Mangusu interview: “I need to relearn how to draft. I need to learn how to draft for them”
We had the chance to sit and talk with coach Vlad "Mangusu" Sateanu, just as his new team, GamerLegion, was about to enter the competition at PGL Wallachia Season 6.
This marks the organisation’s debut in Dota 2. However, the roster is not that new. The players have already been to a few of the previous Wallachia seasons and have played their first The International together in September this year. We took this opportunity to learn from Mangusu about his transition from HEROIC to GamerLegion, how his work process might have changed, and his goals for the new season.
Hi Vlad, you are at PGL Wallachia Season 6 with a new team. Let’s start the interview by talking about what happened after TI because I think it was quite a surprise for many of us to see you split ways with HEROIC.
HEROIC, I and Kaffs have decided since our first TI together that we are going to stay in that formula for one more year. So we decided that at the 2024 TI. It’s not because we had differences or conflicts or anything like that. Kaffs and I get along very well, and I would say we are real friends by now, but we are both very ambitious people, and we both wanted to draft. I wanted very much to start drafting, and at the same time, I felt I was staying for too long in a comfort zone, if you want, at HEROIC, and I wanted to take on a new challenge.
It’s quite a big challenge, I’d say, as GamerLegion is a team that is at the very beginning of its road. How does that impact your work? How do you change your process when you have to work with a team that is just now breaching into the Tier 1 scene?
To begin with, we need to understand that this is a project that will last at least one year. If you think about mid to long-term plans, things start to make sense. There are too many aspects that need improvement. If I think about all the things at once, or if I try to solve everything at once, it’s too much, it’s impossible. I need to think of this as a project. I can’t just go and say, “ok, we need a good placement at this tournament”, or “we need to win this tournament.”
For now, the goal is to beat teams at our level. I want us to be consistent enough that we won’t have any trouble playing against the teams in qualifiers, for example. This is a short-term goal, let’s say. I’d want us not to miss competitions, LANs especially. There are a thousand things that need to be changed or worked on as a team. From establishing a team culture and players’ attitudes to how we talk to each other and how we look at the game. At the same time, I need to relearn how to draft. I need to learn how to draft for them.
GamerLegion, or Apex Genesis as they were at the beginning of the season, had already played a lot of qualifier matches. Has the packed schedule and constant travelling influenced your drafting or gameplay philosophy at all, such as focusing on comfort picks due to limited scrim time?
I know very well that right now we don’t have the time or the luxury to implement all the new things, or to do too many at once. So, every day I need to choose what’s the priority. For now, we focus only on what can help us develop as a team. After a match is finished, we talk about the good things that happened and what we need to keep as a team, rather than discussing the games in very tiny detail.
We focus, for example, on learning as much as possible from this tournament instead of being obsessed with “we need to win it.“ Yes, the schedule is packed, and I don’t always have the time to do the prep as I'd like, but I don’t think that’s too important right now.
An aspirational goal would be to reach the top eight at LANs towards the end of the year. That would be nice.
You now have a majority NA team. Are there any differences in terms of how they approach the game, philosophy about how a team should be, compared to HEROIC or other South American rosters you worked with in the past?
I don’t think it is possible to think about team culture in Dota, especially when we talk about teams from smaller regions. What we had at HEROIC was a culture we built together, and it had little to do with the SA culture.
Here, they have a lot of that NA culture; you can see it every day. They all want to have an impact on the team’s trajectory and how things function. This is actually a difference you notice between teams with a very good, established structure and those without one. At HEROIC, the structure was very clear. We all knew how we did things and what we needed to talk about in terms of strategy and stuff like that. We were doing things in an efficient manner and in such a way that would allow us to develop as much as possible.
While here, when I joined them, everyone was talking, everyone would express their opinion at any given moment, no filter. You know, there are moments when maybe it’s better to stay silent and find a better time to say something. If you raise all the problems at once, if you voice all the negative things at once, all you do is notice that you have a ton of problems, and that can get overwhelming or discouraging. Not only for you, but for the entire team. These are things we need to improve in terms of team culture. I want to build our own culture and grow together as a team.