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OG's Kartik "Kitrak" Rathi was interviewed at DreamLeague Season 21 after his team swept 9Pandas in a clean 2-0. He went over how broken PA is, how Europe impacted his personal improvement and what he misses the most about NA Pubs. Congratulations on this 2-0 victory. How much do you think you earned this 2-0 and how much of it was [down to] Phantom Assassin? I'll say we earned one out of two wins. The first game we can say was a fair win. Second game was PA (laughs). How early were you on this Phantom Assassin train in your drafts? I don't know about how early, but I think everyone knows the hero is pretty stupid right now. It just gives you a fallback cushion where at minute 40, minute 35 they can't really go high ground and end the game. And at some point they just kind of start getting one shot. I guess that, since the beginning of DreamLeague [Season 21] we kind of knew it was busted. Why didn't you ban [PA] out then? I don't think they play it. Or I don't think they have played it, at least. Your Blink [Dagger] on AA [Ancient Apparition] was interesting. What gave you the idea originally? Did you just want to come in with the Vacuum?  

(Katrik's AA build. Image via Dotabuff.com)

Yeah, and I think that 90% of the time AA's Blast is impossible to land against Stampede, Force Staves, Rubik's Lift and all this stuff. It's really hard to land it unless you just Blast one of the Cores point blank, so I just went Blink. How do you feel being in OG now? How are things going from your perspective? Things are going pretty good, I'd say. We're pretty loose, just trying our best in the games and having fun. Obviously, we didn't qualify to TI, which kind of sucks, but we're enjoying DreamLeague. In Berlin you guys looked really good with MC [MinD_ControL]. Then the TI qualifiers [without MC] were disappointing. Now you're at DreamLeague again with him and you guys are looking very good. Is there anything specific that changes when you have MC? I think that [he] is maybe a little bit of a better fit for how some of us want to play. He is very agressive and he is a very good leader. Last game was going kind of sh*t and he just made the game a lot easier for us. He is a very dominating presence, when we're having a good game or a bad game he makes the game feel a lot better than it actually is. When you say that he makes the game better, in the game [that just happened], how did he do that from a losing position? He gave us a very simple condition, at some point we stopped feeding and we just played for our high-ground and the game was easy after that. You've improved a lot in the last year. Have you done something specific to [make this happen]? And would you agree that you improved? Yeah, I do. I think my individual skill level is, like, I'm not a sh*tty laner anymore and stuff like that. Playing in Europe helps a lot for practice, I think that's probably the biggest thing. Every game, even like the rank 500 rank 1000 guy that you are playing against is actually a really good player. In NA, if you're not playing against maybe like 5 or 10 different players, players are just really bad. If you had to pick one thing, is there anything you really miss from NA Pubs? Yeah, the all chat (laughs).

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