IMT Raes: “I don’t think NA is a good region at all, but we are part of it”

Immortals went 3-0 in week 1 and showed incredible promise to destabilize the entire standings. Unfortunately, week 2 was a completely different story, losing al three of their games. IMT Revenge already gave his thoughts on the tema's performance, why did it happen and the power media has on players.

We sat down with Immortals' ADC, Raes, following an extremely close game against Team Liquid that should have went in their favor but didn't. Immortals were ahead in the game from its start till the end, peaking at the 24th minute mark with a 4.7K gold lead. A few mistakes cost them a lot and Raes reflected on that perfectly.

Question: You enjoyed the lead in gold and kills over Team Liquid from the start of the game till its end. Which fight do you think flipped the momentum more than anything?

IMT Raes: I don't think it was the momentum. I mean, I feel like after we took the second Herald and then we gave them that dragon when we have like, 4K Gold, that was enough for us to lose. It feels like the momentum spread from there. When we go back to practice and look back at that game, I know we are going to beat ourselves up over it because I don't think we should have ever been in that position.

I don't think they should have ever had the opportunities they had. With the lead we had, we should have slowly choked them out of resources and closed out the game. To be honest, we were just like scared or don't know exactly what happened. After losing that dragon. I think we just lost it. We just didn't know what to do. I feel like we are kind of back to how we were during the old Spring Split and that was where our mid and late game was really bad.

Question: You gave up two dragons but one of them specifically where you let them take it and went into mid lane. I feel like there was a bit of a miscommunication because IMT Insanity went towards the inhibitor tower alone while the rest of the team suddenly spread across the map. Can you explain what happened there?

IMT Raes: Yeah, on that one it was kind of the same as the first dragon we gave up. Whichever team has priority and better setup around dragon gets it. At least for us, our team is really scared from face shaking and especially during this game. We had no real tank and our engage tools not really there so we have to give it up really. You have to take into consideration we were up against a Varus-Xin Zhao composition, which is really hard to walk into.

So with the third and fourth dragon, like the same thing happened where we didn't have set up we went there in time. And we ended up having to concede both those dragons, even after wanting to contest them. We had to concede and then we had these backup plans, which aren't exactly optimal when we're like so far ahead. On the fifth dragon since it is obviously soul, we had to get set up first on that one and we managed to secure that one. So that was good, but I think like the game was already really in a bad state at that point when it shouldn't have been.

Question: How do you recover from such a loss where you know you can win it 9 times out of 10 from the position you were in? Will it come back to bite you at the end of the season if you don't make playoffs?

IMT Raes: I don't think this Team Liquid match will come back to bite us. I don't think we'll be real contenders if all we do is try to go along this trend of contending for like seventh and eighth place the entire split. That's already a bad look going into potentially playoffs. On a good day when everyone is performing and we just get our shit sorted, we can be a team that can contest seriously in playoffs and actually be considered for a shot at the title.

Right now, especially this week, I really played poorly on stage. I've been in games like these where we've just playing scared, which brings back the old Immortals from Spring and none of us want that. If we'd like get our mid to late game down, get our shit down in general as a team, we will actually be able to beat every one every time, I know we can beat every team. I don't think NA is a good region at all, but we're a part of that region and we're one of those problem teams; I do feel guilty for that sometimes.

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Question: How are you preparing for next week with Cloud9, TSM and FlyQuest on your schedule?

IMT Raes: I think going into next week, we have to take it on with a fresh mindset. It's a new week, new set of games. Our team are just going have to figure things out again. I won't really say we will put this week behind us, but just try to learn from it as much as we can as fast as we can. Because like, there's a lot to take from these games.

At least there is things to take from the third. Actually, not really, there's a lot to take from this game. But like this week overall, I just like inted a bit and that could be fixed. And then the first day, we had a poor draft against Evil Geniuses. So that game was like really difficult to play out as it is before even loading up on the rift. I think to prepare for the three upcoming teams, we're just going to practice, recognize the meta better and try and keep the style that we want to play well. It is all on us so all we have to do now is just drill it into us and hopefully execute against those top teams to prove that Immortals are actually a good team again.

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