill a little bit. When you make the decision to just everybody dive the fountain, does the thought ever cross your mind that you could all get wiped and you could miss ending the game there?





Apollo: Well, I’ll tell you exactly what happened. So, we’re killing them -- I was killing them, just me -- and [Hakuho] wanted to end the game, but I was chasing the Rek’Sai, and he was like, “Don’t chase the Rek’Sai, he has [Guardian Angel], it’s going to take too long.” I was like, “Man, I just really want to kill Rek’Sai.” So I killed Rek’Sai, so I had the quadra kill, and then Solo was like, “Let’s go get his penta!” I wasn’t saying anything, I swear to God, I just wanted to get the quadra. And then I was like, “Okay, let’s go get this penta,” and Nick was like “I will die for you.”





I have a little bit of time, like three to five seconds when I’m walking from me to Lucian, I was like, “Even if we all die here, we’ll end this game.” I was so confident, even if we get five man aced, we’re going to end this game no matter what. I did think about it for a brief moment, but everyone was willing to die for me, so you know. That’s good to have a team like that.





So you made the call. You did think about it, but you weren’t worried.





I wasn’t worried. I was actually so fine if we all died. I think that would have been almost even better of a game.





You’ve been in the LCS for a little while, and we’re at the end of another split but the conversation around the best bot laners seems to always gravitate towards the same two people, being Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng and Zachary “Sneaky” Scuderi. Do you think as an individual, do you have what it takes to beat these guys in head-to-head matchups?





Photo via Riot Games





I think we’ve shown that we can play against them. Me and Hakuho have been playing for two and a half years, and we’ve shown not even including this year, last year as well, we can play versus these guys. They’re still really good players, Doublelift and Sneaky, and they have good supports as well, but I think we’re good enough players to beat them.





You’ve had some impressive splits. Sometimes you had the highest stats of the split, but the conversation would still go towards those two. How do you deal with that? Do you have hopes of becoming known as one of the best bot laners in North America, or are you content with just focusing on yourself and just knowing that you’re a good player?





I definitely am just more content with the way things are and obviously just focused on getting better. I could think about it more, maybe I should, to really try and get known for being the best, but those guys, Sneaky and Doublelift, there are reasons why they’re on the top teams, and there are reasons why they go to Worlds. If you analyze my stats, they could be skewed.





I’m on a lower tier team for a reason, so I think those guys deserve a lot of credit, and I want to go to World, I want to be on that top team, but until I get there it’s fair to say that I’m not as good as them. It could just be a team thing too, so maybe they have better ways of communicating, better ways of pooling resources. They could just be mechanically better too, but it really just all comes down to more team things that you won’t be able to really see [from stats alone].





On a lighter note, 4-0 miracle run in the books. How do you feel as a player on a team like this, since this isn’t something that happens often? As a follow-up, how does a team like Echo Fox prepare mentally to even approach making that sort of run, knowing you have to win four games in a row [to make playoffs]?





That’s the thing. Just going in, we had a huge slump, and we put back [Lee "Rush" Yoon-jae] in, and even that week wasn’t an amazing week. A lot of us were just taking it one game at a time and we were just going to try our best, because playoffs, it sucks, but we might not make it, and we’ll just work on getting better as a team and use these stage games as practice for next split. And we did that for two weeks.





I honestly did not care who won, how many wins do we need, I was just thinking, “Okay, we play [Team Liquid], let’s beat TL. Okay, we play [Cloud9], let’s beat C9.” I think you can’t psych yourself out and think, “We really have to beat this guy and OpTic has to lose,” and all this stuff. At the end of the day, if we get to playoffs, it’s because we deserve to get to playoffs, and I think we all had the same mentality, where we just need to win these games. We fucked up and we didn’t win earlier, so we got to start winning now.





Did it even click today, after you beat the big guys and you come into today, did it click at all, “If we win this we’re in playoffs?”





It clicked after we beat [Counter Logic Gaming]. It was “Nice, now we’re in playoffs.” It was a really fun run. I don’t want to make it sound like I wasn’t excited about this or I wasn’t thinking about it, but if I think about it too much then it’s bad. I just have to be like, “Okay, we beat these guys, that’s really awesome. I’m so happy right now, on to the next one.”





Photo via Riot Games

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You mentioned subbing out Rush, and even though the team did lose when you made the substitution, do you think the subbing contributed to the 4-0 run at all?





I don’t really have a good answer for that. Obviously James “Panda” Ding and Rush had different playstyles, and maybe it helped Rush more than the team itself, like for him being subbed out and thinking what he really needs to improve on.





First off, us losing was not because of Rush. We made this change because there was not really other changes to be made, and our coaching staff felt like maybe this is a better chance. I think it kind of helped me have a different perspective of what I need to do with Panda, and what I need to do with Rush. There’s just two different playstyles, and I think it was much easier when we were playing with Rush because he just had that instinctual play, where he can make that play with instinct, but just sometimes needs to slow down. I think he controlled it a lot better these past couple of weeks.





One of the highlights of your 4-0 run was beating Liquid. That was one of a few lost games that Liquid threw out at the end of the split here after they locked the number one seed. Do you think after these losses that they’re just playing around? Do you think they’re still as scary as they were, or do you think something’s going on?





I think they’re still a really good team, probably still the best team. I do think they maybe have been a little more lax. It almost felt like they were just waiting for us to make a mistake because they knew we would. It didn’t feel like they had to be proactive, just coming from our game alone, and I think they were a little complacent. Maybe it was because they don’t have to win technically, or it could just be something.





It’s really hard to say for me. From our game specifically, it felt like they weren’t doing that much, and their draft was also a little bit strange.





They still have really good players, they’re all veterans, they all know their job. I think they’ll look strong in playoffs so we’ll still have to watch out for them when we face them.





Let’s talk a little about how you think the success at the end of the split happened. Obviously there were some big meta changes, with the crit rework, and everything shifted back to the late-scaling type of playstyle in the bot lane. Do you think that contributed a lot to how you guys were able to win more at the end because that seems to favor your playstyle, or do you think that there was more of some sort of mental shift you guys had to get through?





Definitely a little bit of both. I think we did figure out what kind of playstyle we wanted to do. We got a little too crazy at the end, meaning we probably shouldn’t pick three scaling champions with a scaling jungler, but we figured it was okay. It did favor us more, and we just read the meta that we want to do. It just worked out for us, so I think it did contribute to the wins, but also we just started playing a lot better as a team.





We started being more confident, we started making the right decisions, which is like, it’s easy to say, “Oh, they’re just making the right decisions,” but to us, there’s a lot more thought and a lot more practice we put into making those right decisions. I’m really happy that we did that.





Photo via Riot Games





What do you think Echo Fox has that might be unique and give them some sort of advantageous position against some of the other best teams in the playoffs?





I actually think that we have a pretty big champion pool, and I don’t think we’re scared of trying new things. I know it sounds kind of silly because we’re doing standard compositions, but I don’t think we’re scared of trying new champions or playing differently as long as we figure it out first. That’s what we have on edge, because it does feel like some teams are very similar every game. They’re just like, “Okay, we’re going to pick this, this, and this.” Maybe [Golden Guardians] is a little bit different. It feels like they’re also trying new things, and I think that’s maybe the reason why they’re winning more games, since it feels like they aren’t afraid to do that either.





A lot of the teams have a similar draft phase and it feels like they’re just trying to pick what they’re comfortable with and win with it because they feel like they’re the better team. I think because we were on a loss streak, it felt like we just needed to be more open-minded with things, and that’s mainly what helped us, and that’s what we have as an advantage.





I’m curious of what you think of Golden Guardians and 100 Thieves. I bring those two teams up because they were both, at the start of the split, being really hyped up. Obviously 100 Thieves struggled more than Golden Guardians, but both didn’t live up to expectations in some way or another. What do you think happened? Do you think it was new team jitters, communication problems, that kind of thing, or do you think something larger is at player here with team infrastructure?





I’ll talk about 100 Thieves here, since they’re the easier target. Even I was thinking, “This 100 Thieves roster is going to be kind of scary,” since they have really good players. They have [Bae "Bang" Jun-sik], and I was like, “Oh man, I have to go against another world champion.” Even the first week of scrims, I was pretty underwhelmed. Not like Bang specifically, but just as a team. You know when a team is strong, you’re like, “Okay, these guys can get a lot better.” It didn’t feel like that with them. It didn’t feel like they were going to be scary later. It felt like, “Oh man, this was much less than I expected.” It was weird, and everything I say after this is kind of what everyone knows, but they just didn’t do well.





They still didn’t do well, and here they are, in last place, and they subbed in their Academy team. I think they’re going to make changes. I think after the split, it was fairly obvious why they sucked. They still have weak players, and I’m not going to say names, but we all know who the weaker players are. I think it was kind of obvious afterwards, that this is why they didn’t do well.





This is mostly conjecture, but there were a lot of problems with them even though they were relatively successful last year at the end of the split with the Cody Sun situation and before that, the William “Meteos” Hartman thing. It was all handled kind of poorly, and that can come back to management, that can come back to coaching. Do you think that there are any larger problems like that, or do you think it’s just the players?





It’s just hard to say. The blame can be put on anyone, I just don’t know. I do agree the Cody Sun and the Meteos situations definitely could have been handled better. It’s hard to say, since we don’t know the full story, but for sure there must be some issues between the players and the coaching, and they’re going to look to try to fix that.





About GGS, I expected them to do worse than they did. I didn’t think their roster was a super strong roster or anything like that. I think they had good players, but I just didn’t think they were going to do this well, but they proved they were able to get wins. I was a little surprised that they did so well.





Do you think they have more to give, more to improve on? Or do you think that they’ve already exceeded expectations?





I think they exceeded expectations, but I don’t really know what anyone else thinks. I don’t remember what anyone else thinks, but I thought they did a lot better that people thought they were going to do.