apEX: "This is the most I have ever enjoyed playing with a French team"

Having his break out tournament with the French side of LDLC in attendance of 2014’s Cologne Major Dan “apEX” Madesclaire has remained among France’s best sides ever since. In the aftermath of G2 rupturing during mid 2018 apEX would embark on the creation of team Vitality, alongside a group of familiar faces.

Jumping ahead to recent months and Vitality have ascended above the expectations of many, claiming titles at CS Summit 4 and the ECS Season 7 Finals. Shortly before victory at the latter event, we sat down with apEX to uncover his thoughts on the recent successes of Vitality and reflected on some of his previous lineups.

Allan: Vitality had a change in coach to XQTzz in December 2018, talk me through his background before being brought on by Vitality and what his role is within the team.

apEX: Myself and NBK already knew Remy [XQTZZZ] as he used to be an In Game Leader in Source, I think he was the first real IGL of NBK so they knew each other pretty well and before coaching us he was casting with ESL for two years. At first we had faculty as a coach but we decided to part ways with him because he was not what we were looking for. Remy is a really hard worker and has the knowledge that few people have in the French scene so we decided to take him. His work is incredible and he is working on everything: preparing for our matches, the way we are going to play against an opponent, the way we build our own game and just trying to improve our play. I think he is a big reason behind our recent successes.

From my perspective Vitality looks more structured than your previous teams of G2 and EnVyUs. Do you agree that Vitality focuses on structured play and how does this compare to former teams of yours?

We have good structure now and this is really important nowadays because the CS meta game is really complicated, you need to be focused on many things and the structure is one of them. I think on G2 we had the same thing sometimes but not all the time, it depended on how shox wanted to lead the team, we had a little structure before when we played in G2 but not enough I would say.

For a number of years the French scene has been viewed as having issues with work ethic and personal problems. What is the atmosphere like within Vitality outside of the server and how does this compare to your previous teams?

Some fans think you need all the best players in your team to compete, but I think you need the right people in the right moment playing well together and that is what we are trying to do. This is the most I have ever enjoyed playing with a French team because we are all hard workers and we are trying to get better every day. The coach, the manager, the players, everyone has the same attitude and that’s why I think we're now contenders for titles. The French scene is known to be lazy which is unfortunate because that is not how I am personally and I was always a bit sad to see people were thinking this about us, but it was actually the truth. I think in some of my previous teams we did not change our playstyle and we did not prepare enough for events. In G2 we probably had the most talented team we could ever have assembled in the French scene - except maybe ZywOo now because he is fantastic - but people didn’t work well together, we lacked a lot of things overall and that’s why we didn’t create an era. We could have been able to do so if we had the same mentality that we have now in Vitality, but it did not happen. I think the direction we’re taking now is a good one, we are trying to be as good as we can and I think that started with being more structured, being good individually and not getting read by the other team. CS is quite different to even two years ago because people are preparing a lot for matches right now and before they wouldn’t do so. I think one of the best teams with doing this is ENCE and they know how to prepare for games. For example I feel like in terms of firepower they are not the best team but they are up there because of these things, preparing for matches and they are smart in what they do.

In attendance of CS Summit 4 Vitality beat 2-0 Liquid in the final, how were you guys able to topple one of the best teams in the world during this match?

Liquid are for me the most skilled team right now, any player can be the MVP of the tournament and they are just playing fantastic. I think to challenge Liquid you need to play in a way where you don't offer up the aim duels that can favour them on some parts of the map. I think we outplayed them in many ways during that tournament they even said that in terms of our game plan, strategy and even individually we were better than they were at this tournament. It felt really good to play that well, beating what was then the second best team in the world. It felt like we could beat any team in that moment and it made us even more confident for the future.

From watching recent events it appears that Vitality has good communication, how does this compare to when the team first came together and how is the communication within the team at this moment?

Communication is something that we are putting a lot of work into, I remember when Remy joined [in December 2018] and listened to the team before saying “your communication, no way, it cannot be like that, it is just so bad”. This was the truth and we are trying to communicate much better than we used to. For example, ZywOo came in from below the top level and he wasn't used to communicating everything he was doing. Communication with the AWP such as: I have this, I don't have this, do this for me and it took a bit of time for these things to improve because it was a new thing for him. Even for NBK in terms of communication, NBK and Zywoo are similar, they are both fairly shy people and sometimes you need to raise your voice for some important information. Sometimes both of them would say the information so slowly and we couldn't hear them, it was normal information but it didn’t stand out as important. This was one of the biggest issues we had at the start of the team and sometimes we still have these issues when people are getting a bit lazy, when we are a bit sleepy and people are not trying to communicate as much. For me personally when the communication is off it is really tough for me to play well, that is a problem we had and during CS Summit everything was going our way.

Talking about ZywOo on the CT side, there is a very fine line when playing aggressively between finding opening picks and overextending into giving up entry kills, how has ZywOo developed in this respect?

This was not the case at the beginning of the team but the coach and ZywOo worked a lot on it. For example he would play on A again after already playing there and just keep repeeking and repeeking. [If ZywOo played more aggressive] sometimes he would get even more kills but we would lose more rounds because he would die in bad situations. I think the best player in the world for this is device, he’s passive and aggressive at the same time, he is never going to repeek you on a bad angle, he is never going to give an easy kill to the opponent. I told ZywOo he has more talent than almost any other player, except maybe s1mple but he is way less good than device in these areas. The coach and the whole team are trying to make him as good as device with movement, being aggressive or passive and changing position all the time. This is what I like about Astralis, device can be anywhere on the map at any moment and I think that makes him tough to play against, we are trying to get ZywOo better with these things and I think you can see it now because he is just playing amazing.

ALEX joined Vitality towards the very end of 2018 and now calls the T sides for the team on all maps excluding Inferno, what are ALEX’s strengths as an In Game Leader?

The biggest thing with ALEX is that he is a hard worker, he watches games right after we won or lost to see what happened with his calling, whether it was a bad call from him or from the whole team were doing things badly. Another thing is listening a lot to us in terms of planning, for example against FURIA [at DH Dallas in the quarterfinals] I don't think we had the right plan on T side against them on Nuke and we talked about how we were not playing the right way against them. It is really good to have an IGL who listens to you and the whole team because I used to have an In Game Leader who did not want people to say bad things about the games.

For teams that lean towards more structure play on the Terrorist side like Vitality I think you need a lot of depth in your playbook and to constantly make small changes to keep opponents on their toes. Do you agree and how has this aspect played out for Vitality?

I talked about this before for the CT side but it is even more the case on the T side, I think you need to prepare being hard to read in mind, when they watch your demos they can’t say something is happening here so they are going there. This is why it is so tough to play T side nowadays because people are preparing for the games much more than they used to. There has been a lot of work from ALEX and Remy into preparing for our games and trying to be unpredictable. I think we’re in a good place with this before CS Summit we had a month and a half to prepare because we felt like during StarSeries we were a bit readable with what we did, we are trying to be more unpredictable and we still have some more work to do.

Moving forward how is Vitality looking to improve their Terrorist sides, adding more styles of play or working on ALEX’s calling for example?

A lot of styles first of all, doing some 4-1’s, 2-1-2, running defaults, strategies, contact, playing as many styles as we can. This is what I like with ENCE and Astralis, they can have a lot of game plans, if they play one team with a certain style they won’t play the same in the next game because people will try to counter them, they are thinking about this and just doing something else. This is what we need in the team, learning how to play slowly, fast, inbetween, stacked, across the whole map and this is what we are trying to do.

The next event on the calendar for Vitality is ESL One Cologne where they will meet their toughest task yet to remain in championship contending position. Getting to the top is difficult, but staying there is a whole new ball game.

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Photo credit: Adela Sznajder and DreamHack