Team EnVyUs already secured a playoff berth before losing 2-0 to Cloud9 in Week 9 of the North American League of Legends Championship Series, its final match of the regular season. Slingshot’s Emily Rand sat down with mid laner Yasin “Nisqy” Dinçer to talk about his time in North America and Envy’s chances in playoffs.
Emily Rand: You’ve been in North America for a little while now. What has it been like and how has the adjustment been?
Yasin “Nisqy” Dinçer: I don’t know. I’m still trying to get used to NA right now. The teams are different, the food is really different than EU, but I think I’m doing a good job.
ER: When going from EU to NA, is it the League of Legends stuff that strikes you as more different, or general cultural differences, like food which you mentioned?
YD: The play style in NA is different than EU as well. In NA, they fight a lot more than EU. They just do more random stuff. I don’t know, I just miss EU solo queue because NA solo queue is — I don’t want to say trash, but sometimes people don’t do their best, and having 10 ping doesn’t help either.
ER: The position that has been more popular to come up from NA solo queue has been the jungle position, and talking to a few of the players that were over in Europe for Rift Rivals, they noticed that the most-picked role in EU solo queue is the mid lane, especially with the history of EU mids. Why did you decide to become a mid laner specifically?
YD: For me, at the beginning, I was actually a top laner. But when the tank meta came I wanted to do damage and be the carry of the team. I didn’t want to go AD carry or jungle because I wanted to be good in 1v1s. That’s what I always liked. I’m not sure how others choose to be mid. I just tried every role and mid just fit me the best because I just wanted to have great mechanics and mids have insane mechanics compared to other lanes.
ER: What was your largest challenge not only coming to NA but going from Challenger Series to the LCS?
YD: When I first came to Envy, I wasn’t sure how it would go, if it would go really bad or really good. I think the biggest challenge is to face Bjergsen, and that was kind of my dream when I started my career on Fnatic Academy was to beat Bjergsen or just play against him. I think I did a pretty good job.
ER: What was it like being on Fnatic Academy? A lot of people didn’t expect you to get as far as you did in EU CS, especially with a few traditional sports organizations joining the league. What was that experience like?
YD: For my part, I started my career in Fnatic Academy and I wasn’t sure if we would even get to Challenger Series. I think Fnatic expected us to be in Challenger Series. I don’t think they expected us to win and get into LCS, but when we had Kikis, Rallez, Amazing, Klaj, it’s like four kind of veterans of LCS. That helped us a lot. Also that Fnatic knows a lot about esports, that helped us a lot. We had no problems, no issues. They did a good job helping us out and having four veterans helped as well.
ER: You left the team before Fnatic sold the spot to Ninjas in Pyjamas and the entire roster was changed which was a fairly controversial move at the time. Did you know about the acquisition? And how did you end up on Team EnVyUs?
YD: It was actually pretty random. I was just on Twitter and I saw that EnVyUs was looking for a mid laner and they were going to Korea and stuff. One of my friends knew the owner of EnVyUs and he asked if they wanted to try me out and they said yes, so I went to Korea and tried out. We didn’t even know if we had our spot or if they would sell it. Once I got announced, it was one or two weeks after they learned that the spot was sold to another org. I won’t say it was a necessarily good move; it was still risky. If they had kept the team and my four teammates were still there and I was the only one to leave the team, I might be disappointed in my choice, but I was looking forward to moving to NA and seeing how I’d perform.
ER: Has the risk paid off?
YD: (laughs) Yeah we made playoffs, so it paid off.
ER: It’s been a few rough weeks for you guys, especially since you had such a tough schedule. How will you prepare for playoffs?
YD: We’re going to try our best. Going into this weekend we we knew, and everyone really knew, that the games wouldn’t matter as much unless we 2-0 and Cloud9 went 0-2 or something like that. I think in big matches we can show up. If we can improve our mid and late game in the two weeks we have now we can be in a good spot. It’s still going to be hard for sure but I think we have a shot.
Cover photo courtesy of Riot Games