With the Asia Minor around the corner, we reached out to Aaron "AZR" Ward to hear about Renegades' preparation for the event and how they are dealing with the loss of Yaman "yam" Ergenekon.

Renegades have so far been at and made it through each of the Asia Minors, but haven't been able to take the first place, losing to TheMongolz once and TYLOO twice.

AZR revealed that they have been focusing on playing without kassad's mid-round input

This time around, the competition seems to be tougher than ever. Alongside TYLOO, vying for a spot at the Major Qualifier will be another Chinese team in Flash, a strong Australian side in Immunity and potential upset teams such as TheMongolz.

In a pre-event interview, Aaron "⁠AZR⁠" Ward touched on the calling situation, preparation, goals for the tournament and the opposition they will face at the Minor.

After IEM Sydney, which you attended shortly after assembling your current roster, your team stated that you will be focusing on and preparing for the Asia Minor. What did you do in the last couple of weeks, what did you focus on? In the last weeks, we have been mainly practicing without our coach calling/talking each round and trying to follow the Valve ruleset. We have also expanded our map pool as previously we didn’t have a lot of time to get all the maps to the standard we wanted. Are you satisfied with the improvements you've made since IEM Sydney? Yes, but there is still a long way to go. Losing Yam meant we had to basically start from scratch. Living together in a house is speeding up the process but there is still a lot of work to be done. One of the biggest question marks for your side was how will nexa cope with the IGL duties on his shoulders. How has he been dealing with the added pressure and the responsibility of the role so far? We have been experimenting in this area a bit lately and currently, we feel the most comfortable with Nifty calling as he is a native English speaker and can get the words out faster. Without kassad being able to talk each round was a major contributing factor and for now, this is the direction we are going with. In our interview, nexa mentioned that he thinks FaZe's style would suit your team. Is that something the team agrees on, are you trying to play a FaZe-like style of CS now? We do watch a lot of Faze demos but it's really just because they are a top side and not specific to their style. They have such strong fire power sometimes they can make the rounds work with individual talent so we try to watch a variety of top teams.

Renegades moved away from the kassad-nexa calling combo to accommodate to the Valve ruleset