Daeny on what he said to Faker, drafts, and finals preparations

So during WBG’s post-match press conference (during which a disappointing 0 questions were asked to Weiwei, Light, or Crisp), coach Daeny deigned to give some very elaborate answers on a few things, digressing into his philosophies on the game and his time coaching T1 in 2021. The only other thread I can see on his answers only translated the part about scrim partners, which is IMO the least interesting.

Note I don’t know a lick of Korean, I’m just transcribing Korizon’s captions in the video here for visibility, with abbreviations added and minor edits to punctuation and game terminology. The paragraphs are separated just for readability, at my judgment.

Q: You hugged Faker after T1 won Worlds. What did you talk about?

I can’t talk about that, but… the way I left T1 wasn’t smooth. In fact, my time working in T1 itself wasn’t smooth. That actually makes me grateful for WBG. WBG really gave me full power as a head coach. Meanwhile, back in T1, there were so many areas where it wasn’t the case. In the meantime, I said it in several interviews… I mean, I’ll try to give a short version. My perspective is, "A League team that plays rock-paper-scissors more frequently in a game is more advantageous. To put it very simply, in the existing world of LoL, there’s one R-P-S for one drake, one teamfight. But there are ways to play R-P-S in the tempos in between. For example, taking enemy jungle camps to slowly increase the gap in jungle, or utilize the map movement of jungle-support, who have more freedom in the game, to pressure the top-mid, and so on.

That is what I mean when I talk about “choices” in League, and I had went to T1 to introduce these things to Faker. That this is a way to play LoL. Also on the whole 10-man roster thing… I was really in the process of finding the best set of players for Faker. And it was clearly visible in my interview back then, Faker had mouse issues and equipment issues, so he was taking a break. So I ended up substituting Clozer… these are a series of truths. And… I ended up talking about all of this but what I am saying is that this is the LoL that I can ultimately aim for. I aspire for a League where every player makes these choices constantly by communicating with his teammates. I think that would definitely be advantageous in any sport. I watch football. In world-class teams, isn’t it the defenders who build up specific plays? You can think of it as similar to that process, but applied to LoL.

So I introduce that process… but of course, I think such a concept is difficult to accept at first. No matter which team I work in… even if the players know the methodology, I had to teach it, step-by-step. You could clearly see it when I came to WBG this year but we didn’t do well in the regular season at first. There is the build-up process, explaining this, step-by-step. Why? Because it’s not a simple concept, is it? You are always making choices, with others, while constantly in communication… I think it was also difficult for WBG players when they heard this and tried this for the very first time.

Then when I was watching T1 play recently… I realized, they are exceptional. I felt, “Faker is playing to every other T1 player’s speed.” While the other players are also playing to Faker’s pace. Watching that just made me feel… it makes me respect, you know. It was really cool the original concept being implemented by T1… that is why I said, oh, this is respectful.

Q: How did you prepare for today’s finals? What is your biggest regret?

T1 had such a big champion pool. The players there know almost all matchups out there. So I thought it would be really difficult to find weaknesses through matchups. Because of that - in the current meta, the three midlane carry champions are Neeko, Azir, and Orianna. The first decision was to exclude these three champions when deciding on midlane matchups. There were too many choices in other lanes; I counted the possible matchups and decided it’s impossible to suppress all lanes through drafts. We made those attempts and in the first game… our players aren’t that used to playing Senna-Tahm. I think we prepared for that draft in the first game. But, for example, we could have drafted Caitlyn-Lux on 4-5 and gone for a strong lane phase. Or, we could have just locked Varus-Ashe on 2-3. But we always had to make choices, you know?

That’s the nature of drafts. Make a certain choice, and if that choice does not work, change the direction. There’s always regret after you lose a series. But going back to what we originally planned, we at least identified that there are three carry champions in the midlane and tried to narrow our draft down to banning them out. After that, we tried to draft out for botlane whatever they’re most confident on. So I feel really bad that TheShy was always playing Blue Side. TheShy was on Blue and always had to blind pick his champion. But when top has to blind pick, and if bot cannot have lane priority, the toplaner on Blue will of course fall behind. Then, T1 got Red and got top counterpick, yet still held lane priority in bot. Then T1 was really exceptional in map movement and skirmishes during Herald timings… I saw that, and truly felt just how strong T1 was.

Actually, my biggest regret for today is that I did not get to play a single game on Red. But we had to win on Blue, make the enemy team pick Blue then play Red, for us to have some probability of winning a game. So I kept picking Blue side, but it’s a shame. We also had more than two drafts prepared for Red side. These are my regrets today.

Q: Daeny, who were your scrim opponents during Worlds?

Actually, I think this can be an advantage for the LCK teams when they’re hosting Worlds. When I went to Worlds in China back in 2020 [with DWG], we made it to the finals, then couldn’t scrim for almost a week. I think we had like, three scrims? I felt that way back then. And this year, KDF and NS were the only teams that had five-man rosters and could help with scrims. Then there were teams testing players out, but of course, a team that maintained their five-man roster will be much better for scrims. A team trialling their players won’t necessarily be experimenting with lane matchups, but focused on showing how good they are, individually. That’s why I think it’s a bit disappointing that we didn’t have a chance to scrim with KDF. I think T1 was scrimming against KDF all week. So, it’s a bit unfortunate that we didn’t have that opportunity. Instead, we scrimmed against LSB and NS who are currently trialling their players. Then, there were so many things like media days and content days leading up to the finals. So we could play up to three scrims per day, let’s say. Maybe we could have scrimmed more if we had night blocks. But there weren’t many teams that would facilitate that much for us. Nevertheless, we just tried to fall back to the draft priorities and drafts we had prepared up to that point and try to prepare the finals as best as we could.

I certainly have… opinions on the nature of his answers, but I’m not gonna bother, for the sake of keeping this post relatively unbiased.

I will say, though, that I went back to look at the threads and interviews when Daeny was fired from T1 in July 2021, and his attitude is just about unchanged.