TL Yeon: “I think we’ve been quite up and down, like momentum-based”

After their win in the EU vs NA battle, I spoke with TL Yeon to discuss the series, his love for ADC players, and more.

So hi Yeon, first of all, thank you for talking with us. Before we dive into the series, I want to first ask you how you’re doing after the match? 

Yeon: Winning definitely feels nice so… I’m pretty ecstatic, especially because I really wanted to play in the LCK Arena and the last time I was in Korea I didn’t do so well so I had a lot of riding on this.

Yeon played in South Korea back in 2023 during Worlds. At the time, Team Liquid only finished in the top 16, finishing 0-3 in the Swiss stage.

That’s nice. What was the approach coming into the first game?

Yeon: To be honest, we knew that they weren’t much of a strong laners from the bot lane and they played mostly through mid jungle and support synergy and then Caliste carried in the later stages.

So what was the approach? Were you trying to find a way to punish their bot lane first?

TL Yeon: For bot lane, we were going to play as aggressively as we could because we knew that the laning phase wasn’t that strong in the LEC.

Yeon’s opinion on Caliste

Since we’ve already started talking about the bot lane so I kind of wanted to ask you what are your thoughts on Caliste specifically, ‘cause obviously he’s been the talk when it comes to Karmine Corp. Were you impressed by something in particular from him? 

TL Yeon: I think that everyone is very hyped about Caliste. I think it’s very deserved – I think he’s very talented and mechanically skilled individual player. I think he’s very new – I think I’m actually kind of old considering how much experience I’ve had. I think we mainly wanted to focus on laning phase, like basics, but then obviously, I got too confident and just ran it down. 

I mean, that was like really going back and forth – the early levels didn’t go so well, but after you managed to come back. Let’s talk a little bit more about First Stand in general, so we only have five teams in the competition, where do you think TL is currently positioned at, and what are the goals for your team, but also for yourself?

TL Yeon: I think we’ve been quite up and down, like momentum-based. I think it would be unfair to rank us anywhere in the top two. Even though I think we have a chance to win, I don’t think it will rank us in the top two, I would rank us at least in third place this tournament.

We know that your favorite players are ADC players, that is Viper and Ruler, one of them is here. I think this is the first time you play against him, how do you feel to play against him this time around, and what are your expectations both from yourself and from him?

TL Yeon: I can recall the day three years ago when I was first starting, I watched a lot of ADC players. I used to look up a lot to Viper, and Ruler as well, I thought he was very good but the more I played the more I realized I’m not Viper, his playstyle is not for me and I consider myself a lot more like Ruler in playstyle, but I do think his gameplay is very clean, very little mistakes, just solid player.

Thoughts on anti lane-swap

One last question. Can you give me your thoughts on the anti lane-swap mechanic? It’s been the main talking point of the patch so how has it affected you, your team and the bot lane matchups?

I think that the problem for us is we didn’t have much time to utilize practice in this anti lane-swap especially since we won in playoffs, where lane swap was meta. I think it’s very weird that they overturned the lane swap immediately, considering how every team was playing off of lane swap. It was just a complete meta shift so we’re just getting adjusted to it. We don’t have many problems, especially for me and Core [CoreJJ] cause we consider ourselves very good laners.

Do you want to share a message to the fans? 

TL Yeon: Thank you for the TL fans, I know Karmine Corp fans are very hectic and very strong, thank you for supporting us and having our backs!