The UK scene always welcomes a fresh face and the new kids on the block are here to impress. Soul’s Land are a combination of international university students who are now competing in the UK, with their star player kisynergy, playing alongside Major attendee Sebastian “volt” Malos at KCL University.
The widely unknown team has started their UK LAN journey with a bang, coming second in their EPIC.LAN groups and dominating their first Upper Bracket matchup, Granny Knockers but Good, in a 2-0 win. Before that though, their AWPing IGL, XRT, sat down with UKCSGO to discuss the origins of his team, how he’s enjoying his first LAN experience, and what their goals are for the future. Can you guess which UK player called him a cheater on FACEIT?
XTR sat down with Dafydd Gwynn at EPIC40
Okay, so just to start, how have you found your first LAN experience in the UK?
It’s quite cool actually, the atmosphere here? Amazing. Yeah.
Was it different than you expected? Or is it exactly how you expected?
No, actually, like the LAN tournament I saw before because I’ve only seen the LAN tournaments for pro games. I was picturing that. I thought it was supposed to be seated on the stage, left and right. Yeah, something like that. But yeah, it’s quite cool.
What would you prefer?
Me? I don’t mind actually. But I heard from Finn [Mischief] that only the Grand Final teams will go to the stage. Yeah, but we have a chance. Yeah, but we have to try it. So it will be little bit of a pity if we are eliminated.
In your group, they were kind of saying it’s the group of death. It was the hardest group out of the whole thing. How did you find your opponents?
Right, so… everyone’s good. First of all. Yeah, everyone’s good. I have to say, even though we win them with a large gap between the points, I can see that everyone here practices and they prepare. Yeah, that’s cool. That’s very cool actually. The strongest team will be K10. Obviously, we lose to them once in [UKIC] Division 1 and it was 6-13 I remember, but today, we lose to them 3-13. After that, all of my teammates, are just sitting in front of the screen and watching the screen, they think nothing, they see nothing, you know? Yeah, they were crashed actually [laughs]. But I’m quite amazed that they [K10] lost to I need more bullets.
What did you think about the team, I need more bullets, when you played them?
They are quite a good team. We played Mirage and got 6-6 on first half. Mirage is our best map, one of the best maps. Because we play Mirage a lot. I have like 2000 FACEIT games and half of them are mirage. Yeah, because I play premium. You know, you play premium and it’s always Mirage, Mirage, Mirage. Their AWPer, Dexie, he was a really good AWPer I have to say, he gets a lot of entry frags, he’s annoying us a lot.
So the one thing I want to talk about is before this event in UKIC Division 1, you beat Raptors who are widely considered the best team in the UK or at least one of the best teams in the UK. How were you feeling after that game, where you expecting to win?
We beat them once in FACEIT ladder, but you know tournaments is different from the normal FACEIT. Actually before we start we know they are an Advanced team on ESEA and we showed our respect actually, before we start on inferno. We set our small goal, “our goal today is to play against the Raptors and get 10 points.”
But gradually, after the T side, we can 9-3 on the first half and we said our small goal is 10. And now with the first half, we got nine, maybe let’s just win then [laughs]. Then we just try it and try hard and finally we did it.
That must have been an incredible feeling right? To have this goal of only getting 10 and then you won. I want to move on to the UK scene. In the UK scene everybody knows everybody, one AWPer knows another AWPer, one rifler knows another, but nobody knew who you were until very recently. So that begs the question, who are you guys?
Right? Actually, we met each other in this discord that we’ve got for Chinese CS:GO players in Europe. And we met each other on there. Most people know kisynergy because he’s the one from the uni league. He did really well and he teamed up with volt at KCL who is a Major player as well. I’m graduated, so I don’t play uni, I simply play ESEA and FACEIT ladders with the other four guys. So I think it’s quite normal that people don’t know us. But actually we have a high elo on FACEIT so we play always against arTisT, and ifan so many times so they know us on FACEIT ladder, but ifan says I am a cheater [laughs].
We actually spoke to ifan earlier and he was saying that it’s so cool to see Soul’s Land on LAN because it’s nice to see fresh faces in the scene. Do you think you’re going to come back to LAN? Is this something you’ll want to make more regular?
We will try our best to attend every LAN. We will try our best, including at the end of the year, the top 4 teams for the UK Division One, Finn told me we’ve got the LAN. Yeah, yeah, we’re also trying for that.
What are your expectations? Do you think you’re going to make that?
For me? Before everything starts, I think every team is fifty-fifty to us except DuckDuckGoose with ZAL. They are so insane I have to say, they literally destroyed us. Like, we played the road to LAN finals, the the upper bracket finals, they literally destroyed us. 26 points for two maps, we have zero chance to win against them, zero. That’s what we talked about after the game. The points we won, we only got seven points in two maps. And we said the seven points are the points that we should have won. But the rest of the 26 points they won, we have zero chance of winning them. Yeah, they are so good. I have to say.
So just going back to your team, tell me a bit about the players on your team. What are their backgrounds? How do they play? How do you guys play as a team?
Yeah, right. So to start with kisynergy he wasn’t one of our team members. He was on another Chinese team, and we play like the Chinese vs Chinese CS:GO tournament in Europe, and we beat them. After that, we invited him to join our team and he said yes. He’s really good.
For Wh1mzzz, he used to be our IGL but his favourites pro star is NiKo. Yeah, seriously. So he said that he wants to focus on his aim, he just wants to think about the crosshair, he doesn’t want to think about others. I’m the AWPer like I was before, but I don’t play on the AWP as much on CS2. Like s1mple said, on CS2 the AWP is not impactful. So different.
As for Sundance, he was anchor for our team, but he’s more like Perfecto. He said he’s Chinese perfecto, he plays support really good and plays Mirage B and solo defence on one site.
For Harborboy he was a Chinese player, he has a friend who is a Chinese pro playing for a team called New Happy. So we team up with each others and, other than kisynergy we played together for just less than two years. kisynergy has played with us for two months.
Have you brought him in really quickly?
No. It is not a struggle, we had good chemicals [chemistry], but the gaming style we still have to change.
Anything else you want to add?
Come on Raptors! Beat K10, let’s meet in the Grand Finals.
