QC Quinn: “I think I played pretty poorly game two, but it’s nice to play poorly and have your team back you up”

A landmark match for the NA DPC as Quincy Crew were able to take down Nouns Esports with a 2-0 sweep. Despite the score, each other games was relatively close for most of the game. With this win, Quincy Crew are poised to win a spot at the upcoming major. Their last roadblock to a first place slot is Evil Geniuses. They remain undefeated so far in the NA DPC.

The game one draft was one of the strangest of the NA DPC. Taking some inspiration from Tundra, Nouns drafted themselves a mid Clockwerk for Nicolas "Gunnar" Lopez. Nouns also picked up the first position one Enchantress in the entirety of the DPC for Guilherme Silva "Costabile" Costábile.

Quincy also picked up an offlane Weaver for Rodrigo "LESLÃO" Santos, slightly less strange, but the hero has been out of favor since the last patch. Despite the odd draft, the game ended up being very close.

Though Quincy seemed like they were going to pull away, Nouns were able to get pick offs on Yawar "YawaR" Hassan and Quinn "Quinn" Callahan. However, the counter initiation from the Quincy line-up dealt several blows to Nouns as the snowballed to be able to win the game.

Nouns again elected to go with the position one Enchantress in game two. The rest of the draft was fairly standard with a Visage offlane and Tiny mid. Quincy decided to secure the late game with a Medusa pick. The trajectory of the game stayed relatively similar to the last.

The game was close and Nouns got key kills that breathed some life into their draft. Nouns were able to very easily get kills on Quinn, who was having an extremely rough game on his signature Ember Spirit. However Quincy's potent combos stemming form the Adrian "Fata" Trinks Snapfire were able to dominate teamfights and propel their Medusa to unreachable networth.

The panel then got a chance to talk to Quinn after the win. Neal "tsunami" Khandheria first asked Quinn how he felt about his victory today. Quinn said that "it feels pretty good, I think I played pretty poorly game two, but it's nice to play poorly and have your team back you up, and have some decent team cohesion in fights, things like this, despite individual bad performances. That feeling is nice, being able to play trash sometimes and still win."

tsunami then asked why Quinn had a poor performance in that game. Quinn responded: "I think most of it was just me thinking about incorrect things or just not being quite sharp enough, it's not so much related to them (Nouns) as it is to me."

He continued: "Nouns are an extremely weird team, the way they play is like insanely, five man-y. they split the map down the middle and just farm and wait for you to run into them. So it gets really weird and drawish because it's not to the other teams advantage to run into their five man wall, so you just kinda sit their and farm because you have better late game and wait for them to stop five man walling. So it's very weird but I think a lot of my stupid deaths were just due to me."

Tsunami next asked Quinn if they had prepared for the carry Enchantress. Quinn said that "we definitely knew it was a possibility. He'd (Costabile) been playing it in pubs and stuff and it's a type of stat that Nouns would do. Like historically when we play that team, they have strats for us, or we prep for some opening and then just don't do the opening we prepped for." Quinn followed up saying "it happens pretty frequently and I think we talked about Ench and kind of expected it. We didn't expect them to run it back the second game, we thought they'd go for something else."

Next, Mira "Ephey" Riad asked how Quinn was feeling mentally overall. He stated: "I think I'm feeling pretty good. I'm taking a different approach to this team compared to prior teams."

He explained: "I'm historically a player who focuses a lot on overall team gameplay, like what you do on the map, trying to reach towards an ideal. I'm taking a different approach with this team, focusing much more on myself and enabling the players that we have, just having everyone do their own thing and letting what that shapes, and let that be its own thing. I haven't had the greatest success in the past and I think at times my focusing on the grander scale and trying to reach for perfection has hurt my individual gameplay and the gameplay of the team as a whole. It's something I've been working on and I think mentally it's been a lot nicer for me."

Ephey followed up, asking how Quinn has made the change to accommodate his teammates. Quinn said "it hasn't really changed the way I play pubs. I think a lot of it is sort of a mindset shift from this is what should be done, as opposed to this is what your players are good at and enabling that. He continued: "So maybe that looks like different heroes, it looks like us playing slightly differently, maybe slightly slower at phases or whatever. Pushing for ideal or whatever is just hard, so I think it comes more with just accepting things happening and playing for each individual situation as opposed to just striving... for the fastest win possible. I think that's the proper thing to do sometimes but not always.

Ephey asked if this was a natural thing or if he was forcing himself to do it. Quinn said "I definitely put myself into a groove of looking at grander things and had sort of a negative slip of looking at my own minutiae in terms of gameplay. So I think it's been a bit of a process to get back into it but I think every Dota player naturally functions best in this state where you're able to just stay in the zone and play your own game. So it's pretty easy to slid back into it because that's what you should be doing."

Ephey's then asked was if the team had any pre-game rituals. Quinn said that "we play a pre-match scrim to just get the jitters out." As for himself, Quinn said "I've dabbled with breathing exercises and meditation, and for whatever reason I haven't really stuck to it . Maybe that's just cause I'm a lazy bum! Besides that, not too much. Get some water, just try to chill out, and try to be in a calm state."

Ephey's last question was how comfortable Quinn was feeling on getting the major slot. Quinn responded "I think you definitely still have to be on your toes. I mean The Cut pushed Nouns to some pretty close series, I mean they almost lost. Taking them not seriously would be a mistake for sure."

He followed up: "EG is obviously EG, but to be honest it's very likely that whether or not we're going to the major is determined by the time we play EG. So I'm not really thinking about the series, when we play them I wanna win, but realistically we just need to win our next series, and see what happens with other teams and then we'll punch our ticket or not. Points are really relevant for us. Getting the number one seed is important because for us the best scenario is one where either EG or us qualifies directly to TI or both. A world where both of us are in the qualifiers is kind of trash."

Kevin "Purge" Godec then asked Fata about how they select teams for their pre-game scrims. Quinn responded that "generally we do play weaker teams. You don't wanna go scrim on EU ping the hardest team you can. You scrim Tundra in the morning and lose and you wanna die." He continued: "We actually played somewhat of a weaker team this morning, and we actually lost our scrim this morning. It didn't really effect us, I think the biggest benefit is just warming up, getting some of the jitters out. Maybe your tricking you brain into focusing the jitters on the scrim. This is the first team I've ever done it on and I think it's pretty good so far."

Purge lastly asked if the team was going to play any weird heroes in the near future. Quinn responded: We've got some weird stuff, we just haven't picked it yet. In scrims there was some Arc Warden five. I think Fata has a very large hero pool. He's comfortable playing a lot of core heroes as support. I think it just hasn't happened yet, but it'll happen!"

Can Quincy Crew secure a first place finish? Will they go to the major? Find out with us here, at esports.gg!