LastShadow: "I rate ToD as top three foreign protoss"

Photo by: MLG

Nick "LastShadow" De Cesare, formerly of Team GosuGamers, talks to team Dignitas about his stay in Korea, the players he holds highest esteem of and why he would never shoot for an MLG-granted Code A seed.

LastShadow joined GosuGamers in March 2011 and in August he traveled to Korea to live and train with the Mvp B-team. Since October, Nick has been releasing vlogs on his stay in the East and those are one of the topic discussed during the interview with team Dignitas.

LastShadow opens the chat by expressing his adoration of South Korea, not just in terms of practice environment but also in terms of culture. The ex-GosuGamers player is positive that moving out of the United States and to Korea helped him improve both mechanically and strategically, due to not having to play "players with inferior timings and inferior build understanding outside of a select few players".

- "I want to live in Korea indefinitely, my Korean is improving very slowly but surely and I plan to eventually take a language course or something when I can afford it. Living with my friend Terry who's a Korean citizen but also super fluent in English helps out a lot too since he's extremely helpful. I don't plan to ever return to America really, I will apply for PR here in a few years after I've built up enough time or whatever else I can do to obtain it. However nothing is ever 100% in anything, and there's only probably one thing that could make me return to America realistically, but that's off-topic."

The talented terran player further shares that he is currently on the look for a new team. He talks about his misfortunes in finding a Korean team and also elaborates on what kind of foreign roster he would like to join.

- "I'd be open to joining a foreigner team that have presence in Korea, but only ones with a presence in Korea and a not a half-assed run in Korea or something (for example only coming here to play a GSTL or something). I would prefer the team also have Koreans on it as well and not made up of only foreigners, so I suppose this really cuts back on teams I actually like."

The topic of the interview then shifts to the players who Nick holds high values for. Who does LastShadow admire and who does he think are the most underrated players on the scene at the moment?

- "I rate ToD as top three foreign protoss, with probably the greatest ability to articulate his thoughts and put his knowledge into others. He thinks about the game the way other foreigners whom I hold high respect to also think about it, such as Liquid'Ret, Mondragon, and the no-longer playing Yosh, to name just some examples. [...] For underrated, I'm not really sure, Morrow and ToD don't get the credit they deserve I feel. I feel the same for Cytoplasm and Juan. It might sound like I'm just spouting off players at the GOMHouse but this is far from the truth."

In answering the question if his plans to stay in Korea indefinitely includes not participating in any foreign tournaments, LastShadow is adamant that this will in fact be the case, seeing no point of wasting sponsor money travelling abroad while "people like MVP, Nestea, MMA, etc exist and go to events". In addition, while on the topic of foreign tournaments, Nick expresses his very strong opinion on earning a Code A seed through MLG.

- "That's so morally fucked up I can't even imagine why someone would aim to knowingly steal a seed from a Korean that probably deserves it more than you. If I deserve Code A, I will win through the qualifiers, I shouldn't obtain it through silly invites or online tournaments, that's dishonourable and pathetic compared to what the ancestor game bw set as a standard for us."

Source: Catch the rest of the interview on Team Dignitas