The 2018 Call of Duty World League Championship is the biggest tournament of the year—and for some, it’s the biggest tournament of their lives.
Adam “Assault” Garcia is one of those players. As a part of Evil Geniuses—a team with two former world champions—Assault isn’t shy about expressing what a 2018 CWL Champs title would mean to him.
After his team’s 3-0 win over Lightning Pandas today, Assault talked about EG’s recent run of sweeps, which includes a crushing victory over OpTic Gaming.
After that quick win over Lightning Pandas, what do you guys need to do to win against Team Envy in the next round?
Assault: I think we really just need to win the veto process—get the good maps—and keep playing our game. Because in this event, we’ve been using a lot of teamwork and what not. If we keep working as a team and playing our own game, we’ll be fine against Envy.
Who would you say is your team’s MVP for the season or Champs?
Damn, I don’t know. I don’t want to say myself and sound arrogant. The MVP so far in this tournament has got to be my teammate, [Apathy]. He’s been playing lights out in every game mode and playing smart with the team, which is something he struggled with at Stage Two and why we kind of fell off. But he’s been playing really well this tournament.
Goonjar said yesterday EG “didn’t pose too much of a threat” to Lightning Pandas. What did you think of that?
I was mind-blown when I heard him say that because the last time we played them was at Anaheim, and that was like our worst event as a team, and we still smoked them at that event. Coming into this event, we played way better, so I just knew we were going to come out and smoke them—and we did.
With Rise Nation being eliminated yesterday, who is the biggest threat to your team now?
You got to say Team Kaliber is the biggest threat to us. Obviously, they won the last event and they’re really good at this event. They took out Rise first round and now I think they’re playing Elevate. I expect them to win that too, so I expect them to be our biggest competition here.
ACHES and Apathy have both won Champs before, but what would a Champs win mean to you?
It would mean everything to me. If I win this tournament, I’ll probably cry on stage. We’ve all put in a lot of time for this tournament—it would mean a lot not even for just me, but for all of us.
Did that win over OpTic help put your recent run into overdrive?
I think the OpTic win was huge for us for the simple fact that our backs were against the wall—we literally had to win 3-0 or we were out of the tournament. After we won the first map against them, we were like, “Oh, shit. We can do this against them.”
We ended up steamrolling them the next two maps and then all that momentum from knocking out OpTic—the hype around that has given us so much momentum.
What did your Elevate loss teach you guys?
It taught us what not to do in the rest of the matches. That’s got to be our worst series we’ve ever played as a team. And my teammate, Apathy, that was probably the worst series I’ve ever seen him have too.
I guess it worked out in the end because it knocked out OpTic early and we got momentum from that.
Evil Geniuses will meet Team Envy in the winners bracket semifinals later today at 5pm CT.
