These Are Pengu's Favourite Operators To Pick
Niclas "Pengu" Mouritzen is a Danish Rainbow Six: Siege professional player. In his career, he has won countless trophies and belongs to the most dominant R6 team of all time - G2 Esports. We try to shed light on how the player approaches the game, and what makes him so successful, by discussing his favourite operator picks in Rainbow Six.
In the European league, Pengu has mostly picked Hibana on attack, and Smoke on defence. The two operators play into his strengths and style. When attacking bomb sites, Pengu prefers to be one of the last men in. He lets others find the entry kills and stays alive for the aftermath. Because of this, he has been able to win the most 1vX situations of any player in EUL, six in total. This behaviour also manifests in an above-average round survival rate of 41%. So what operator can be played from a distance, but still contribute massively with their utility?
PENGU ON ATTACK
For the attacking side, the answer is Hibana. As a hard-breacher, she is capable of destroying reinforced walls. Thermite and Lion can do this as well, but they would require Pengu to enter the site. Both have to deploy their wall-destroying gadgets in close proximity, whereas Hibana can just launch her X-KAIROS pellets from a safe distance.
When using the operator, we can see Pengu do just that. A great example would be the first round of G2 Esports' match against Rogue in the first stage of EUL. On Villa, Rogue had reinforced the Aviator/Games bomb sites. From the balcony, Pengu was able to deploy his pellets to create an opening into the Aviator room. This gave his team a direct sightline into the connector between the two sites. While G2 were probably trying to already set up for an afterplant, where one player could basically cut off one bombsite entirely from the outside, they ended up losing too many players on entry.
So the last survivors of G2, Pengu and Ben "CTZN" McMillan, joined forces and managed to get the defuser down. Eventually, Pengu clutched the round for his team. In the following rounds, he mostly relied on his Hibana play again. Once in the entire half, he picked Maverick. Unfortunately, he was quickly defeated by Leon "LeonGids" Giddens while entering the building.
Pengu really appears to favour the types of operators that let him stay in the backlines. He is rarely ever seen at the front, which also translates into his defensive playstyle. There, he mostly relies on operators that aren't incredibly useful at the start of the round but grow into impactful playmakers towards the end.
If you watch the Six Invitational 2017 aftermovie to the end, you will see Pengu clutching out the last round on Hibana, winning PENTA the match and the SI trophy!
PENGU ON DEFENCE
Smoke is an operator who exemplifies this tactic perfectly. His toxic canisters are virtually useless at the start of the round. But if the player manages to stay alive well into the later stages of the round, he can deny entry to the opponents and, most importantly, deny plants. Ironically, this was actually done to him in the G2 vs Rogue match. Attempting to plant the defuser at the end of the round, Pengu was halted and eventually killed by a smoke canister.
But just as they shut him down in this instance, so does Pengu regularly win fights with his Smoke. He still manages to be useful in the preparation stage, where he uses his shotgun to create vision and rotation holes. This way, his colleagues can save their grenades and utility for later. During the round itself, he is one of the players who stay near the site. His abilities and utility don’t make him into a great roamer and should the enemy team manage to breach the defence, his smokes are required instantly.
We were able to see one of those rounds play out in their match against Virtus.pro on the last play-day of EUL. G2 chose to defend the Garage bomb sites, meaning that the attackers would likely attempt to open the garage doors up and try to enter the site vertically as well. At the start of the round, Pengu went upstairs to the ground floor and secured the hatch in Toilets, proceeding to destroy the surrounding walls. This would leave any attackers trying to destroy the hatch open to a multitude of angles. He then went back downstairs, created a few more holes for vision and then positioned himself behind a stack next to the site. As VP opened the garage doors, he was able to delay them with three smoke canisters. From that position, he managed to get kills onto players pushing the Yellow Stairs as well. This round serves as a perfect example of how Pengu approaches defence in Rainbow Six: Siege.
If Pengu doesn’t pick Smoke, he often picks Mute, the reason being that both operators play similarly. Both can pick a shotgun as the primary weapon and then use the SMG-11 as a secondary. The player can thus use the shotgun to create holes and openings and still has a strong sub-machine gun to win fights with. He really seems to like this weapon in particular, as he can also be seen on Sledge often. With this weapon, he commits to short-range fights, where the high fire rate outweighs the comparatively low damage output.
His abilities will soon be tested to the core in the European August Major. There, G2 will fight for the trophy alongside Rogue, Virtus.Pro, and BDS. None of these teams are clear-cut favourites, making this one of the tensest R6 competitions in recent memory. Statistically speaking, we will probably witness quite a bunch of heroic Hibana and Smoke plays from the Danish legend.
Images via Ubisoft | SiegeGG
