In the world of competitive Dota 2, new teams don’t always land on the scene and immediately make a big impact. GLYPH is bucking that trend by immediately securing an invite to BLAST Slam VII in just their second official tournament.
Made up of a series of familiar SEA names, and backed by former Alliance and Execration coach, Leon “Arthur” Lee, GLYPH already holds victories over the region’s top teams, including REKONIX and Team Nemesis.
Jaxon.gg sat down with coach Arthur following his team’s qualification for BLAST Slam VII. He told us a little about how the team was formed, GLYPH’s early success
GLYPH qualified for BLAST Slam VII through RES Unchained 4. Image Credit: RES/Relog Media
So just to start out, GLYPH is a brand new team. Can you run us through a little bit about how this team came together, how it started out?
Leon “Arthur” Lee: “So I think that it started out a little bit over a month ago, when I decided to leave Execration after DreamLeague Season 28. And then I poked JaCkky (Souliya Khoomphetsavong) because at that point, I knew that JaCkky is the person that I really wanted to work with.
After I left Execution, I went to him and said, ‘do you want to make a stack together?’ I didn’t even know if anyone else would be available. All I knew is that I wanted to work with JaCkky.
Why JaCkky? I think mostly because I feel like in my one year experience with Execration, I feel like it’s really important to be able to find a core player that has the discipline in and outside of the game to really bring the team to another level. That’s what I realized. So that’s why the name that popped off in my mind is JaCkky.
And then thankfully for me, he was a free agent. I talked to him. He’s down. And we start building from there. And he was the one that basically suggested, ‘um who else do we have in mind?’ And he was like, OK, we have zeal (Nicholas Lim), we have Narman (Ravdan Narmandakh), we have Jhocam (Tri Kuncoro), Emo (Zhou YI), and then we just start off from there. And then we started to make calls to everyone, and then everyone is like, ‘OK, I’m down. Let’s do this.’ And that’s basically how it formed.”
So on this team, you have a variety of players who’ve come from different levels of play. You have major winners, people who’ve been to TI, regional champions, and then players who are maybe still looking for their first big international victory kind of on a big stage. Does having that mix of, I suppose, motivation, but also experience, help drive the competitive edge of the team?
Arthur: “Yeah, for sure. I think so. I think the one thing that I noticed the most that these players have compared to my experience before is the ones that have made it before, like winning tournaments, I think in our team it would be JaCkky winning a LAN with BOOM Esports before and then obviously Emo from the Singapore Major, they have a lot of individual confidence when it comes to their own gameplay. And they will be very sharp and very explicit and clear with how they want to be helped.
I thought that was really, really important because it’s so easy. Imagine if a support player, your cores are telling you exactly how they need to be helped. It just makes the game so much easier. And I think that is something that is almost very hard, in my opinion, to coach, at least for myself, because as a coach, I’m looking at things from a broad perspective. I’m looking at the big picture most of the time, ‘how timings, yada yada, gel together.’
But one thing that I’m not capable of doing very well is individual stuff. Like I can’t tell Emo, ‘bro you need to play out this situation, how do you need to play this matchup,’ these are the things that the players need to know and I’m glad that my core players they have very good understanding in terms of that and it helps a lot to really help everybody understand what each other need.”
How has GLYPH kind of managed to pull in talent from around the region and make it coherent and to play to a high standard?
Arthur: “Yeah, I think how we got together was basically I sold them a good enough proposal, I guess. Because obviously, I know I don’t have any money. I don’t have any sponsorship behind me that I can just come in and say, I’m able to offer you this much!’
I think what I was able to sell them was that ‘look at the landscape right now in Southeast Asia.’ I think that if we are able to build this team together with JaCkky and me, I have a very high conviction and belief that we are going to break out of Southeast Asia. That was my belief.
And I think obviously being able to find JaCkky and him saying yes to me first, he’s like such a strong building block, right? Like, you know, when I have JaCkky, I go to anyone else, it feels much easier.
compared to if I didn’t have JaCkky. Obviously, ranking one player in Southeast Asia makes the persuading process much easier.”
“[The carry players are] very explicit and clear with how they want to be helped. I thought that was really, really important because it’s so easy. Imagine if a support player, your cores are telling you exactly how they need to be helped. It just makes the game so much easier.” – Arthur on the team’s chemistry.
So let’s talk a little bit about GLYPH’s recent success and qualification for Blast Slam 7. There was the victory at the EPL World Series, then this qualification through the RES Unchained 4. To us on the outside, it seems like the success has come out of nowhere, but what kind of work has the team been putting in to get to this level?
Arthur: “I think it was very important that we chose to play EPL, because this is a tournament that I feel like a lot of qualifier contenders like Playtime, Nemesis, these lower tier tournaments usually are ignored by the higher contenders.
But for us, we knew that we are a newly formed team. We can’t just be playing scrims in the dark to find improvement. I feel like there needs to be some sort of on hand experience. And then there’s nothing better than playing a tournament ourselves to get used to each other, to get used to the intensity.
Grinding scrims and grinding tournaments to us is very different. Because even though our players are much higher tier than someone would expect to see in EPL, I don’t think that matters because at the end of the day, being able to win an official is very important for pro players. And they wouldn’t want to be losing to teams that they don’t think they should be losing to. So that kind of intensity and motivation is something that you can’t really create out of nowhere for scrims. And I think playing EPL really, really helped us. um And I would actually attribute a lot of our success in the qualifier run to that because we feel like we were able to use that one month to really build chemistry, build the way we talk to each other, build our attitude.”
So to more specifically look at the Blast Slam qualifiers, RES Unchained 4, you found yourself in quite a difficult bracket. You go against the Gabbi/Palos stack (KukuysV3), and then into Team Nemesis and finally REKONIX. Within the region, these are pretty high profile teams. What kind of allowed you to kind of keep pulling out victories against these opponents?
Arthur: “I would say that we probably know them pretty well because our players have been in the scene for quite a long time. We know each other pretty well.
And then I think there is some kind of advantage to us also because we have been just sitting here watching Nemesis play PGL, watching REKONIX play Birmingham, even though it’s a different patch. But I feel like us being able to really look at them and identify what style is this team playing is an advantage.
For example, Nemesis plays really slow, really slow. And we know that we could take advantage of that. And then we know that REKONIX likes to play really team-fight heavy. And we could think what kind of approach would be good into that. We were able to think strategy-wise, we were able to identify these things, discuss and come down to an alignment of, what kind of plays do we feel as a team collectively comfortable into those teams?
And I think when we are able to approach it like that, for example, against the Nemesis team, we knew that, OK, these teams, no matter what, they are going to turtle. So how do we choose to play against them? And once everyone comes to an alignment and be like, OK, this game for sure is going to go past 45 minutes, then it kind of calms everybody down.
The early shenanigans kind of don’t matter because we know this game is going to late. And I think that kind of alignment and clarity that you are able to have during the game is very important. And I think we have that. I’m not sure if they have that or any of the opponents in our bracket have that, but I do think we have a strong sense of that.”
How much work do you put in then to kind of discover these kinds of strategies that the other teams are doing to build that image so that the team can have that coherency? How do you approach building that knowledge?
Arthur: “Honestly it is not very difficult because our players kind of know each other pretty well and a lot of them are like ex-teammates. For example JaCkky played with Jabz (Anucha Jirawong) for a long time and then Jhocam played with 23 (Nuengnara “23savage” Teeramahanon) as well, so they kind of knew each other and then I would just be able to ask them,’how’s 23 like as a carry?’ And they would give me the answers that I need and then we build from there.
That and a lot of theory crafting, a lot of just talking about how we want to approach certain situations, certain play styles, and those kinds of alignments, I think really, really helped.”
On some of the tracking sites, I think they’re accurate, Liquipedia, DatDota, etc., GLYPH are undefeated in terms of series. As an undefeated team, there can sometimes be a moment where that first series loss comes and it affects the team. Are you preparing for that? And do you think this team has the mental fortitude to kind of weather that moment?
Arthur: “After this run, I would like to think that we have the mental fortitude, because I have to say we only played three series because it is a single elimination qualifier. And I would say that the first series against Gabbi/Palos, Kukuys, that was scary because we were down. So in game one, we were getting beaten down really hard. Game two, we barely made a comeback. Game three, we made a comeback as well. So honestly, our run could have just ended there.
So that was really scary for us and I’m just glad that we survived day one and I remember I was talking to my girlfriend and I was like telling her I have a very strong feeling that if we’re able to survive Nemesis, you know, we are able to complete this run. Yeah, I have that confidence.
The last time I felt this strongly was when I qualified to EWC last year with Execration.I had this like incredible confidence or just gut feeling that ‘Okay, if we survive this, we are going to make it through.’ And I feel like a lot of people would have this kind of gut feeling sometimes. I’m just glad that we survived day one. That was scary.”
GLYPH celebrate their BLAST Slam VII qualification. Image credit: GLYPH
So the biggest thing in Dota right now is still the 7.41 patch. While it’s been a week, I think it’s been 10, maybe 11 days now, it feels like teams are still adapting to it while others have kind of figured it out. Where in that progression do you think GLYPH is? How comfortable are you with the patch?
Arthur: “We are still not sure, to be honest. Like, even this Largo hero that we played today in two games that got us some clutch victories, we didn’t believe that it was good enough, like last patch. We actually thought that this hero got pretty significantly nerfed, but then we played a scrim against a team, they pulled the frog against us.
And then we were like, ‘holy sh*t, this hero is still so annoying. This hero is just still so imba.’ And that’s why that loss in scrim actually convinced us that this hero is good again. And we were like, okay, no one else in the qualifier is thinking that frog is good. It’s really only us. And then we realized, okay, there’s a good opportunity for us to pull out against Nemesis. We did that.
Honestly, I’m quite surprised that we were able to get it against REKONIX as well because we literally just played one game and won the game with the frog. So, I thought that was very lucky of us.
In terms of where we are in the patch, I feel like we are still very new to the patch. We barely have time to discover things because we kind of have to just find our hero pool to play for this qualifier. So there’s not a lot of room for us to try out new stuff. So I will say that we definitely want some more time [with the patch] before we go into the DreamLeague Qualifier.”
“To be brutally honest, GLYPH is a stack of rejects. Most of us are rejected, doubted, kicked, replaced. But none of us are quitters. We found each other and created our own luck. We helped each other believe in the potential in ourselves and just grind, and grind, and grind.” – Arthur on the team’s motivation and philosophy.
On that, actually, I was going to ask, looking ahead with GLYPH, you’ve got some time now between now and BLAST. What’s next for GLYPH? What tournaments are you looking at next?
Arthur: “Yeah, so for the next 10 days, we are preparing for the DreamLeague Qualifier. We will have to play open qualifiers and then after that hopefully qualify to that and get into closed qualifiers and then hopefully win that as well.
Then right after that it’s going to be BLAST. So it’s going to be a pretty busy two months for us. We are going to be traveling to BLAST somewhere around the end of May. So it’s going to be just two months of prep.
And then obviously also we are looking for an organization to represent during this period. I’ll probably have to show some interest to the world and hopefully get some interest.”
At BLAST Slam VII, obviously the ultimate ambition of every team at every event is to win, but beyond that, are there any kind of mini-goals and ambitions at Blast Slam you’d like to see the team reach?
Arthur: “I will start with… I can’t speak for the team first, I’ll start with myself. The past two times that I attended BLAST with Execration, we got last place. So I feel like, you know, it can’t get worse than that. Thankfully. But obviously I would like to not be in last place. I think that sounds like a realistic goal. So that would be my own aim.
I think for the rest, I know that like Zeal, when I talk to him, his motivation is that he’s not just talking about qualifying to international events. He actually wants to do well. He wants to get a good placement. He wants to prove himself. So I know for sure for zeal, he is super motivated to show himself. And I think the others are too, like JaCkky, Emo. These boys are, they have won events before. And I’m sure that anything below winning events is probably below the expectation.
And for our team as a whole, the initial goal of this team when we form is that we are going to use this time until June, which is going to be EWC and TI qualifier, to prep ourselves nicely, train, and then we go for the qualifiers. And the biggest goal would be to qualify for TI and to qualify to EWC. That’s the biggest goal.”
Brilliant. Finally then, when you’re a new team, one of the hardest things you can do as a new org and new team is get fans behind you. What would you say to any Dota enjoyers reading this article or seeing GLYPH in the bracket and thinking, should I support these guys? Like, well, what would you say to the prospective fans?
Arthur: “To be brutally honest, GLYPH is a stack of rejects. Most of us are rejected, doubted, kicked, replaced. But none of us are quitters. We found each other and created our own luck. We helped each other believe in the potential in ourselves and just grind, and grind, and grind.
Eventually, we made it together. Despite all the doubts from the world. Never quit believing in yourself, find your people and your self-beliefs, get to work and good things will come. I guess this is the message we’d like to share and inspire!”
That’s all the questions I had. Thank you so much Arthur.
GLYPH will be in action during the DreamLeague Season 29 SEA Open Qualifiers next week (April 8-11)
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Featured Image Credit: EWC
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