Legacy’s EGym on his experience at Cologne and the Australian scene: “OCE right now is like NA back when it was a baby”

Despite a fantastic first two games from the Oceanic representatives at the International WildCard tournament, Legacy Esports were unable to claim the much coveted World Championship Spot and finished as runners up of the event. Despite their loss, the team performed competently and Legacy's Support player Bryce "EGym" Paule was praised for his Alistar play. I spoke with EGym on a numer of topics.

Braum, Leona, Alistar - from your picks in this tournament, you generally seem to enjoy playing more tank orientated supports versus mage orientated ones. Is there a particular reason for your preference?

I'm not entirely sure actually, I think it actually stemmed from the Annie/Thresh/Leona meta; which is when I began really focussing on improving as a support. At the time I was reknown in Oceanic soloq for being the guy that just first picked Thresh every game; and at the time I hated playing Annie, so it was really just Thresh and Leona. From there I began expanding my champion pool and have just favoured playing tanky supports as my champion pool has grown. I also think a large influence is just the meta, whereby the majority of viable supports right now just happen to be tanks rather than mages. That's not to say I don't play mages, I've always enjoyed playing things like Nami and Morgana, and occasionally a little Vel'koz =P

In Europe you've been scrimming Challenger and LCS European teams, what do you think of the playstyle differences between Oceania and Europe? Europe seems to have a more passive approach to the game and has a much stronger mid-game, what have you learnt from scrimming the teams?

They definitely play a lot more passive than us, which I guess the average viewer of wildcards wouldn't have been able to tell because I feel that DP plays more like an Oceanic team than a European team. European teams (from our experiences in scrims/ranked 5s) tend to focus a lot more of farming and playing safe early game, and big teamfights don't happen until everybody is sitting on 200 cs and has 2 major items. Whereas we love to invade the enemy jungle brawl around dragon and just in general fight all the time. To use the wise words of Alex Ich back in Moscow 5 days, "see hero, kill hero", and I guess that just about sums up the way we play.

But there are definitely very evident strengths and weaknesses to these 2 playstyles. The way I see the EU meta is that you can never really fall very far behind. If you're just farming for 20 minutes, maybe a few kills will happen but you with either end up even or ahead by the 209 minute mark, they also tend to have either even gold or 1-2k gold leads by this points. This allows everyone to scale very strongly into the midgame/lategame teamfight and rotation phase. Compared to the Oceanic meta where we just want to fight all the time, kill scores tend to be in the 10s by 20 minutes, everybody has a lower cs score compared to EU and gold leads vary greatly. Games are often decided by the time they reach the 20-30 minute mark with gold differences sitting around 10k. It creates a much more exciting and volatile sort of play which is much more exciting from a viewers perspective.

Something funny I would like to point out is that within the Oceanic region, around the time of our Winter Regionals we were known as the team that didn't necessarily have strong lanes or early game, and we would win by outscaling and outrotating our foes. But when we came over to Europe we'd finish lanephase, press tab and wonder why in the world we have so much gold to play with, this isn't normal!

Of all the teams that you've scrimmed and played against, who had the strongest botlane in your opinion? What did they do that other bot lanes you faced struggled with?

Definitely SK's bottom lane, Candypanda and nRated. To be completely honest I couldn't tell you exactly what they did to push their advantages but there was just something about the way they played that seemed extremely smart. They would always be prepared for whatever we would throw at them and had an extremely good read on how the lane was going to play out before we even started. I guess that's what you would expect from a top tier LCS team though. In Oceania there is really no way for us connect to any other servers (180 ping NA, 300 ping EUW, 200 ping KR) so it was really exciting and an honour to play against that calibre of team.

In many of your games, Legacy had a tendency to be slighly overaggressive in the early game and you guys fell behind due to that. How has this experienced shaped your overall game flow? Do you still plan to be quite aggressive or has this tournament exposed some problems that you'd like see rectified?

I don't think Wildcards has exposes any sort of problems that we didn't already know about, and over-aggression is definitely one of them. Ottoke (our coach) always makes jokes about bloodlust, he watches our scrims and we back out of a fight, everyone almost dead and nobody has their ultimates, but we're still trying find ways to go back in. I guess this tournament did a lot to highlight where our problems actually lie, but they definitely weren't things that we didn't know about already.

You played some exceptional Alistar during your first game and was largely responsible for the team's comeback against Dark Passage. Unfortunately you never really got to play him again. For the inexperienced Alistar support players, what are some general tips that you can give someone to up their game?

Alistar's strength isn't in lanephase, in fact he's fairly weak against most viable supports right now except maybe Braum. As you saw in our first game we lane-swapped which is the ideal situation for Ali support to shine, I just rushed mobi's and ran around the map trying to be as influential as possible. In terms of general tips, don't be afraid to blow your flash, the amount of times you can catch your enemies off-guard with flash Q or flash WQ is insane; consider upgrading your boots with distortion too to reduce your flash cooldown. I also think the biggest secret with Ali is also you can Q before you flash because it has a relatively long cast animation (similar to Shen's taunt-flash), when you pull it off there is literally no time for your enemy to react before they get knocked up

Australia hasn't had the greatest Competitive exposure so far but with your performance today, that may no longer be the case, what do you think needs to happen so that the Australian scene flourishes? What coverage would you like to see in the future about the Australian Scene?

There are a few reason's why the Oceanic scene is so small, the first being the size of the region. We're very new, and therefore not very big so our player pool is considerably smaller than that of the other major regions meaning we have a much smaller talent pool to play with. This also means viewer numbers are considerably smaller. Without large viewer numbers, it's hard for companies to justify investing into the scene, and as such it's taking a very long time for infrastructure to grow. You always see people talking about how the difference between Korea and NA is the infrastructure that allows the players to focus much more solely on the game, and OCE right now is like NA back when it was a baby.

There has been ideas of a South Pacific LCS which incorporates South East Asia and Australia, would you like to see this incorporated?

This would be amazing from a player's standpoint, I could possibly see it happening in a few years but right now I don't think it's very realistic. It would legitimise League as sport in Oceania, which would allow players to dedicate much more time to it than they can right now. If you compare our pro's to other big regions, let's say NA, it's their job to play the game. They live in gaming houses with their team, practice all day and have LCS games every week. Whereas in Oceania our tournaments come sporadically, we'll have a big tournament one month and not see another competitive game for another 3 months. Also because there is little money in the scene our pro's are mostly students by day and play league when they get home, so educational commitments come first, whereas in other regions players are salaried and able to focus solely on the game. Hopefully in time these things will change as our scene grows, and it definitely is growing.

Against Dark Passage, it seemed that you were unprepared against the Nidalee pick, could you please shed some further light on the difficulties your team had when versing Nidalee?

I'd probably like to pre-face by saying we learnt a great deal in our 3 days of bootcamp in EU before the tournament, and the meta changes very quickly. As we were leaving OCE Alistar had just begun to see play in top lane and it was very interesting to see the changes by the time we'd landed and arrived at the studios. EU prioritises different things, because they like to play passively early lane phase tends to last longer than we're used to, which would allow Nidalee to abuse he lane dominance and become much more of a nuisance than she would be in OCE. That's not to say we didn't have plans to deal with her, they just failed on the day

One of the things I'd say caused most of the problems you saw in our play at Wilcards would be we focussed more on trying to counter the way DP plays than to just play our own game. As such we banned Trist every game because when you look at DP you see HolyPheonix as their carry, and denying him his comfort pick, not to mention Trist is insanely strong right now would be a good idea. However we probably should have started banning Nidalee over Trist because she was much more of a problem, but it's a lot easier to say in hindsight.

They played better on the day, and they deserved to win. Congratulations to them and I sincerely hope they're able to put on a good showing at worlds, I can't wait to watch the games.

How was it like playing at Gamescom and how was Cologne in general?

Playing in Cologne was amazing, to come from such a small region to playing on the LCS stage with a massive crowd in front of you is definitely a different experience. The sheer scale of everything was amazing, and to have all these big name personalities like the LCS casters/Sjokz casting our games and doing our interviews was really awesome.

Thanks for your time, do you have any shoutouts or anything else to add?

No problem, just a big shoutout to our fans and everyone that supported us at Wildcards, it was a disappointing result but to have so many people supporting us was amazing and really motivating. Hopefully we can pull out some better results in the future. Shoutout to Riot for hosting such an amazing event and giving us the chance to travel to Cologne to play. Shoutout to all of the people behind the scenes listening to our voice chat before champ select on stage, those were some very funny times. And of course a giant thanks to you for having me and giving me a chance to address a lot of things, thanks!