karrigan: "We have an EG default"

On last month's edition of Talking Counter, episode 35 and published on March 11th, invited guest Finn "karrigan" Andersen talked about a variety of topics from team cohesion, recent events, and notably, where he gets his strategies from, as an in-game leader.

He mentioned that some of his strategies come from unlikely sources. He usually watches demos of teams ranked from #2-#6 in the world, but also ventures outside the top twenty to see what teams on the up and up have in their back pockets.

He took strategies from Eternal Fire, for instance. One of the demos he watched was Evil Geniuses' surprise victory over Heroic early in the year on Inferno. karrigan saw how EG successfully managed to defeat the best team in the world at the time and integrated it in his own repertoire, saying

Basically we have an EG default. It sounds funny, but if you watch the demos, the players actually have a good structure, but they have a bad ending in the rounds.

karrigan clarifies this to say his "EG default" consists of greedily taking map control without expending utility, as EG did with great success over Heroic.

Later on in the podcast, upon being asked his sources of inspiration for novel ideas, karrigan continued on EG's victory over Heroic, even adding a small comment on his team chiding him for looking through EG demos.

[I look at] everyone. I hate to look at the number one team, I always hated that because when you look at the number one team, you see everything is perfection, every decision is the right thing. So that's why I looked at EG demos. I'm looking from the other side 'why are they not winning?' They must be working hard, but something isn't working. What not to do? I watch their demos to see what are they doing wrong, and I'm seeing good stuff. They're winning rounds against Heroic by doing this specific default. Then I looked at Heroic's demos, seeing if that's a problem with them, but they're wrecking everyone. So we try out an EG default with variation next time, you know.

The team was asking me, 'why do we have so much EG?' and I said 'because they're actually not that bad'

Since this episode of Talking Counter, karrigan's FaZe has qualified to the BLAST.tv Paris Major, albeit with a close call, needing to take the Last Chance Qualifier to take the final Major spot. Their opening match at the Major is against Monte, but before then, we will get a chance to see the team compete at IEM Rio, where they will face off first against 9z and won dominantly. They play later today against FURIA.