In the beginning of the 2018 Summer Split of the EU LCS Misfits took everyone by storm and started the split with a 9:0 win streak. After surviving the meta shift, the team started struggling and falling down a few places in the regular season. Even though the team was improving the results weren’t showing. After their loss against Vitality in the third place decider match, our reporter Alexandre “DrPuppet” Weber had the chance to speak with Misfits Coach Hussain “Moose” Moosvi to understand what happened in Madrid.







How are you feeling after the matches? What happened today?



Usually, after a loss, you can say they did this well or we weren’t ready for this, but the reality today is they just beat us, they just beat us overall. They played very well, Jiizuke was phenomenal today, especially in his Leblanc and Ryze games. I think we prepared well for the series, we weren’t taken by surprise or anything, just felt like they were the better team today. To be honest, based on today’s play they improved a lot during the last week and I'm not sure it is all based on that last week as they played champions that don’t necessarily fit what they used to play before. So I’m not sure how much they really improved or if they kept some things in their sleeve up until this point. So well played to Vitality. Up until this point, I think we were playing well, we definitely dropped the ball today. So I can’t really say that one single factor lost us the game, I think Vitality was just the better team today.





One of the things I thought was interesting is that you guys started really well into the season. Despite the crucial meta changes, you stuck to ad carries and kept winning, but as soon as the meta switched back to be more ad carry oriented, things didn’t seem to be working out for you guys anymore. When you wouldn’t get a lead in the early game, the games seemed extremely difficult for Misfits as a team. You found very creative ways to snowball Maxlore or set up Hans Sama to carry, but it was even more noticeable in the semis against Fnatic that when the team wasn’t ahead in the early game it wasn’t the same team. What happened there and where did this change come from?



During the split even though we were 9:0, I think the other teams knew and we definitely knew, that we weren’t a good team in the mid and late game, so we were working on it for a while. We were good at our early game fundamentals, we knew how to snowball a lead when we got it in certain compositions. So we tried to stray away from that, we tried to learn to be a lot more versatile and in some ways, we managed that and that’s a big reason for our improvement for playoffs and in some others, we failed. This is kind of the history of Misfits, there is a point in every single split that we are doing extremely well when we are playing to our strengths and we know what the initial roster is capable off and then we start pushing towards something extremely uncomfortable to see how far we can push it. Then we come to playoffs and bring everything that worked and didn’t work together, while usually to every team this would be a short slump towards the middle of the split, it was quite extreme and bad for us. We figured out why it’s the case coming for playoffs and that’s the reason we were able to get so much better in time for playoffs.



In the case of the Fnatic series, it was a little bit different as for the rest of the split. Then in the Fnatic series, we drafted to get ahead really early and when we played a slower composition and play more towards the mid and late game like the tristana+Galio composition against the Vayne. I thought we played the early game still fine, it wasn’t a big snowball but still fine, we played mid game excellently and we just messed up that last team fight. The big team fight where Vayne got the kill on Tristana. I think what went wrong there was execution. That game showed how much we’ve improved in terms of our reliability on coming out of the early game with a 5k gold lead or something like that. We improved on that end, we have our limitations like every other team and we are aware of it. Despite our loss, I think we did a good job of bringing everything together and we just lost today at being prepared of doing that well enough.







One of the things that I noticed today, the team went all into the ad carry focused compositions, but the team seemed to struggle in terms of skirmishes and team fighting. Despite Mikyx playing the fights especially well, the team wasn’t in sync or simply took bad skirmishes. Was this a problem that only occurred today or is it already a problem you guys were aware of?



We definitely took some bad fights today, actually very uncharacteristic bad fights today. I have a little bit of an idea where those problems came from, I think some of it was macro but some of it was kind of having “too many second doubts”. I think everybody wasn’t 100% sure about everything and everybody was not necessarily on point today. Misfits has a system, currently, we rely on everyone to perform close to their peak level and if everyone does that we have an incredible synergy together and we work really. So usually we are a pretty decent team fighting team but today we were quite off point in terms of reading the map and individual performance across the board. The biggest aspect today was us picking terrible fights. We have a bit of an idea of how to fix that and we will do that for Gauntlet.



I think it is normal for teams to have certain games that they pick bad fights, even Fnatic picked a lot of bad fights against us, so I don’t think it is a problem that is exclusive to us.



More often than not we get it right and pick the right fights, today we just got it wrong a lot.





Looking forward to the future especially towards the Gauntlet. Not only fixing the problems but is the meta where Misfits want it to be? Is it finally a meta where you guys would say it is fun to play league of legends again?



It’s actually quite interesting then the meta is changing a lot even during playoffs it changed a lot. For an example, we just saw Urgot being picked in Korea and that’s on 8.15, a patch prior to us. Vitality banned it a lot against us today. I’m confident that most teams if not all the Gauntlet will pick it up as well. The meta is changing while we are all on the same patch and teams are starting to figure it out more what’s strong and what’s not and in general being more creative. I’m not sure where the meta will be for Gauntlet, I think the meta was fine for us during playoffs. It wasn’t necessarily in our favor and also not necessarily against us. I think in general all teams can win by playing their strengths and the better team will win in the end.





Any message to the fans?



Thank you for supporting us even after our loss. A lot of people still came to us to cheer us on and to say that they still believe in us. It’s of course been a hard split and I think we still did a good job bouncing back and we have been working hard to make it to worlds, so the fan all the fan support has been very encouraging and Madrid has been amazing, so thanks to all of you.