A team that has risen to the occasion, Rise Nation is one series away from taking home their first major LAN win in Infinite Warfare after taking down Cloud9 3-1 in the winners bracket finals.
Both Ulysses “Aqua” Silva and Daniel “Loony” Loza were excited after their big win against Cloud9.
“When you are on the winners side, you have that backup plan if you lose that first best-of-five, because you still have another one,” said Loony. “So it feels great to be on the winners side.”
“This is really the first time we made it through winners to get to the finals,” said Aqua. “I think having Loony on the team helped us in respawn.”
Aqua has developed into a complete player, and it showed as he and his team made it past several strong sides in Cloud9, Luminosity Gaming and OpTic Gaming to end up where they are in Vegas. He credits it to a growth in maturity, as well as some past close finishes.
“The past two events I’ve grown, because back then, I would sleep late, do dumb stuff, and relax,” Aqua said. “But I’m more responsible now just because I’ve been to so many events and especially for champs, placing third kind of helped me not lose composure.”
With Loony being joined by this crew at the start of Infinite Warfare, he’s happy that the honeymoon is not over, and believes that this team is full of team-players and talent.
“We’ve just been meshing really well,” said Loony. “You have that new team and have a honeymoon period with new faces, and we’re really making it work. We all mesh well, we all have that teamwork and ability.”
This Rise roster has already improved on their past placing in Infinite Warfare, after finishing top-four at the PlayStation Experience Invitational.
During pool play, there was a bit of hesitation on calling Rise a favorite to win after Enigma6 swept them, and it was a definite wake-up call for Aqua.
“It definitely did (feel like a wake-up call),” Aqua said. “The reason why is because we were like, ‘Aight, this is going to be easy. It’s another amateur team and we’re so used to them hitting flanks.’ But we were paying too much attention to flanks when they were playing as a team, so good job to them that we didn’t expect that. But we looked back at it and knew we should have won it with a 3-0 too.”
“We weren’t playing as a team,” Aqua continued, “and we went back to the hotel room and watched it. We said ‘This is how we have to play,’ and texted each other that we need to regain.”
For Loony, however, he saw it as just a matter of momentum, and shook off the loss before his team made their run in the winners bracket.
“They came out of open bracket hot, and they just kept rolling,” said Loony. “We could have taken them out, and made ourselves the ones that went undefeated in pool play, but our teamwork wasn’t on, and our vibes were weird beacause it was the first match we played that day.”
As for Rise’s next opponent, the two teammates are conflicted on who they want to face in the finals, with Loony going for logic, while Aqua wants the glory.
“That winners finals series, the only reason why they won that first map was because ACHES dropped 42 and that was a really good performance by him,” Loony said. “I think if we get Cloud9, we can 3-0 them and take that championship. I think FaZe would be the harder fight.”
“I want FaZe,” Aqua said. “I know that everyone thinks they are the better team, and we want to take out the better team.”
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James Mattone is a journalist for GAMURS and can be contacted on Twitter –@TheJamesMattone.
Photo credits: Blazy
