Evil Geniuses' General Manager Andrew Barton Talks Building Roster And Jojopyun

For the second year in a row, Evil Geniuses have gotten off to a strong start in the League of Legends Championship (LCS) Lock In tournament. As one of the teams that made the offseason exciting, the Geniuses have shown up and have been firing on all cylinders.

A team consisting of tenured top laner, Jeong "Impact" Yon-young and up-and-coming AD Carry, Kyle “Danny” Sakamaki were joined by the likes of top-tier North American support, Philipe “Vulcan” Laflamme from Cloud9, top-tier jungler and LEC MVP, Kacper “Inspired” Sloma and highly-touted newcomer, mid-laner Joseph “jojopyun” Joon Pyun were meant to make a splash in the LCS, and they have so far.

But creating a team like this takes a lot of effort, one that Evil Geniuses General Manager, Andrew Barton, told us all about. 

Congrats on the win, Andrew. How’s it feel getting to the Lock In Semifinals the second year in a row this time with a new roster?

I think it feels really good making it our second year in a row two semi-finals. But I would say on our end, we definitely have higher aspirations. I think, semifinals, even finals is really the bare minimum for us. And so the goal this year is to win it all.

When we talked last year, the roster was expected to be good - but exceeded expectations so much so, that you yourself said you weren’t expecting it. This time around though, seeing this year’s iteration of the Evil Geniuses team, does that same line of thinking still ring true, or is it something different now?

Yeah, for last year I definitely expected us to be strong. We were ultimately one game away from making worlds in our 100 Thieves series. And it just didn't go our way that time around. And it really took us regrouping in the offseason and making decisions on what we want to do. But I think for this year, for any player joining Evil Geniuses, they know the baseline is making worlds and anything less than that is seen as a failure. And so for us this year with jojo, Danny Vulcan, Inspired and Impact, these guys have all come to EG knowing that, hey, we want to get to Worlds that's our goal. And we're along for that ride.

Many view this Evil Geniuses roster as the most exciting roster that transpired in the offseason. Can you elaborate a bit on how that process went of keeping both Danny and Impact and adding Inspired, jojopyun, and Vulcan?

Yeah, it was, uh, oh, I could talk a long time on this process. But definitely a lot of work went into how we designed this roster going into next year. From the back office side, myself, Nasr, Peter get to work on really how we want to shape up this roster and the decisions we want to make with it. So with Impact and Danny, specifically Impact this is a player who he missed his worlds in one of his first times in his career here at EG. So that was quite a shame on our part. And so going into this next year for Impact, we had to make it really crystal clear with him that, hey, we're going to be turning things around, make sure that we get you back to Worlds.

[The] first step for us was really having conversations with Inspired and seeing what we wanted to do there. And for him, obviously, the mid jungle duo is super important.

We were looking at a lot of high-class mids, but we wanted to have a conversation with Inspired first about taking a look at our Academy mid. Seeing if he was on the same page with our coaching staff and our players, about: 'Hey, look at how talented special this kid is, we think we can take him all the way to Worlds and actually be a Western mid laner who is going to stand up to Eastern mid laners'.

Because I think throughout the past few years, we have not seen many Western mid laners stack up. And so we truly do believe that jojo is able to stack up against mid laners from other regions, especially after seeing him boot camp over in Europe during worlds, and seeing him compete against different players.

Then finally, it came down to having conversations with Vulcan and seeing what we could do there for [him]. He's worked with myself in the past at Clutch Gaming, as well as with a few of other staff members here. For Vulcan, it was pretty simple. He knows exactly what he's in store for over here, despite never playing at EG or really knowing too much about the organisation, he understands what he's going to be getting out of the staff here, and really knows my expectations for rosters and what we want to do.

So that was really awesome to be able to pair him and Danny up together, and then that was it I think for now those are the big changes we made.

Going back to the young guns in Danny and jojopyun. Danny last season showed a lot of promise, even winning rookie of the split in the summer. Jojopyun on the other hand had a lot of hype coming into the LCS due to his performances in the Academy scene. In some ways, both Danny and jojopyun have become a core identity of this Evil Geniuses team. How confident has the org been in these two players since they first stepped in it?

Yeah, I think what Danny, I think I spoke about this in the past, but we promoted him [and] that is a tall task asking Danny to come in. Never play Academy never played LCS has never been in a team environment and such. And so, Danny overcame a lot of obstacles to really get where he is at. With how he performed last year, there is zero question in my mind that this is a player who is going to play for many years in our organisation, and he's going to be a focal point for us.

Flipping over to jojo actually, really the moment I met this player who when he joined us last year, going into Academy there was something quite different about him.

I would say, compared to almost every other player I've met, I think there's very few who I've worked with that I go: 'Wow, hey, this player can be someone'. But for jojo, it was almost immediate, in what I identified with him.

There is really no question in my mind about his ability to get to the LCS, and how he would actually perform. I think you can even see that through his interviews, how he interacts, this is a player with utmost confidence. And I think that is really what is required out of young and upcoming players. You have to go into the League being as confident as you can, because there are veterans in this League who will eat you up if you are not confident.

Being able to put around strong players around my rookies, I think is actually the most critical component towards the roster construction, because I would not be as confident as I was promoting jojo and Danny, if I did not have the strong pieces around them like Impact, Inspired and Vulcan.

Evil Geniuses as an org is now known to really take initiative with new up-and-coming players especially after bringing on Danny last season and jojopyun this season. What motivates the org to want to continue doing this when, in some ways, other orgs don’t seem as invested as you guys?

I think it's sort of an untapped market I want to say. I think while the market has been tapped, sure, we can argue that there's an opportunity for us when organizations are passing up on a lot of North American talent. They could look to import more heavily could look to import in Academy and whatnot.

By no means, am I saying EG is not interested in doing that, but I think, currently, there's an advantage here where if teams aren't looking at Academy super well enough, or looking in the NA market that's an opportunity for us to go, okay, let's really dive into what people are passing up on, and see if there could be a hidden gem here that we can uncover. 

So that's been a little bit of our mindset, for the most part, but I think, it's a ridiculous notion in concept that there's no talent in North America. I think a big problem that I've noticed in the past few years is, we actually lost a lot of young players to different titles, such as Fortnite where jojo came from, we've lost players to VALORANT, and just numerous other titles.

I think what's going to be important going into these next few years is how do we actually get these players to come back to League of Legends and prove to them that, hey, you can make a career here within this title.

And actually, my big hope is that I'm able to kind of choose jojo as the staple figure to other titles going, hey, look at what this player accomplished, he was able to go all the way as a pro. He was a Fortnite pro, he transitioned to a League of Legends Pro. And so you've seen that with other players like Gamsu, I believe, has been working on that. I want this I want jojo to be kind of that staple piece for other titles to realise, hey, there's a future in League of Legends as well.

You mentioned that you weren’t worried about anyone at the top due to believing in having a roster that could compete with anyone. I assume this is accentuated even more with this roster that’s been built this year? Or does the team still want to take things one step at a time?

I think we're gonna take it one step at a time, honestly/ I want to sit here and be absolutely confident, but we're still in Lock In, teams don't have their teams here yet. And so there is still a tremendous amount of work for us to do. But I think, I am super happy that we are off to a very strong start, and everyone is taking this very seriously.

Like I said at the beginning of the interview, when any of these players join EG, I need it to be known that, hey, our goal is to make Worlds we're going to be putting in 110% effort every single day to reach our goal.

These guys have come in, everyone came in right after Christmas and really got into work. I could not be more happy with the work everyone is putting in. And we're gonna be reaching that goal this year of worlds.

Evil Geniuses will look to keep their strong performances in the Lock In tournament going when they face off against Cloud9 on Saturday, January 29.