The European mixture began their journey at the Major with a 16-2 win against Astralis on Cache, a map mousesports had rarely played offline. On day two, they fell to SK following a narrow Mirage before getting one step closer to the playoffs with a 16-3 win over Vega Squadron on Mirage earlier today.

suNny discussed mousesports' showing at the Major thus far

In our next interview from the Major, Miikka "⁠suNny⁠" Kemppi discussed the aforementioned matches and the advantage of Main Qualifier teams that had the chance to warm up and get used to the tournament setup.

You started off with a massive win over Astralis here at the Major, considering Cache was never a map you played often, was it something you didn't want to show at the Main Qualifier, a pocket pick?

We agreed with the team that we won't talk about our veto in interviews, but Cache is a map that no one knows anything about what we are doing and we feel very comfortable on it. Also it depends on the matchup, but against Astralis we kind of knew that it would go to Cache, we knew they would leave it in the pool and we were ready to play it against them.

We knew what to expect, like these two-man pushes and stuff like this, so we punished them really hard on that. If you analyzed our match against them, every time when they pushed something we had the right read and we just punished them and then we just went for the trade game afterwards. It worked for us and it felt that we were hitting our shots more than them, so we were really confident.

In terms of preparation, was it at all a problem that they switched up roles between dupreeh and device?

To be honest, on Cache it doesn't even matter that much, because you can AWP basically everywhere on the map, especially on the CT side. We started T and we got 13 rounds, we basically just prepared ourselves and didn't antistrat too much, which we always do, we don't trust too much that things work like that and we always focus on ourselves. That didn't change anything.

The situation was somewhat similar against SK, they came in with a stand-in so preparation wasn't even much of an option, tell me how you approached that and what mindset you had going into the match.

They've been on the top for two years already, so everyone knows how they play. They don't win matches because they have new stuff, they win matches because of experience and they have really good clutchers. Against them, I felt that we had the game in our hands, we lost both pistols and we got 12 rounds and at least in three clutch rounds we just had unreal miscommunication, which we normally don't do, and that might be that we weren't ready to win against the best team yet.

But personally for me, that match was really good even though we lost, I learned many new things about myself and I think that match was kind of a needed loss for our team, like a wake-up call. We were more upset when we lost against Space Soldiers than SK, because we knew that if we fix these silly mistakes that we did there, we would one day be at the top.

Going into Vega squadron, I'm sure you were familiar with their playstyle, were you just well prepared for what they had in store?

To be honest, no, we didn't go through a lot of things against them. We have played them a lot in practice and online and I personally played against them a lot when I was still in PENTA, so we know what's in front of us and it was just a different mindset when we played against them. We're more aware of everything, which is kind of random, and I still feel that they tried to play too much "real Counter-Strike" against us, because they didn't do these famous Vega rushes or anything.

It was easy to read what they were doing, every time when they went mid, for example, there were always three or four guys shooting and one was making noise in B or A apps. It was just a different matchup and I'd say it's not like about preparation against them, it's just about the mental part, you have to be ready for everything.

You need just one more win to go through to the playoffs now, what is going to get you there, does it depend on the matchup, the map...?

Obviously it's about the matchup as well, I'm not saying this arrogantly, but of course if you play against QB Fire, you expect an easier matchup than Na`Vi. We'll just prepare for the next match like we did thus far, we just try to make our own game plan and not focus too much on antistratting. I think we can do it.

Most Legends had quite a rough start into the tournament, perhaps being a little rusty, are you glad that you had to go through the Main Qualifier in that sense, being able to get used to the setup here and warm up?

I think the reason why the last Major's Legends were a bit rusty on the first day is because of the monitors. Almost every tournament has BenQ ones, the difference is not that big, but for me at least, I had to change my position a little bit, because the stand of the monitor is much bigger. I'm not sure how it is with other players, but it's definitely that the qualifier teams already got used to this, the different timezone, and these PCs.