Now that I think of it, Origen is just a reunion for myself, Mithy and Deficio.

For the second time in my career, I am a mid laner in a team managed by Deficio. For those that don’t know – the first was with Ninjas in Pyjamas alongside Mithy.

Mithy and I go way back. We first played together as part of the Lemondogs roster in the 2013 EU LCS Summer Split.

I was on the team from the very start, but Mithy didn’t join us until later. I remember picking him up during week 4 after we had suffered a poor start to the split. We didn’t look back from that point, we went on to have an insane winning record after that.

There were way more games back then – we played each team four times – but even so, I think we only lost about three games after Mithy joined us; we even went to Worlds together.

After the 2013 season, we had our ups and downs… mostly downs.

We both joined Ninjas in Pyjamas, completing the lineup alongside Zorozero, hyrqBot and Freeze but we failed to automatically qualify to the LCS – we lost against the team that went on to become Team ROCCAT in the tiebreaker for the final spot.

After we lost that game, everything started to collapse. Deficio left us and later announced that he would cast in the LCS and we had a real problem getting the team organized.

Mithy and I could have requalified with the team we went on to form with Ninjas in Pyjamas, especially with the expansion tournament still in existence: H2K-Gaming, Giants Gaming and Unicorns of Love had all qualified by the end of that split and we had been smashing all those guys pretty hard.

I like to believe that we would have made it, but then again, I thought we were going to go on to achieve great things with Lemondogs before as well.

As everyone knows of course, unfortunately, Mithy and I both got banned.

We never got to realise that dream of qualifying with NiP.

A lot of people might remember the chat logs that went on Reddit – Riot Games gave us both a fine and a warning for those.

Even after that warning though, we continued to be toxic in solo queue.

I didn’t hate people; I was just amused by writing toxic stuff in /all chat – it made me laugh. I kept doing it without thinking about any possible repercussions.

I didn’t think of myself as a professional back then; just some guy who was good enough at League of Legends to make money from it.

The bans were a reality check.

From that moment on, I really just saw how serious and professional competitive League of Legends had become. Now my ban is lifted, I have gone on to play four consecutive years in the LCS, starting with Team ROCCAT in 2015.

I’ve hardly said a single word in solo queue in that time.

Both Mithy and I have changed a lot since our early days, but you can only change so much: the core of your personality always stays similar to what it was.

Mithy is still the perfectionist I first met at Lemondogs, but he’s more in control of his emotions these days.

As part of Origen, he meditates to make sure that he doesn’t get angry whereas, back in the day, he used to get really stressed out and angry very easily.

As for Deficio, it’s funny to see how much he’s changed.

He was once just a normal gamer nerd like the rest of us, but now he’s very outgoing and ambitious. He gets stuff done; that’s cool to see.

He spent all of last year hyping me up with #YearoftheDuck, but I tried not to pay too much attention to it. Still, I wasn’t surprised to receive the offer to join his Origen project during the offseason.

In the free agent market, Caps and I were the highest-rated mid laners. I heard rumours that Caps was going to move to NA to join Team Liquid, so I was quite confident that almost any European team would want to have me on their roster.

What has surprised me most is how unique the infrastructure is here at Origen, besides being based in Copenhagen – in Scandinavia – rather than Berlin.

We have the top-notch people in their respective fields here at Origen.

Take Kasper Hvidt, who’s almost like a celebrity in Denmark. He has all these really good connections to extremely skilled physiotherapists and psychologists.

I was experiencing wrist pain throughout all of December and I literally couldn’t play. I went to a lot of physiotherapists; some of them said it was doomed, others were suggesting needle treatments and acupuncture.

Then one of Origen’s physios took a look at it. He saw that it was not just inflammation but that I was too tight in my upper body – I’d been strength training for about two years but never stretching out.

After a few sessions with him, and repeating the stretches he showed me, it got better. I haven’t had any wrist pain at since.

It’s all part of becoming more professional in my approach. This isn’t Lemondogs or Ninjas in Pyjamas anymore.

It’s still a learning process for everyone involved – especially for myself, Deficio and Mithy – and we still need to find the balance.

Maybe this time around, we’ll realise some of the dreams that we had back in 2013.

Image Credit: Riot Games