LEC winner G2 Mikyx – “I’m not too happy about how we played”

After 3-0ing regular season rivals Fnatic, G2 Esports have claimed their fifth consecutive Split Playoffs, and support Mihael "Mikyx" Mehle sat down with esports.gg right after the match to chat it out.

G2 Esports seem inevitable in the regular season, despite Fnatic consistently taking huge gold leads in the early game of all three games, they kept prying defeat from the jaws of victory. Each time, G2 found a disoriented and unsynchronized Fnatic and punished them severely for poor choices and fights. After the dust had settled, Mikyx spoke with us about the series, why he's not fully happy with the win, and more.

We're coming off a really fast series, Miky. Firstly, congratulations on the win, how are you feeling about the series about your team's run through playoffs more generally?

"After the series, I guess I feel mixed emotions. Relief, that we actually won the series, and it wasn’t that close, I guess, and it was fast. I'm not too happy about how we played, or how I played. Kinda reminded of the Mad Lions series we played where I was dying a lot.

But at least this time I feel like I didn’t get caught as much. I was just dying because of stupid individual stuff, like in lane, and stuff like this. So I feel kinda bad, but not as bad. About our run, we had a bit of a rough patch, I think we were not very sure what we wanted to do on the patch and that showed in our last three series, I think.

I think now, in the end, we’ve kind of figured it out, but it’s still a bit awkward. I’m just kind of just looking forwards to new patches, I think we can figure them out a bit better. And now that we’re going to Worlds, we can be a bit less stressed about the whole thing, because, yeah, the last week was very stressful."

Is that something that you value really highly? The ability to not sweat your international life going into Season Finals? You can just set your eyes on Worlds and not be stressed about winning Finals.

"Yeah, pretty much. I think for every pro player the goal is just to win Worlds. Especially after you were at Worlds at the previous year, and you’re out, and you don’t win, then you basically just have to wait another year just to have another shot at it. It’s kind of just been a waiting period to get there again and to do better this time around. This time I feel like we have a way better shot than we did last year. So, I’m looking forward to that."

We just spoke to Fnatic's coach Nightshare about the volatility of the meta, which is something a lot of pros have mentioned, and he had specific complaints about where the Support role is at. He was talking about how poor supports are walking around with one item Warmog's praying not to be one-shot so they can regen their HP and do something useful. How do you view the post-midseason meta?

"I think for sure Warmog’s is kind of strong, but I feel like the job of the support didn’t change as much. I think, mostly, it’s just about mid/jungle, AP junglers being really strong and ADs mid being strong as well, on the patch. So everybody else just plays that and everyone has to just adapt to that. It kinda happens that you want to have tank engage supports with AP junglers, because you want frontline.

But it also happens that those AP junglers can also one-shot the supports because they do percentage max health. Your job is just to throw your spells, stay in front, block spells from enemies, and hope your team does more damage. So I guess it’s a bit extreme in that regard, but it’s always similar when there are front-to-back comps, these fights will happen. But yeah, I think this version is a lot more extreme than others." 

What changes do you guys want to make to the way you approach the meta on a specific patch? You mentioned a rough patch of not knowing what you wanted to do with the patch, how did you fix that and what were the problems that were causing it?

"The thing is that nothing on the patch stood out as being really OP. So it kinda seemed like it was up to the team what they wanted to play. That was kind of our thing. That switched, day-to-day, what we were prioritizing. One time we played AP junglers into tank junglers, then the next day we play tank junglers into AP junglers, and we kept switching.

"So we’re never sure what’s actually the winning side. So we just kinda picked whatever we preferred, and sometimes that turned the draft a bit awkward. I guess, for the future, I think the process just needs to be: we have to find what we think is the strongest on the patch, what counters it, and, yeah, just adapt based on that.

I think we could for sure be more creative in terms of what champs we actually think are strong, stylistically, or what champion gets countered by some other champion’s kit. We were kind of just following other regions and just kind of doing what they did. But nothing was very consistent in what was winning all the time."

"Like, Sejuani first pick was picked a lot but it was kind of losing. Leona blind pick was picked very often at the start: now it’s like 30% winrate. So people didn’t really play with it, people stopped. Zyra, as well, is quite high. It just felt, random, this whole thing, which champions actually win. Like, Brand/Zyra matchups all the time. "

We've already asked Caps and Dylan this, and apparently, it's something you've talked about a lot at G2. If you could pick a new Runterra region to be featured for Arcane Season 3, what region would you pick, and what champion from that region do you want to see?

"I think Bilgewater would be cool, because there’s Pyke, and he, like, fights sea monsters and stuff. I think Graves is also cool, I’d like to see him, I guess Illaoi, GP, MF, these are all pretty cool champions. And Tahm Kench too, I guess. "

I think you're the first Bilgewater answer from LEC, nice!

"Freljord and Shurima is too mainstream, but it’d be cool though. I think any of them are cool, honestly. I like Freljord, I like Shurima, but thinking about it a bit more, I can’t give the same answer. And I also like Bilgewater. Yeah. "

Any quick words for fans as you set your sights on Finals and Worlds?

"Thank you for sticking with us. We had kind of a rough patch so anyone who didn’t lose faith in us completely, I appreciate it. I hope we can restore that faith during our Season Finals, when we can get our….stuff…together a little bit more and show some cleaner performances, especially for myself.

I was not very clean the last two days especially. So yeah, but at least it can’t be much worse, so that’s the bright side. I look forward to Worlds, I think we’re gonna do some cool stuff over there."

Mikyx and G2 have locked their spot for Worlds 2024 and will return for the LEC Season Finals as the final boss of the bracket after a one-week-long break.

That's all for now, stay tuned to esports.gg for more LEC and LCS esports coverage and interviews.