C9 APA: "I think I'm an incredibly creative player"

The 2026 League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) playoffs kicked off with an electric series between the first and fourth-placed teams of the regular season. The first stop on the road towards finals matched and , trying to secure their spot in Arizona. Sparks were still lit after the teams’ encounter during Week 6 of the regular season.

Though Cloud9 was able to jump to an early 2-0 lead, FlyQuest punched back and forced first-series Silver Scrapes. However, Cloud9 kept their label as the favorite to lift the championship, and narrowly won the series 3-2. Following their victory, Eain “” Stearns, Cloud9’s mid laner, shared with Sheep Esports how his team navigated the thrilling Game Elder Dragon fight, Johnson “" Le and Song “" Su-hyeong are FlyQuest’s aces, their slow-and-steady improvement, Cloud9’s scrims improved going into this match, and how C9’s magic is channeled through his creativity.

Eain “APA” Stearns: “We said we didn’t want to make an actual Elder flip. We wanted to literally just push them away, so we didn’t want to hit the Elder Dragon. If it comes down to a flip, it’s a 50-50 because no jungle has any insane smiting tools, and they even had stuff like Kalista. We decided we were going to push mid, and Park “” Seung-gyu could teleport to FlyQuest’s base. We were stalling the remaining 20 seconds of cooldown on my ult, but other than that, we were talking about what summoner spells they had. If I recall correctly, Kalista had no flash, and we just took the fight.

APA: I think, in hindsight, before Team Liquid plays, so I might be corrected again tomorrow if TL smurfs. I think it was a mistake to pick FlyQuest because they do seem like a better team than Team Liquid right now. The name brand of the TL players, you have to be a little scared of them. Park “” Ru-han is a really good toplaner, Brandon “” Villegas is a potential MVP candidate, Lim “” Hyeong-seong has won MVP previously, and Sean “” Sung and Jo “” Yong-in are a renowned bot lane. I played with them, and they’re really good. Even though they were easier to face, it could have been a fluke. You know, if someone slept poorly or we showed up better in the day. After facing FlyQuest, I think it was a slight mistake [not choosing TL], but I’m glad it didn’t bleed us. At the end of the day, we’re not only trying to make it to MSI and to Arizona, but we’re also trying to win. Regardless, we have to beat everyone, so it’s not something too big to dwell on, considering we won.

APA: We take everything into account. We don’t scrim FlyQuest too often, but we take scrims into account, stage games, of course, and the personal opinions of our players. I think the ace of FlyQuest is mostly Gryffinn, but sometimes Quad has unique picks. Honestly, the topside, but mostly, I would say 90% of the time, Gryffinn is their ace. He is looking to pick unique champs, while everyone else plays mostly standard until the later games, but you know how later games are; I played Swain, and Ibrahim “” Samet Bulut played Akali.

It’s hard to tell what’s going to happen in later games of Fearless, but most of the prep is talking about what Gryffinn is going to play, why he plays these champions, and what he plays these champions into. If we’re picking a champion we know he is going to play… For example, if he picks Nasus into Vi, what are we doing about the Nasus pick or the Shen? We’re trying to have open and honest conversations about thinking: is it good, or do we care about it? The conclusion today was: yes, we care about it, so we’re going to ban them because we think he performs worse on the normal meta stuff. The Xin Zhao game is a lot worse than the Shyvana game. Even though no one plays Shyvana but him, and everyone plays Xin Zhao, that was our read on them.

APA: I think our champion pools mix a lot. He is a good Cassio; I think I’m a good Cassio; he is a good Hwei, and I’m a good Hwei. I feel those are the two picks that are mostly quote-on-quote what Quad is known for. For the Cassio game, I personally feel she is a broken champ. We first picked it, zero bans, didn’t ban anything in 4 and 5, and gave him his preferred match-up, which ended up being Viktor. I think I played much better than him that game, albeit the champion’s difference. In Game 3, I think Hwei is a good answer to Sylas. Even though I ended up trolling a little bit in the later laning phase, I think my early laning phase was really good against him. We were also flexing Twisted Fate all the way from R1-R2, and Thanatos wanted to pilot the champ top. It was best to let Thanatos play TF and answer mid with Hwei. There’s another game where I take TF mid, and he goes another funny counterpick into K’Sante.

APA: I think our scrims have been much better, especially this week. We had our best week of scrims to date. We scrimmed all the good teams, , TL, and . We, obviously, didn’t scrim FlyQuest, but every other good team we scrimmed and did pretty well, I would say. Especially considering we were struggling against teams like LYON and TL earlier in the split. Also, our ideas on the game are meshing right now. We have a better understanding of what our team meta is and how we want to push the game forward. We’ve been playing together for six months, so we understand, with deep nuance, what we need to do, how to do it, and, if we can’t do it, someone else needs to step up.

APA: I think their fighting was pretty good. I don’t think they did something special macro-wise. They had decent macro, to the point that it’s not losing them the game as it did in the past, but I think their fighting capabilities were pretty strong. They would show up to fights, either weaker or stronger, and throw down the gauntlet. For example, the fifth game when the Mundo and the Azir walked in literally 2v4, and we just killed the Mundo, it’s like… That’s how their team functions right now; they go into places and fight you. I would say they have pretty good hands. I think their fighting is some of the best in the league, and I don’t think you can flip on FlyQuest at the moment. I would be… I know they face Sentinels, which I also think is a decent team, so maybe I wouldn’t be surprised if FlyQuest lost to them. Yeah, I think FlyQuest is good.

APA: I don’t fully agree that it’s super tightly knit. Even though it was 3-2 today and we were pushed to the edge, I personally believe we’re a much better team than FlyQuest. I feel like, except for , , and , which is progressively becoming a good team, there aren’t many bad teams in the league. In years past, there used to be like five bad teams in the league. You would play versus them, farm them because they had a terrible player here or there, and they couldn’t win because they lacked trust in each other. Now, we actually have teams with solid foundations. Even if a team is favored, if you play poorly, you will still lose, for example, us versus FlyQuest. I disagree that competition is tight-knit. I think that C9 and LYON are the top two teams, and then there’s a gap.

APA: I credit myself a lot for this. I feel like C9 last year with this main core wasn’t that creative of a team. I think I’m an incredibly creative player. The example I can give is today’s Annie game where I flanked and TP’ed. We’re realistic players, so we felt the game was kind of over, and we needed to make magic happen. That’s what we started looking for with the teleport and flank. I said, “If they hit turret, I have tp in ten seconds or whatever, so am a tp behind them when the wave comes by. I’ll flank ‘em, so if you guys can find an engage, hopefully we can win.” I didn’t expect us to win the game off that as quickly as we did, to ace them and run the game down mid. I feel like a lot of the credit should go to me. As I said, I’m an incredibly creative player. I studied and think about the game a lot, so I can try and find these creative angles, and I’m lucky enough to be in a good team that, even from behind, trusts me to make these plays.”