Evil Geniuses will open the Breakout rounds tomorrow at DAC 2018. It’s a “do or die” best of three series against Newbee, a team EG chose to play against. VPGame had the chance to sit down and talk to Artour “Arteezy” Babaev on the media day in Shanghai, China. You can read the full English transcript of the interview below while the Chinese version can be found here.

A while ago we saw you were building Battlefury on a bunch of heroes who don’t typically build this item, like Spectre, but recently you are not doing that anymore, why?

Battlefury was really OP at that time because it worked on illusions, and I didn’t even feel too good about that Spectre game. If I would have had Radiance faster, like 4 minutes faster, we would have just won the game, so I learned after that game that Battlefury on Spectre was not good at all. And then, they nerfed how Battlefury works on illusions, so I stopped buying it.

So you guys picked Newbee as your next opponent, what are your thoughts on that, was that because you’ve been beating Newbee a lot or what?

We haven’t played against VG, so we don’t have much experience with them. We played them in scrims and they were doing pretty well and they also play differently than how we think other Chinese teams would play. We understand how Newbee plays, they’ve been playing this sort of similar style for like 2 or 3 years. We know what kind of game they are going to play and we feel our playstyle works well against Newbee.

So, in terms of playstyle, do you prefer to play hardcore or semi-core?

I think it’s healthy to have a balance, I don’t feel like you should be restricted to play one type of a core. As for my preference, I’m very comfortable on both of those, of course, I’d like to be in a position where I know if we go late game we will win the matchup. But it doesn’t always have to be like that because sometimes it’s also nice to play semi-core and carry the game.

picture courtesy of EPICENTER

Are there any other opponents you are looking forward to play against at DAC?

I’m pretty happy with our bracket right now, if we win Newbee we get to play LGD. I think their playstyle is similar to ours, so it’s going to be an interesting matchup. I feel very confident in my team and our losses in the group stage. I see our losses as a healthy thing as we learn from them. Then if we beat LGD, we get to play Liquid or VP next, it’s like proving ground for us… So, I think this trip should be nice for us.

So VP, Secret and Liquid are the top three in terms of DPC points, how do you feel about your matchup against them?

I feel like we are in a pretty good spot right now as a team and we need a victory against VP or Liquid. We’re not scared of Secret at all, we are pretty comfortable against them. In the draft, we’ll get what we want and we understand what they want and how they are going to play. Playing against Secret doesn’t feel the same way as playing against VP.

We are doing better against Liquid because we played a lot of games against them over the last couple of weeks and progressively I see we are doing better. I feel like we can win a series against them now, compared to six months ago where I felt we didn’t even stand a chance. I don’t know… it could be that Liquid is getting worse and we are getting better.

In the group stage, you only lost against VP and Mineski, what are your thoughts on Mineski as a team?

I think Mineski identified some flaws in our strategy. We weren’t too experienced to deal with how they play and I’m guessing coach 71 just came up with some new playstyles for them, prepared especially for us. In that game for some reason we were talking about banning Invoker in the second phase, now, looking back, I feel we shouldn’t have done that. But at that time we found their opening was really strange, we thought they were planning something and they needed a hero like Invoker.

Recently you have been playing Morphling a lot, Morphling is a hero with little room for mistakes, why do you like to play this hero?

I think Morphling is a hero that makes you constantly push your limits, you want to make your opponent think twice when they plan to kill you, but of course, sometimes you will just get killed easily and you look really silly. That’s basically what happened in our game against Mineski, I just kept on pushing my limits and eventually, I got caught.

Thanks for your time Artour and good luck in the main event!

Evil Geniuses versus Newbee will be the first series in the Dota 2 Asia Championships main event. It’s scheduled to commence at 10:00 local time, 04:00 CEST and will be broadcast in English on PGL’s twitch.tv channel twitch.tv/pgl_dota2.

Four teams will be eliminated on the first day of the main event, and the full schedule is as follows: