Just under three years ago, Vincent ‘Happy’ Cervoni and Fabien ‘kioShiMa’ Fiey were hoisting the DreamHack trophy in Cluj-Napoca, representing EnVyUs. Today, the two are reunited under the American organization, but don’t look to achieve the same level of success they did the first time together. The only question that can be asked is; what happened?

The first ride on the blue horse

French PC vendor LDLC held a winning team in 2014, with Happy, KioShiMa, Richard ‘shox’ Papillon, Nathan ‘NBK’ Schmitt and Edouard ‘SmithZz’ Dubourdeaux winning DreamHack Winter.

After the new year, that all changed, as EnVyUs, mostly known for their Call Of Duty team at the time, took charge. The deal was made official by February and it was implied that LDLC didn’t want to let them go but Hasbr0 met the buyout clause.

The team’s first Major was ESL One Katowice 2015. The team delivered a solid performance, only falling to NiP in a tense best of 3 in the semi-finals. The team found their first title at the Gfinity Spring Masters 1 and subsequently won StarLadder StarSeries XII, ironically taking their revenge against NiP.

However, the near miss at the Gfinity Spring Masters, losing the group stage best of 3 against Virtus.pro became the decider in their group stage exit. The team were demoralized and began to play sloppily. However, the problems were masked by another Gfinity tournament, and once again facing NiP in the finals, where they won. The team environment became untenable after more group stage exits, and a French shuffle was imminent.

Shox and SmithZz left the roster, marking the start of their duo. EnVyUs and Titan, another organization hosting a Francophone team, made arrangements to bring in star-AWPer Kenny ‘KennyS’ Schrub and support player Dan ‘apEX’ Madesclaire. Shox and SmithZz would go the other way to Titan. NBK, kioShiMa and Happy would prove to be the core strength of the team, as the team went on to win more titles against the likes of Virtus.pro, Finn ‘Karrigan’ Andersen’s Team SoloMid, and Fnatic.

ESL One Cologne 2015 was just around the corner and as a Major, the stakes and prestige were higher. The team stormed through impressively and only fell to Fnatic in the grand final, finishing 2nd overall. Happy and co. would attend the third major of 2015, in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Happy, kioShiMa and NBK would win their second title and apEX and KennyS, their first. Crushing Dignitas and Na’Vi in groups, the team fought hard against Fnatic and G2, before meeting up again with Na’Vi again in the grand finals, coming from the other side of the bracket.

It was a disciplined performance, and EnVy remains the last coach-less team who won a major. However, the team lost all their structure and discipline and suffered a group stage exit at FACEIT 2015 Stage 3 Finals. An attempt to remedy this problem emerged in the form of Mathieu ‘Maniac’ Quiquerez, who formerly played for Titan but joined the team as coach, their first one in over a year. Despite a great performance at StarLadder i-League StarSeries XIV and a title at Global eSports Cup in Lithuania, underlying issues still haunted Happy’s team.



A DEVILish move

Tensions between kioShiMa and the team, began to sprout and rumours of a roster change spread through the community. It became known after the group stage exits at ESL Expo Barcelona and IEM Katowice 2016, that kioShiMa was singled out for his negative rating in events in the previous 3 months. The then 21-year-old was released by the team and two years later, he admitted on his Twitch stream, “I would say was justified because I was slacking [off] and didn’t want to play with the players.”

He was released by EnVyUs in March, and replaced by Timothée ‘DEVIL’ Démolon of Team LDLC.White, who had recently won Assembly Winter 2016 with the team. He was seen as an upcoming French talent and was the MVP of the event, beating his teammate, Alexandre ‘bodyy’ Pianaro. Hasbr0 explained in the press release, “It is always a last resort for us to make a roster change, but in this case, we believed it was necessary in order to regain the momentum we had going into the last major of 2015.”

The team were unable to practice, but things were already looking bad from the outset as the boys in blue were eliminated by NRG in the Counter Pit League groups. The Major circus visited Columbus, Ohio in the USA and EnVy came as the defending Major champions. However, they didn’t see and they certainly didn’t conquer. Even with the roster change, they were expected to make it to the playoffs. The brutal group stage format of ‘two strikes and you’re out’, counted against them. They lost to home-soil favourites Counter Logic Gaming in distant fashion, and future major winners Gambit Gaming would eliminate EnVyUs in the group stages. The team faced problems on the CT side in the two games, where Maniac was supposed to give the team more structure as coach.

This was the worst Major winner defence and remains so (Gambit were eliminated in the group stage of ELEAGUE Boston 2018, but had 2 wins), as they failed to win either match.

Arguably, it marked the fall of EnVyUs as a top-5 team, and the actions of tournament organizers afterwards agreed with this assessment. Instead of being invited to events directly, the team were only given invites to qualifiers for ESL One New York and StarLadder’s StarSeries. DreamHack Masters Malmo 2016 appeared to be an outlier in hindsight, as EnVy crashed out again without a win at the next Major in Cologne alongside fellow French team G2 Esports. It was becoming a running theme of French teams struggling to get out of groups at majors. DreamHack Open Bucharest 2016 appeared to be another outlier as they could only find form outside of the majors, leading to a semi-finals appearance. Shortly after their win at Gfinity CS:GO Invitational, DEVIL was dropped for Christophe ‘SIXER’ Xia, who returned to CS:GO after a brief period away from Counter-Strike.