LØS Brandão: "Our main goal is to regain our identity"

LØS

head into the CBLOL 2026 playoffs after putting together a consistent campaign throughout much of the regular season, but also experiencing a drop in performance in recent weeks. The team, which dominated the competition during the period when the meta favored roaming supports and mages in the botlane, had to adapt to the recent changes in the game.

In an exclusive interview with Sheep Esports conducted Saturday, August 29, after the win against , Felipe “Brandão” Brandão, LØS Assistant Coach, analyzed the difficulties the team faced during the meta transition and explained how the recent results served as a wake-up call for the roster. The coach also discussed Jeong “” Seong-hoon’s development and the greater level of protagonism the player has taken on within the team throughout the split.

Felipe “Brandão” Brandão: “First of all, what changed a lot for us was the meta, and that was inevitable. In the previous meta, with roaming supports and mages bot, we were ahead of everyone, unquestionably. Going back to a more standard meta, I believe we got very unaccustomed to playing this way. It’s not that we don’t know how to play it, because before the mage meta, it was the same meta, so I think we need to adapt again. That was the greatest difficulty in recent weeks. We dropped a little bit in level, but we need to understand what identity we want to have again, since we can’t continue doing the same thing we were doing in the previous meta. I believe adaptation is also part of it. During these weeks, we tested a lot of things.

We even considered continuing to play mages, and we tried to see in which situations we could play them and in which we couldn’t. Today, for example, we played Seraphine. We are still testing a lot of things to create a more solid identity since the meta changed. We will have two weeks before playing the playoffs, and we want to use this period to establish this new identity. To have more certainty about what we want, what we want to play, what our priorities are, and then establish ourselves in the meta and become solid again. I believe we dropped a lot because of both the change and the tests we are doing. So, our main goal is to regain our identity.

Brandão: First, the loss is very good for us to wake up. Winning that much, unquestionably, isn’t good overall, because it naturally makes you become more comfortable, stop paying as much attention to the details and, sometimes, play on autopilot in certain situations. That was the first thing for us. The second thing is that it worries us, but it was more of a shake-up for us to wake up and get ourselves back on track. I believe we are doing that. Last week, when we lost to LOUD, I had a lot of complaints about our practice week. Personally, I thought the week before that had been horrible, and we had already had other weeks that weren’t very good, but that week before LOUD was the last straw for me. I was very happy that this week, we completely changed our approach. It was a very productive week.

Besides the tests we did, we played much more solidly in the things and concepts we want. Whether we lost a map to Fluxo today or not, I don’t think that impacts it. I’m very happy with the other two games we played. The first game had a bit of a catastrophe in the toplane. Especially because we had Seraphine bot, Gnar couldn’t be as far behind as he was. I don’t think it was (Kim Dong-min) fault either. I believe it was a team mistake: we should have covered when they took top, and we ended up not doing that. He got isolated, and the game became difficult because of it. So, what worries me isn’t losing that map to Fluxo. I see the two victories much more positively, because they were in our style, with us controlling the game, building a significant gold lead, and playing for objectives.

Brandão: First, this is the problem I talk about with winning, and I believe it isn’t only in the championship. If you win a lot in the championship, a lot in scrims, it starts to feel like you don’t have any problems. If you always play perfectly, you probably won’t, but that isn’t the case. The tendency, speaking about human nature, is for you to become comfortable and not pay as much attention to mistakes. What was happening is that before, we were much more focused and working on our concepts. We didn’t even give our opponents a chance; we suffocated the teams we were playing against.

Over time, we weren’t as focused, playing more on autopilot and not looking as much at the things we had been doing before. Even so, for the team to be good, everyone was in good form, everyone is mechanically good, and we end up winning games through individual mechanics, through fights. We end up forgetting about the concepts we are working on. This kind of thing masks the problem. Even though we weren’t practicing well and working on the concepts we wanted, we were still winning.

You don’t feel like you need to improve or go back to doing what you were doing because, in the end, you are winning. It’s difficult to see that. It’s something I’ve been talking about for a while, around three weeks, not just me, but the other coaches as well. The loss comes at a good time for that, for us to wake up. The change in our approach from before to now, especially this past week, was completely different. It was very positive, and I think that will make us arrive at the playoffs very strong, because the tendency now is for us to focus even more.

Today, we lost a map, we understood exactly what we did wrong in that game, and it’s already something we can work on during these two weeks. Everything has already been different from the other weeks. We already have a purpose, we know what we want to work on. We aren’t going to focus only on fights or individual things, but more on what we want to play as a team, including the identity we want to have. All of this has a big influence. For me, these last few weeks, especially this past one, were very positive in that sense. I think we are having a very good change in mentality.

Brandão: Maybe people don’t know this, but when we built the team to play the circuit, at the time we didn’t even know we were going to play in the CBLOL. The first piece we had on the team was (Wallyson Queiroz), because he was already a player under contract, coming back from . The second player we signed was Feisty. So, we had Duduhh and Feisty as the main pieces of the team and for the style we wanted to build. Everything was also built around them, their style and how we believed they would perform. It’s turning out that it’s working really well.

The reason we chose him from the beginning was that he was already a very consistent player. If you look at his laning stats, he has always been very good in that regard, since last year and this year as well. I believe he had one bad point against Fluxo in the previous split, in that BO5, and after that he returned to his consistency. We have players like Duduhh and Zest, who sometimes overshadow him a little bit individually, but he has been a fundamental piece for us since the beginning.

We have (Gabriel Aparicio) as our captain, but Feisty talks a lot in-game. You can see that many plays around him, especially in the mid game, in terms of assignments and proactivity on the sides, usually come more from him. He is kind of the heart of our team in that sense as well. So, I believe that now, in terms of laning, he has always been great for me, but after the EWC bootcamp, he has been bizarre, at an absurd level. For example, we had a scrim against , and he solo killed (Jeong Ji-hoon), something that, at our level, is often unimaginable to think that someone from the Brazilian level could do.

I also believe the meta is very good for him. The champions in the current meta favor him a lot. It’s not very different from before, but I believe he has matched the team much more in terms of protagonism simply through his gameplay. Many times, the other players also have much more media exposure and know how to work with it, while he doesn’t know as much about that. But for us, he has always been a fundamental piece from the beginning. I think he is just showing and giving back that confidence to the team, the confidence we gave him.”