Misfits Premier achieved a win in the 2022 LFL Summer Split over Mirage Elyandra. It’s their first win since they included former LEC’s Astralis jungler Nikolay “Zanzarah” Akatov to their League of Legends roster.
This victory was definitely needed to get momentum for the team ahead of the next weeks, as their last results were three losses after the Split kicked off. After the game, Zanzarah was very animated in his live interview with the LFL studio analysts.
Zanzarah said the following in the interview:
“I don’t want to prove anything. I just want to win something because sometimes in Astralis—yeah, if you join Astralis, you don’t want to win, let’s be honest,” Zanzarah said. “But in Misfits, this is the good organization. This is the organization that wants to show up, that wants to stomp people, and show who is the boss… This is why I am in Misfits right now. And I’m tired of losing. I came here to win.”
Following in the steps of other Tier 1 players, Zanzarah stepped down from Astralis and left the LEC tournament after finishing the Spring Split at the bottom of the ladder by joining with Misfits Premier, hoping to get better results in the heavily talent-stacked French League.
A lot of comments can come from professional players regarding their previous organizations, however most players tend to not comment directly on the matter unless it was a good overall performance. However Zanzarah was not discrete at all, directly stating as seen above “if you join Astralis, you don’t want to win, let’s be honest” . Part of the community does agree from a performance standpoint, as unfortunately Astralis’ results since buying a slot in the now franchised league are definitely appalling. However, the team environment is something we don’t have much information on unless something drastic happens, so we can assume it wasn’t an issue with lack of motivation or synergy, something that happens quite often in the scene.
Zanzarah definitely seems to feel more at home in the LFL, coming back to winning ways after his stint with Astralis.
In his latest game, Misfits Premier decided to use a scaling composition and set to win the game at a slow patient pace, something usual these days, consistently building up their advantage by securing neutral objectives and pursuing well controlled teamfights.
Misfits Premier’s AD carry Woolite was voted MVP of the game while maneuvering Twitch, as he was crucial in getting the advantage thanks to early plays created in conjunction with support Vander on Renata. Most of the composition took off once Zanzarah started hovering Woolite so he could play aggressively with a traditional scaling champion such as Twitch, thus accelerating his scaling by quite a margin.
Misfits Premier’s next match will be against Team Solary on June 15th at 12pm. However their hardest challenge will be to face defending champions LDLC OL the day after at 11am CT.
