Tsunami Ink: "Everyone saw the quality of our play"

Despite facing elimination in the top sixteen of Fragicago 2023, it goes without saying that Straight Aimers, a mixteam formed formed for this tournament, have a lot to take away from their time at the Scrims Esports Center. Straight Aimers garnered widespread interest from those at the LAN center and on Twitch for pushing Bobby "stamina" Eitrem's MIGHT to the limit in the group stage, almost upsetting the "superteam" despite Straight Aimer's lack of name recognition.

In many ways, credit for this feat can be attributed to Straight Aimer's IGL, Victor "Ink", who helped prep the squad and lead them into many of the player's first LAN event. Outside of Fragicago, Ink dons many hats, playing in ESEA Main, coaching Tsunami Sirens in ESL Impact, and acting as the general manager of the organization. With all of this in mind, Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" Moore spoke to the jack of all trades about his team's run at Fragicago 2023, assembling the Straight Aimers mixteam, and how he feels about the recent change to the ESL Impact League, among other topics.

Please note that the full interview can be found below on YouTube, while the transcript has some key snippets from their conversation.

How do you feel about your run overall, considering you made top sixteen as a mixteam?

We came in here seeded as the top half of the tournament. There's 32 teams and we were seeded around 13th to 14th, so making top sixteen was the bare minimum, even disregarding who we were going to play. Obviously beyond that after getting situated and going into day one we realized its top eight or bust in our heads. We really wanted to make quarterfinals because there's a bunch of other teams that could sneak through their group and get through, and everyone saw the quality of our play and put more beyond that.

Yesterday [December 1st], all eyes were on you as Straight Aimers faced off against MIGHT. I don't think a lot of people expected for things to be as close as they were. How was the team feeling during the match and what were the emotions going through your head during that rollercoaster of a series?

Retroactively, watching the stream back we heard one of the casters say that we were playing as if it didn't matter what the other names in the server were. I think you could tell the whole tournament against the weaker opponents we dominated them and against the better ones we stepped up.

This mindset is really the winning formula when you go to LAN because at the end of the day you look across the building and the person is just another kid with a keyboard and mouse, and you realize 'I'm probably better than this kid if I just flex on him and do a play.'

We really relied on that and in the moment we were super calm, and it felt like the goal was to get to an opportunity to say 'Oh how are you losing to me, I'm a pedestrian, I walk on the street and you're losing to me, that's an issue.' We came in with that underdog mentality but we knew we could flex some really good individual skill and it came through.