Albus NoX Luna’s Likkrit shares his thoughts on Worlds

After a disappointing loss to Europe’s H2K on Sunday, Likkrit shared his thoughts on the match and ANX’s journey.

Albus NoX Luna gave us some of the most exciting games ever in the World Championship. Unfortunately, those did not come in the quarterfinals against H2K. After the series loss, ANX support Kirill “Likkrit” Malofeev went on his VK page (Europe’s version of Facebook) and posted some of his thoughts. Likkrit made a name for himself with colorful interviews throughout Worlds, and his post-Worlds thoughts were fascinating as well. The following is from his page, translated by Reddit user Ten_Ketsu.

The following is from his page, translated by Reddit user Ten_Ketsu.

Thoughts on the group stage

After an opening game loss to ROX Tigers, ANX went 4-0 in the groups. But they couldn’t keep that level of play going, losing to G2 Esports to set up a first-place tiebreaker with ROX, which they also lost. Likkrit mentioned that they “should have won against G2 the second time, but unlucky.” Still, ANX can be proud of getting into the quarters, and Likkrit agreed: “Games in the group stage were awesome, we managed to show in practice our signature champions, [ANX jungler Oleksandr Glasgov] Stejos played as a young god almost all the time.”

The competition got real in the quarterfinals

Likkrit indicated that the period between Groups and the quarterfinal stage wasn’t easy on the team: “After the groups we had no scrim partners left and we had to release a couple of picks.” ANX was made famous by their inability to find scrim partners before the group stage. That may have given them a chance to develop a unique style of play, but they used almost all of those strategies in the group stage. Still, this is something that Riot has to address; not allotting a team, regardless of origin, good practice before the most important tournament of the year is extremely unprofessional.

The matchup with H2K, specifically the draft phase

The Worlds meta really changed between groups and quarterfinals. It seems that teams have settled on champions like Syndra, Caitlyn and Zyra. We really wanted to see ANX pull something out of their hat against H2K, but it was not to be. The top lane was the same for all three games: Andrie “Odoamne” Pascus’ Jayce against Dmitrii “Smurf” Ivanov’s Gnar. Even Likkrit’s champion pool was static: he went Bard/Alistar/Bard, each time playing into Oskar “Vander” Bogdan’s Zyra.

Unfortunately, part of the lack of practice led to stale picks for ANX. Likkrit indicated that ANX focused on taking Ryze, Olaf and Kennen away from H2K. Additionally, with Nidalee an automatic red-side ban, ANX banned nearly the same champion group each map.

On the other side, he believed that Catilyn “covered an important hole and one of our three most basic problems.” He didn’t elaborate on what that problem was, but seeing how the game went, it seemed ANX was worried about the laning phase and hoped that Caitlyn’s range would help them. Vladislav “aMiracle” Shcherbyna’s Caitlyn wasn’t horrible in lane, but they fell behind in too many phases early.

Next: Recap H2K's win over ANX in the Quarterfinals

Likkrit’s own champion pool was determined by that pick-ban strategy. He indicated that Bard and Alistar were “interchangeable in this series… a must if we didn’t take Zyra first, which was impossible since on blue side you need Caitlyn, and on red side Caitlyn, Olaf.”

He did admit some mistakes: “Alarm clock aka Zilean — our serious mistake in draft which lost us third map” and “Picking Vlad into Syndra — our stupid mistake.”

It was telling, though, his thoughts about the Jayce that Odoamne was so effective on: “Practically didn’t influence our losses.” He had a good sense to know what worked and what didn’t, and that aside from the draft, H2K just played a much stronger early-game. In fact, he pointed out the key factor being ANX making “a critical amount of mistakes.” It’s good to see pros being self-aware and candid after tough matches.

A final note for the fans

For most fans, this Worlds tournament was their first taste of ANX. Likkrit mentioned the team “are not going to disband” and that he was thankful “for everyone who watched us up to five a.m. and rooted for us, sorry we couldn’t have performed better.”

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