NiP picked up their first win on LAN since adding Fredrik "REZ" Sterner to the squad, defeating Cloud9 on Cache. To hear about the changes and what NiP went through in the recent months, we talked to Richard "Xizt" Landström.

The Ninjas picked up a win against Cloud9 in their opening match of ESL One Cologne 2017, going up 1-0 in the Swiss system on the first day of the tournament.

Xizt admitted that it has been hard for Swedish talent to break through

After the match, we caught up with Richard "⁠Xizt⁠" Landström to hear his thoughts on adding Fredrik "⁠REZ⁠" Sterner, Björn "⁠THREAT⁠" Pers and young talent in Sweden.

You have two events until the player break, now coming to Cologne, how are you feeling, what do you want to do here? After the change, how is the team feeling? After failing the Major qualifier, we were really disappointed, obviously. We've been working really hard, making a new gameplay, changing our default rounds, and I think adding REZ was really good for us. First of all, he is really young, he's got huge potential and I think he fires us up, the other players as well. It feels great, getting the invite to Cologne and big thanks to them because maybe we don't deserve all the invites right now. But thanks to them for believing in us and we are just here to prove that we can once again win tournaments, or at least go far. Talking about the change, how has REZ been fitting in the team? Role-wise, and in general, the spots, how are you adapting to him and what is that situation like? I haven't really seen REZ play that much before we brought him in. Like I said, he has a huge potential and he fits really well in our team. He is holding solo positions mostly as CT, as T he is a very aggressive player, so basically it's him and me, we are making aggressive plays. I think we have a really good flow on our default rounds, he brings a lot of firepower. And he is a young kid, he listens to what we have to say to him and he is teaching us a lot of things as well. Before the event, THREAT mentioned that you are going to be working on your map pool, changing it a lot. You still banned Mirage first, that didn't change, but what is the map pool like, what are you doing, any big changes coming up? To be honest, we don't know what our strongest maps are yet, we haven't played that many officials. You can't really read too much out of practice results because practice is practice, you never know how serious the opponents are going to be. So we are just going to wait and see, we are playing all seven maps as of now and we will see which ones we feel confident on in official games and which ones we should ban.

After finishing school, THREAT is now back with NiP full time