Meet MAD Lions’ Carzzy: one of the LEC’s brightest prospects
The League of Legends European Championship (LEC) is only three weeks into its new season but the newest team, MAD Lions, has already left quite the impression.
The young squad has been a breath of fresh air with brave and aggressive decision making as they attempt to individually outplay their opponents. They play with little fear and perhaps most importantly of all, have fun while doing so.
On the analyst desk last week, one topic host Alex "Machine" Richardson was keen to keep talking about was the importance of having fun and being friends with your teammates. In a stressful environment where you need to practice hard every day, keeping high team morale can be crucial.
It’s a quality that MAD seemingly have in abundance and is an attitude that is epitomized by 18-year-old ADC Matyáš 'Carzzy' Orság who could be seen on player cams laughing after dying in fountain thanks to his own bold call and a Sett ultimate from Rogue’s Finn 'Finn' Wiestål.
Since joining the LEC, Carzzy has not stopped posting on Twitter and bantering the rest of the LEC’s pros. When asking him about how he’s finding the new level of play, he couldn’t wait to mention his followers: “It's a lot of fun to play on stage and it's also fun that you get so much more reach on social media so you can do funny stuff.”
In the squad’s stage debut, MAD had the intimidating task of taking on Worlds finalists G2 Esports. Before the game even got going, Carzzy was telling the G2 players in all-chat to follow his Twitter and after just 10 minutes the squad found themselves five kills up and quickly grew a solid gold lead. It was a particularly good start for Carzzy who had already picked up two kills in lane on Mihael “Mikyx” Mehle.
The bravado of the team was something that even caught Rasmus “Caps” Winther by surprise as he said to me he’d expected a team full of rookies to be more nervous when playing on stage for the first time.
Carzzy confirmed that Caps was wrong, at least initially: “Actually I wasn't nervous at all. I went into the game with confidence and I knew the chances of us winning were small but once we started getting a lead I actually started choking because I knew we had a chance.”
It’s a lesson that he’ll undoubtedly have learnt from but the early signs are that the Czech bot-laner will have a very promising career. Debuting at just 17 years of age, Carzzy has taken to pro play naturally. His aggressive and brave playstyle is shining through as he currently has the second-highest average damage per minute (647) and percentage of a team’s damage (34.9%) in the entire league.
Click to enlargeThough, considering the fact he’s an EU Masters champion, his strong performances shouldn’t come as a surprise. “The tournament (EUM) helped me a lot” Carzzy says, adding: “I didn't know a lot about lane management, wave management, all this macro stuff. But, once the EU Masters started my former team began talking about it and I learnt quite a lot. It helped me big time, I don't think I could have played on stage as I have been without it.”
Carrzy has been playing the game since he was very young, he even first reached Challenger when he was 14-years-old. However, Carzzy revealed to us he wasn’t sure about the game at first:
“My friends got me into League of Legends. When I was 10 years old I used to say LoL is boring but then I started playing it and I got addicted. I was just playing, playing, playing, playing. That's pretty much it.”
It’s a story that many of us can relate to, apart from the fact he reached Challenger after playing for just a few years. Still, while many of the new generation of pro players walked down this career path after watching early tournaments which solidified their decision to try competing as well, Carzzy admits that his pro career came about almost by accident.
“I actually don't think I ever thought that I wanted to become a pro. It came out of nowhere, I was playing for fun and once I was Challenger I started playing in small tournaments for Riot Points. There were some teams in the Czech Republic too that were always picking me up and then out of nowhere I got into a better team. I was like, oh this is so much fun maybe I should start playing in competitive. That's how it all began.”
However, if you think Carrzy is only playing for fun and doesn’t have a competitive streak you’re very much mistaken. He’s already decided that he has a few “rivals”:
“I want to play against Vitality again since I find Comp my rival and I can't wait for Milica to join the league so I can beat them even with him. I have played against Comp a lot in scrims, he's always defeated me in scrims but in tournaments I've always defeated him. We're both young and we both got into the LEC in the same split so I think it's a rivalry, we're friends but rivals at the same time. Then I'd like to smash my Czech colleague Patrik then I'm also excited to play against Rekkles and Upset.”
With matches against Fnatic and Origen next week, we’ll get to see just how Carzzy matches against those last two in perhaps his biggest individual test yet. After MAD showed absolutely no fear against G2, Carzzy says you will see much more of the same from the team in all of their games:
“I think you can expect a lot of fun, a lot of craziness and aggressive gameplay still. I think we're an early-game team, in scrims we're always playing aggro team comps and we're usually ending the games really fast while fighting 24/7 but I think we need to get more comfortable on stage before that starts happening in LEC games.”
Images via Riot Games
