Similar to "Made in Brazil" in the old age of Counter-Strike where the team hired two players from a Norweigan team, Keyd team becomes the first Brazilian team in League of Legends to hire two rather unlikely players to complete their lineup.
A shocking announcement has been made by Keyd Team in that they are introducing two Korean players. While Winged of NaJin Black Sword was a sub on his team, he will now be on the main line-up as jungler for his new home. SuNo, who formerly played in SK Telecom T1, MVP Blue, and most recently Quantic Gaming, will take over the role of mid for the Brazilian team.
The team manager released a statement regarding the drastic change to an originally all Brazilian line-up.
With the hiring of foreign players, our greatest concern is that they may have some problems adapting to a very different country that they were used to, a different culture and very far away from home, along of course with the language barrier created by the difference in the languages spoken by the players. All of this was very well studied, Keyd has Korean roots and will look very closely to the adaption of SuNo and Winged to our contry. Regarding communication, we have studied some previous cases, when Brazilian and International teams have adapted their way of communicating to its new player. What we are gonna do is, our communication will work in linguistic blocks (3 languages) and a large block in English that will be the overall communication regarding decisions, rotations, fights, and shotcalling
In addition, we were able to interview the CEO and head coach of the new Keyd Stars team, who helped clarify the adjustments the team would be making with two Korean players on board:
First off, thanks for taking the time out of your busy day to answer a few questions. How long have you been looking outside of the borders of Brazil to complete this line-up and how did the pre-existing members feel when you brought up the idea?
Oh no problem, thanks for having this interview. This idea came up in an informal talk between friends when we remembered about mibr and what they've done to make the Brazilian CS scene grow. we've been since, for one and a half week of the hardest work of our lifes in this, searching for players and opportunities.
So you ended up talking to your players about it and they all agreed to it?
Let me start from the begining: we lost our jungler Revolta to CNB, a rival team. From that, one of our said options was to try to keep Revolta and take CNB's midlaner for our team, alongside a new ADC and put our toplaner in the reserve position.
Our midlaner was shocked (with reason) and decided to instantly leave the organization as a whole, even though he could've stayed as AD Carry maybe, but it didn't work, none of it. So we had no midlaner and no jungler from that point. From that point, we thought of that and approached our own players. they were really really excited but weren't believing it could happen.
Are there any other players from the Korean scene or other regions you tried to reach out to? How did they react when you reached out to them?
We've only contacted koreans, but yes inside Korea the process of choosing Winged wasn't all that easy and fast. We've talked to many junglers, from former OGN players to current ones. Obviously they were all afraid of in the first instance, but as we explained what we were going to do, it all became cleaner for them; our project is really nice and so are our ambitions. The good thing is that as I've met and am friends with most of CJ ENTUS Blaze and their staff. They would offer me recommendations and that sort of thing.
To follow up, does the team owner you mentioned help you guys get acquainted and communicate? Do you have any worries that the language barrier will make it difficult for your team to bond socially outside of just practicing and playing?
Yes, Edu will stay here in our house for a week and will try to come daily after that. I'm surely worried about it and am studying multiple cases at this time from not only eSports but normal sports as well. Foreign signings happens the most in normal sports, that's also one of the reasons we decided to bring up both SuNo and Winged instead of just one of them.
What are scrims like for your team? Do your players already have a set schedule?
We have a set schedule that was really well developed and have input from every great team and region in the world, putting up 8 hours of raw scrims in different hours of the day and with different things to do alongside scrims. Both Korean players also wanted to know our practice schedule and really liked it, not because it's more lax or something like that, but because it is actually close to what they're used to.
Do you think this is going to be the push Brazilian eSports needs to step up to the next level and compete internationally or is there more work needed?
There is surely way more work needed, that's why we plan on having bootcamps outside of our country among many other things. This is going to be a good push for Brazilian esports as a whole but a lot more for our team than for our scene. So we all will still need to work our souls out of our bodies to push our region to the next level.
Any last words before we close out this interview?
To close out, thank you a lot for this interview and opportunity Michale, I really hope that we start growing even more now but as a team with results so we can live up to the hype and recognition we're getting right now. Also thanks for everyone who follow us, also Keyd owners Andre and Edu, our sponsors Steelseries, NVIDIA, BenQ and id820, and last but not least to everyone who supported me and my team in the last few days and who are supporting now!
The full team that will arive once Winged and SuNo arrive this upcoming weekend will be as follows:
Mylon - Top
Winged - Jungle
SuNo - Mid
brTT - Marksman
Loop - Support
Source - Keyd