The new season of the North American League of Legends Championship Series starts in just a few weeks and eSports fans couldn’t be happier that the off-season is finally ending. Last year’s rosters have been turned on their heads, with teams picking up players from all around the world in hopes of winning an LCS championship, and maybe even a World Championship. One team that’s getting ready for the craziness that Season 7 will bring is Echo Fox. After nearly losing their spot to relegations in the 2016 Summer Split, Rick Fox’s eSports team is ready to show NA what they can really do.
IDigitalTimes talked with Jake Fyfe, Echo Fox’s general manager about the team’s new roster, how they are preparing for the off-season and Keith’s Ziggs.
The Looper In The Room
There wasn’t a single League of Legends fan who expected Looper to join a North American team, let alone Echo Fox. Looper is one of the most decorated Korean players to ever touch the top lane, winning the 2014 LoL World Championship with Samsung Galaxy White. After, he spent a year with Chinese team Royal Never Give Up and has now decided to make NA his home. So far, it’s been a smooth transition says Fyfe.
“A lot of our guys respect him, have been watching videos of him and looked up to him and now get to play with him,” Fyfe told iDigitalTimes. “When we brought him in, we boot camped in Korea for a month in December and that was the first time the team had any interaction with him. Within the first couple of days, he went out and bought his own English books, he’s definitely motivated to integrate into our team.”
Having a foreign player with a language barrier can be quite the obstacle, but EF are prepared. EF picked Looper over some of the other foreign top laners because of his ability to speak and learn English. “Looper played in China for a full year ... and he was able to learn fluent Mandarin in under a year and he didn’t even have a tutor,” Fyfe said. HeavenTime, a strategic coach for Echo Fox, is bilingual and is able to translate for Looper whenever necessary.
In under a month, Looper has already learned how to speak with the rest of his teammates. To keep everyone on the same page, words like “gank, kill and flank” are kept out of in-game communications. This helps Echo Fox play League of Legends as a well coordinated unit.
“The guys can talk with him just fine,” Fyfe said. “He’s very vocal too, he’s calling out teleports, enemy cooldowns, in game it’s very clean. We have to standardize our language in-game.”
Looper may already be one of the best players in the world, but he’s ready to prove his worth to Echo Fox and the rest of North America. “Looper is a humble guy, he respects and looks up to all the Eastern top laners like, Smeb, Duke and Ssumday.”
Season 7 LCS Changes
Riot has decided to implement some major changes for the 2017 LCS season. The biggest is that games will have 10-bans instead of the usual six. Fyfe believes that this change will help Echo Fox since “our team loves the 10-ban system. We think it creates more strategy, preparation and planning and that’s something we excel at more than other teams.”
EF’s players have had a wide enough champion pool to excel in this new season of the LCS. “We are going to be able to out ban people and put them in uncomfortable situations and show some of our pocket picks outside of the meta, we are going to see more personality in picks,” Fyfe said. “You can’t out ban Froggen or Looper, our major force in the top lane.”
Season 7 has also been notoriously rough for bot lane Marksmen or ADCs. “My team has been calling this season RIP AD, it’s going to be a tough season for ADCs, this season is really going to test Keith’s positioning” Fyfe said. “He’s definitely going to have to get ready for all the weird stuff that’s going to happen.” Keith has been practicing his bot lane Ziggs and might even have some other pocket picks up his sleeve.
Gate, the former support for Team Impulse and Phoenix1, is ready to back up Echo Fox’s ADC, Keith. “Gate is one of the most positive players I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. He’s so optimistic, it’s almost unreal. He’s mentoring Keith and after every game they look at Plays.tv and go over each point in the game where it didn’t go great.”
Echo Fox’s Unorthodox Practice
Echo Fox practices differently than other League of Legends pro teams. Instead of scrimming against other LCS teams, they keep everything in-house, playing games with their 10-man roster. “We are keeping very close to our selves in this off season, we are trying to become self-sufficient,” Fyfe said. “Not a lot of teams know what we are doing and we don’t know how well the other teams are playing in the off-season either.”
Rick Fox, the ex-Laker and current team owner, is the driving force behind this new practice system. “When we look at the scrim environment, we keep doing the same thing just because that’s how it’s been done for the last five years. Rick is coming in with more experience in his sport than League of Legends has even been out for” Fyfe said. “The Lakers aren’t practicing against the Bulls.”
Get ready to cheer on Echo Fox in the NA LCS Spring Split every week, starting Jan. 20.
