Note: This article is a text port of our live interview with alecks. The video interview can be found here.

Tell me how you guys are feeling; you just took out Wolves. This is your third grand final you guys are going to, right?

Obviously we feel great. Nothing much [more] to say. Job's not done, we really need to win a trophy eventually, hopefully this is the one.

You guys had a great thing going on Lotus. It was a bit of back and forth, but in the second half you guys kind of came alive. You guys won the first four rounds, Wolves won two more, you called a timeout, and things started to swing back and forth from there. What were you telling the guys during those timeouts, those high-pressure situations?

I can't remember but I think they won three in a row, so we had to discuss what our game plan was. We were doing something that we decided not to do as a team, so the timeout was mainly to just align ourselves and to make sure we stayed confident going in.

You guys are no strangers to international events, the big stage. How were the nerves today? How were you guys feeling in general, especially after Lotus, you guys seemed really confident. But going into this matchup, what were you guys thinking?

I thought they were confident going into the game, but when the game started they started missing shots and making some very recently uncharacteristic mistakes and trying to rush things. So… that was Lotus. And also, Wolves… on Ascent though I think our gameplan was good so everyone was quite confident that they would take it.

Going into this veto, you guys have historically throughout this event been permabanning Haven. Wolves have been doing the same thing. Going into this matchup today, you guys drew Team A, and you naturally banned your permaban. How confident were you in this map ban knowing that you were willingly giving Wolves another ban?

We worked out the veto; if we were Team A we would ban Haven, if we were Team B, we would ban whatever we felt like… I think it would have been Ascent, but in hindsight Ascent went pretty well. The good news is if we know what Wolves is going to pick then it's something we can prepare for, so we made sure our Ascent was as clean as we could make it.

Speaking of preparation, how have you guys been preparing for this matchup these past couple days?

In the past on the dark days we try to take breaks during the days. This time we took the opportunity to take a break earlier just before the Sentinels game so that we could reset. I think this time during the dark days we just played all three days and made sure we were as prepared as possible. There were a lot of things we needed to work on, so we needed every day to count. I think we took a lesson from taking a break just before Sentinels; our Sunset was shakier than it should be… I feel as if the overall map concept should have been cleaner, so I didn't want to make any mistakes this time, so we grinded these past few days.

There was this one round where Yuicaw placed his ultimate down on stairs, forcing two fights that you guys didn't win. How were you feeling back in the coach desk when that happened?

I was a little bit upset… They knew the ultimate was coming and they knew roughly where the Killjoy would place the ultimate. We played that situation completely wrong, and because of that we got absolutely punished. I thought we were going to have to play three maps to win the game.

How important do you think Lotus was for you guys in terms of playing Split? How confident were you guys in closing out the series if Lotus didn't go your way?

We were very, very prepared for Ascent, so it wasn't too much of a worry. I don't think that we needed to hide Split or anything, but I did think that it would be way harder to win Ascent if they won Lotus because they would have been really confident and historically we don't have a very good Ascent. I'm very glad we closed it out, we don't really have to think about the other scenario, so that's pretty good.

You guys are going to the grand final, do you have a prediction as to who you may be meeting up there?

Honestly speaking, it'll probably be G2. I think they are the probably the best in the world. I do hope that we end up playing FNATIC which would mean that we play almost every team in this event, and that's something I like to do when we go to these kinds of events.