It's been a rough year for Froggen. A tough 2015 with Elements immediately transitioned into being sidelined from the NA LCS in visa hell, and he came back to a team sitting tied for dead last. But he's wasted no time in trying to turn things around, and Echo Fox have skyrocketed to the middle of the pack with a 4-game winning streak. It's tough to say how far they can go, but it goes beyond saying that his return has made competition in North America considerably more interesting.
I got a chance to chat with Froggen last week, after their win over NRG eSports. Due to personal circumstances I wasn't able to publish it last week, but here it is now. I still think the content is worth putting out there, but just keep that in mind!
Henrik "Froggen" Hansen
You're back, you went 2-0, how do you feel?
It feels good. We just did what we practiced, and it happened to work out.
You've been gone for a long time. What have you been up to since the visa stuff hit?
Nothing. I've just been playing League all day pretty much. We've been team-practising a lot, so we've been on a normal schedule with practice and all that.
Have you been in America the whole time?
I've been at the house for most of the time. We went to Canada for a couple of days to get the visas.
So you were rotating with the people who were going to play in LCS for scrims?
We didn't scrim with the people who were playing in LCS at all. We just kept scrimming with our main roster – kept focusing on the big goal of actually improving as a team and to show it once we got back.
Now you're sitting in a big hole, but you've showed some pretty impressive games since coming back. Do you think you can make the push back?
Yeah, I definitely think we can. We won against NRG, which is regarded as one of the better teams. There's still a lot of way to go, and the patches are gonna change next week, so we'll see how good we are at adapting. But I definitely think we can do it.
It seemed like you pretty much had control of that game from the beginning. How did the game vs NRG feel for you guys?
It felt pretty good to play out. I think we were actually stronger throughout all stages of the game. They tried to group up on us when we actually had a really good power spike, and team fight before they had their power spike, so we just won a really good team fight with Kfo hitting 4 people. From then on it felt pretty easy to win the game.
So like you were saying the new patch is going to hit pretty soon and change things up – the new Assassin item and everything. You've traditionally been stereotyped as a farm-oriented player, lots of mages – you going to be moving towards some assassins? What do you think about the new item?
The last three years, my most played champions have been assassins so I think that's a wrong statement. [On the item] I haven't seen it too much. I think the cooldown is too long because you proc it on an auto-attack. It's really hard to control when you want to use it, and I don't think that's good. If you randomly use it, it's a 2-minute cooldown. So it actually doesn't give you that much unless you can control the passive really well.
So you don't think it's going to push champs like Talon or Zed into a place where they're a little too strong?
No, I think it's good later on in the game but in the early stages you still need more armor penetration items, you need to build a bit defensive or you're going to get blown up...stuff like that. I don't think it's gonna change too much.
How do you feel about mid lane in general right now? Up til the new season we had a pretty huge amount of diversity in the mid lane at the end of Season 5, but in Season 6 we've seen a lot of Corki and a lot of Viktor, a little bit of Zed and some other champions. How do you think mid lane is right now?
I think if you want to, you can play whatever champion you really want. It's more about if you can counter pick these common picks. You'll most likely go even in lane and then you'll have different power spikes and you do different things. In general, it's just easier to just play the strongest champions at the time which are Corki, Viktor, and so on. But you can play against it as people have proven in LCS, especially this (last) week.
Are there any picks you think people aren't touching that'll be pretty strong come the new patch?
I'm not sure right now. I think there's some picks that can be really good for counter picking, especially if Zed is coming back. We could see Urgot returning – he kinda fell out once he couldn't counter pick all these assassin champions anymore, but if they're coming back he might come back too.
Going forward, we're in the 2nd round robin and you guys are starting to come back, but where do you think you still have to grow if you want to make a push towards playoffs?
I think we have to grow everywhere. I don't think there's a certain thing...actually, communication is probably the most important thing we'd need to grow on. We obviously have some language barrier, with Kfo on top lane. But he's learning English every single day, so that's improving all the time, but that's the most important thing. Besides that, there's nothing we're perfect at, so…
How's the communication with him going – how has the process been?
I think it's been fairly easy. It's nothing that we haven't been able to overcome at least, and he's showing improvement in all those areas. It's been pretty good. Actually, for the team in general, I think it's been pretty good progress. We've been needing to use simple communication that everyone can understand, so we can't even go in and talk too advanced about a lot of things, and so no one on the team gets confused. It's just really simple communication we're using, so I think that's really good.
And just to finish up – today's Valentine's Day, are you doing anything afterward?
Nope. I'm playing League of Legends!