Pentanet.GG didn’t manage to get their first Rumble Stage win on the third day as well. In the 2021 Mid-Season Invitational, they got through the Group Stage by defeating Unicorns of Love in a tiebreaker, but the Rumble Stage was something different. Being down 0-6, Mark “Praedyth” Lewis was quite depressed, but he hoped he could take back as much as he could from this experience.

It’s been rough for you guys at the Rumble Stage. How does it feel facing the best around the world?

I feel it’s a privilege to be versing these teams. We had huge issues and a lot of the games were just pointless to play, but we’re learning and we’re still having fun.

Could you share some of the issues you were having?

The draft was a huge issue, and I think a lot of our players weren’t aligned on how we were going to play the game. It’s really hard to play the game for us when we don’t get natural leads, and we’re not getting those leads. Because in OCE, we’re just better than everyone else so we would always have some lane we could play towards.

But here, everyone’s struggling to get their own advantage. I think against UOL, it was kind of easy. Their players weren’t as good, so we could get advantage somewhere and play towards that, but here, if we have top side winning, the other side would lose harder.

What was your mindset like coming into the Rumble Stage and moving onto the latter half?

Coming in, I thought we would actually do okay. I thought we would have close games in almost every game — I thought RNG would be very hard still, but I thought we would have a decent chance against every other team. But problems have come up with our team and I think our drafts were bad. It was like a mix of everything just going wrong for us here.

Going to the second half, obviously, we won’t be making it out at this stage. I don’t think anyone thinks we will. I just hope we have closer games still even if we don’t win.

It’s your first international tournament. Weren’t you nervous?

No. I don’t really care that much about being on a big stage or playing against the big players. If I make a misplay, it’s because they’re better or because when we’re losing hard, I just want to do something so I just… Die [Laughs]. I wouldn’t say anything about my performance was from nerves or anything. I’m just getting outperformed. 

In this tournament, you’re the bot laner that used the most champions. Was it to try more stuff or make different attempts?

I think from the start of the tournament to now, we had a different outlook on how to play bot lane, so that makes sense that way. But I don’t think the champions really matter. You just draft what’s good for the game.

Were there any players you wanted to meet personally?

Yeah, Perkz was my favorite player since Gamers2 back in 2016. So it was awesome to play him today. I wanted to try to kill him, but I didn’t get it. [Laughs]

And versing Ming has been really eye-opening. But also very depressing because he just… I think I’m winning, I’m playing really good, but in this game against RNG, and then Ming just hooks me and solo kills me. I was like, “Okay.” I thought I was really doing well, and he just kills me. He did a lot of things like that. He’s playing support, but it feels like he’s playing mid or jungle. And he’s just like hunting me down and just killing me somehow — I don’t really understand. There’s a beauty in getting destroyed so hard by a single player. Even though it’s pretty sad, it’s cool.

What about out of the game? You’ve probably met a lot of people there.

We’ve been hanging out with a few of the players and Riot staff and they’ve been really cool. It was an awesome experience to make it here and just talk to people that are in the same industry. We can talk to them about everything. Back in OCE, it’s just us, there are no other games or scenes. It’s hard to talk to people that aren’t from our league. It’s been really cool just going out in Reykjavík and talking to all of the players.

As you said earlier, frankly, it’s very unlikely that you would make it through. What do you think you’re gaining through this tournament?

Perspective. When we got here, straight away, we scrimmed Cloud9. We just versed them, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is how the game is meant to be played.’ You should be doing something every single wave, every single deploy. You should be always be working towards something.

If you have been doing nothing, you fall behind and lose the game. Whenever we put the brakes on for one second, the game would be just lost. Just learning how to play the game and just hoping that we take the most from this experience because losing every game… It doesn’t look good for us at all.

What would your final goal be in the remaining tournament?

I don’t really care about winning at this point. I just want to do the best we can and hope we get close to beating these teams and hope we can learn the most from it. Normally, I’d look back at the tournament and think about my regrets or anything, but it’s hard for me to have expectations now. I just want to think about the next game.

I just want to play on stage and I look forward to playing every game. I just hope we learn a lot of things that we can bring back to OCE and then it make it easy for us to go to Worlds and hopefully, we would have a better performance there.