We caught up with Cloud9's two stand-ins Martin "⁠STYKO⁠" Styk and Maikil "⁠Golden⁠" Selim to hear their thoughts on playing with the North American organization ahead of the match that will pit them against Jake "⁠Stewie2K⁠" Yip's and Tarik "⁠tarik⁠" Celik's MIBR.

Cloud9 opened the tournament in Atlanta against one of the favorites, Astralis, in a match they lost 2-0 but showed good form on Inferno where they were able to take the Danish stars to overtime. Now, they face MIBR, where two players of Cloud9's Major-winning roster now ply their trade, for survival in the tournament.

STYKO & Golden can feel the rest of the team are extra motivated to play MIBR

During the interview with Golden and STYKO, we talked about the upcoming match against MIBR, their position in the team, the way the team has been working lately, and what has changed after the Swede was brought on to lead the squad in the server.

Let's start talking about the MIBR match, something maybe personal for some of your teammates. Do you also feel the rivalry there, are you part of it?

STYKO: Personally, a little bit, because Tarik was my teammate in Cologne, but not in a bitter way or anything. If we have to face Tarik and Stewie2K and these guys we'll do our best, but I feel like the rest of the guys are putting a little bit extra into the match and are motivated to win and want to show them, I guess, that the decision they made wasn't right.

I feel like the rest of the guys are putting a little bit extra into the match and are motivated to win and want to show them [Tarik and Stewie2K], I guess, that the decision they made wasn't right. Martin "⁠STYKO⁠" Styk

Golden: I have no opinion on this, really, but you can feel the tension. It's definitely going to be a rivalry playing into the future and this is the first match.

Talking about the future, are you more trying out or more standing in?

Golden: I don't want to be too vague, it's more of a tryout for both of us, but not much else I can say.

So would you consider the match against MIBR pretty important on a personal level?

Golden: I don't know, actually. It's just a regular match for me.

STYKO: Yeah, same. It's not like we are heavily dependant on the result here at ELEAGUE because of the circumstances we have been facing and the short amount of practice time we've had, which really isn't helping anything. It's not like we have to do good to be signed, we just have to show our potential, that we're improving... it's no secret that we're far below the level of the teams here in terms of preparation. We just have to focus on the match and do our best. It doesn't say anywhere that if we bomb out in groups we won't get signed or that if we get to the final we'll get signed. I feel like Cloud9 is testing our attitude and everything we put into the game. The effort we put in, if we mesh well, and so on, and if we do then probably there will be something more in terms of contracts and so on as well.

Some people have noted that you don't have the star power and firepower that some of the teams playing here have. What are you going to do to get around not having the firepower and be good without it?

Golden: You can play very good CS without needing to frag. Some players just need to be more aggressive or take more space in the team, and we have to play around that. Everyone needs to adapt to what I'm bringing because it's a bit different than what they've been used to. The firepower thing won't be a huge issue if we can consistently perform. I want people to play CS all of the time and that kind of thing, and as long as they do it will show.

You're talking about what you bring. Coming on as a leader, how much are you taking from the old Cloud9 playbook and how much are you bringing in fresh? Are you adapting more to the team or the other way around?

Golden: The transition right now is that they are adapting to me. At the same time, if I show them something and they have something similar, I don't want to change it. I want to keep what they have going at least for this event, because I don't like to call rounds that we haven't touched upon much. I would say now it's mostly what I bring, though.

How would you say the team has changed since Golden came in from when Tarik was leading?

STYKO: The biggest change I noticed is in Skadoodle. Golden tries to put him into much more impactful positions than he used to be in and it's showing great results in practice, where he's been having pretty good games. Also, in the opening match against Astralis he did really well. I think he's trying to be a more aggressive AWPer and Mike [Golden] here is trying to tell him stuff like "you need to be more aggressive during defaults," or "you need to take this or that peek." We're trying to bring this EU style into him in which every AWPer is either hybrid or aggressive since we rarely have defensive AWPers.

Concerning the firepower, the biggest thing I noticed, which is somewhat correlated to Skadoodle, is that though people say we don't have firepower even if you make a team of five players that are individually not that skilled, someone will pick up the slack and eventually do really well because of the roles that are given to them. It's not like we're all going to drop five frags per map, someone will step up and do better than they did recently, some will do worse, and some will stay around the same, it's all about the team performance and how you build a team. Right now, Cloud9 is in the position of rebuilding the team and with Golden and me as stand-ins it's actually working kind of well because Mike is really implementing the EU tactical mindset based off of what fnatic used to do when they were really good with him.

Even if you make a team of five players that are individually not that skilled someone will pick up the slack and eventually do really well because of the roles that are given to them. Martin "⁠STYKO⁠" Styk

You had a good first map against Astralis on Inferno taking them all the way to overtime with Skadoodle showing what he's capable of. How did you prepare going into the event and that match particularly?

Golden: Actually, we didn't prepare much. As far as Astralis goes I just have in my head how they play, so I just told the team what they're going to do and how we have to prepare and that kind of stuff. To make them aware of the small things Astralis like to do and then I just called as simple as possible. It wasn't much of a preparation because we only had four days to practice with the whole team and I was in Europe for two out of the four, so we didn't really get the feeling going.

Now that you've had a couple more days to practice, do you feel an improvement day-to-day?

Golden: Yeah, I think today we improved the most to date. The comms were very bad before and I'm trying to help everyone communicate, triggering people to talk more. Against Astralis it was really bad, we barely communicated during the first map and it was horrible to play. The tilt made us strike out but we're getting more fresh now. We talked and said that if we don't communicate properly we will never win and now everyone understands communication is the most important thing for us.

Did you notice any change, STYKO?

STYKO: Oh yeah, you can really see that we tend to not communicate well if the team is not doing well in practice. It's a human mechanism that most players have, it's pretty rare that the whole team is communicating the same when it's 15-0 or 0-15, but what Mike is trying to implement is that... if we are relying on team play we have to be on point with communication all of the time. We can win games without being on point when it comes to aim or reactions or whatever sometimes, but we can win more when our team play and communication are on point all of the time. That's our #1 priority right now, to try do as well as we can in practice in terms of communication and then translate that to the matches.

I think that will help us the most in the long run because we haven't had time to anti-strat anyone. We're still building our own game so it's really hard to prepare for enemies. We'll remember the things we do against certain teams on practice, and we'll kind of talk about what they like to do or not, but it's not anti-stratting.

You came into the event here as two tryout/stand-ins, did you sit down and talk about any goals or expectations for the tournament, or are you just going game to game?

Golden: I didn't, I don't know if STYKO did?