Immortals upset TSM in week 5 of the 2020 League of Legends Championship Series Summer Split, showing impressive bounceback after a loss to Dignitas earlier in the week. Immortals has generated leads in most of its games since Jungler Jake "Xmithie" Puchero's return to the starting roster, but the team has not been able to shut the door prior to doing so against TSM. 

TSM put up a good fight in the late game, primarily through the Aphelios of Yiliang "Doublelift" Peng, but IMT was able to secure the victory. After the victory, Xmithie spoke to Inven Global's Nick Geracie about his success vs Doublelift in 2020, the rise of Ignite Graves in the jungle, and playing with two rookie solo laners in Top Laner Kieran "Allorim" Logue and Mid Laner David "Insanity" Challe.

Congrats on your win against TSM, Xmithie. How are you feeling after that crazy late game?

I feel pretty good. I've won my last 3 games against Doublelift...I might be his curse.

I was going to ask if you think you have an advantage against him due to your familiarity with him as a player and teammate. Are you able to predict what he does when you play against him?

I don't think it's that. I don't really hyperfocus on Doublelift specifically at all, but I think the way he molds his team is something I'm kind of familiar with in terms of how things play out. I'm not really sure of the specifics.

Let's focus instead on IMT's game plan against TSM. You secured the win today with a triple marksman composition that featured Graves with Ignite in the Jungle. Graves has been meta in previous patches, but now that Ignite has risen to popularity, does that change the way you play the champion since you are without Flash?

Yeah, I think it's definitely a lot easier to get caught. In all of our fights today, you could see I was trying to get the opponents to engage on me to bait them because I had no Flash, which ideally would allow my teammates to counter-engage. In most of the fights TSM took, they couldn't kill me. It might be because they drafted Zilean in mid. Maybe if they had a different champion it would have been harder for me to survive, but against that team composition, it was easy for me to play.

Graves usually has a lot of armor because of his True Grit passive on his Quickdraw, but against mages like Syndra it is pretty hard to survive when you have no Flash. Ignite is pretty prominent on Graves in the jungle right now because usually you build Executioner's Calling. Ignite essentially gives you an Executioner's Calling every fight that you possess it.

Immortals has managed to gain leads over its opponents in the past few games, but haven't managed to close the door and secure the win. What was different about today when compared to your previous set of games?

It's not really late game that we faltered on in the last three games we played before this one. For example, in our games against Team Liquid and Evil Geniuses, it was pretty much one split decision that made us unable to win the crucial fight.

We were at our opponents' nexus in both matches, and we thought we could pretty much end the game there, but coincidentally, all three games we played were against Aphelios. In all of those games, there was always a turning point in the opponents' base where they ace us and gain an objective or our nexus.

When TSM had that fight today against you, in which Doublelift did almost 10,000 damage in a single fight on Aphelios, was the team concerned that the same thing would happen as the previous games you just mentioned?

The difference this time is that we have all three of TSM's inhibitors, so the waves made it almost impossible for TSM to even get to the river in the middle of the map because of all of the Super Minions.

We knew that TSM was probably going to get Elder Dragon, but if they had gone for Baron Nashor after, that would have been essentially asking for a death sentence because we had double Teleport. We could have just TP'd into TSM's base while the rest of us stalled at Baron so they wouldn't be able to recall. Because of this, it wasn't as 'game over' for us after losing that fight to TSM. We just stalled the Dragon and waited to push their base with the Hand of Baron buff.

This Immortals roster is interesting because it's the first time that you've played with two rookie solo laners. What's it been like playing with Allorim and Insanity?

I don't think I've ever played with a rookie Mid Laner since...mandatorycloud. 

Now THAT's a throwback.

*Laughs* Yeah. It's a pretty new experience. It's like kind of going back to the basics of what macro is in North America. In NA, macro is different from all other regions, but since we started scrimming LCS teams in the past two weeks, it's been pretty eye-opening for both Insanity and Allorim. They're also figuring out my version of playing micro, which isn't super different from other teams, but is how I usually play. I hope it gives them a good grasp of what high level play looks like.

Thanks for the interview, Xmithie. Would you like to say anything to the IMT fans after this win?

Since this roster has started in LCS, we have gone 2-4, so it's not really what I expected. Even though we only started playing three weeks ago, I always have high expectations for my team in general.

I'm sorry to all of the fans; I think right now we're still looking forward to going to playoffs, and once we have enough experience, we are still aiming for Worlds. That being said, hopefully there will be a Worlds this year. *Laughs*

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