SNA Fluff: “NA dota has come a long way in terms of competitors”

Yesterday The International 2014 qualifiers kicked off with North America's best teams vying for a highly-coveted spot in Seattle. Among the teams attempting to qualify include the Sneaky Nyx Assassins (SNA) featuring former Team Liquid players Michael 'ixmike88' Ghannam and Brian 'FLUFFNSTUFF' Lee.

The Assassins finished 4-2 on the day with losses to Liquid and Peru's Revenge eSports. onGamers sat down with SNA captain Lee on their first opponent on day 2, the currently undefeated North American Rejects.

What do you think about your play thus far now that qualifiers have begun?

We felt pretty good about our chances to get into the upper bracket at the very beginning of the day, but after we lost to Liquid we realized we might have to take the harder route in the losers bracket.

The only upset within our team was probably losing to Revenge because we felt that we made some big mistakes that cost us the game. I think we're okay with our score, but we definitely expected 5-1 or a 6-0 today. Either way everyone feels confident about our chances to make it into the playoff stage and upset the bracket to take the first or second place.

What went wrong during your game against Liquid?

Our openings were pretty standard and expected for the most part, but the real problem came towards the end of the draft. I was gearing for an Ursa pick because I thought it was extremely strong versus their lineup. One of the reasons was that I picked CM, who is a much stronger early game hero as opposed to a mid/late game type of hero, was to compliment the Ursa pick. At that point I was all in on my pick, but I took some bad advice and left it for the 5th pick, where Liquid banned it. Basically at that point all of my plans went down the drain and I had barely any time to think of a replacement so it left our draft in disarray.

One of my teammates suggested Naga Siren and because I was low on time I just trusted the idea. Naga turned out to be a weak pick for us because she didn't match up very well versus Liquid's draft. So the two heroes CM and Naga ended up being a poor laning duo and Liquid took full advantage of it's weakness. TC also did a very good job of picking heroes that masked each others weaknesses and left me low on options. All in all, I got outdrafted by getting greedy with my pick.

You play NAR first up on day 2 after their undefeated run yesterday, what are you thinking going into this game?

NAR is just the team to beat in this qualifier and we definitely respect their skill. We're all confident that we can go toe to toe with them because we've played each other in tournaments and in private many many times.

We have a slight disadvantage coming off the Summit qualifiers where we lost to them 0-3, but our team was having some internal issues at that time. We reflected on our losses together and think that we understand the reason why they got the best of us and want to test our theory tomorrow.

There has been a lot of enthusiasm for the North American International qualifiers and scene as a whole right now. What do you think about the hype?

Personally I'm excited to see the NA qualifiers play out because I know many of the players and teams and have played official matches against them. There's obviously a rivarly between NAR, Liquid and ourselves due to the fact that we all have former Liquid members and I think it's fun.

I think NA dota has come a long way in terms of competitors in recent years, however I don't think the majority of us are quite ready to compete with European teams. I would say the European qualifiers are much more hype than the NA qualifier, but I think because NA qualifiers are first out of the 4 regions it revives the spirit of TI in every dota fan.

onGamers also spoke to Liquid's Sam 'BuLba' Sosale on the team's first day of games.