Following their meteoric rise at the end of Season 23, which saw them qualify for playoffs in 3rd but lose out to Publiclir to finish 4th, dd+5abs have made significant changes to their roster. After cutting their previous medic Honey Badger and losing their pocket qnx and their scout ixy, dd+5abs have now found replacements to complete their roster. Veteran player Admirable and rising talent django have joined the team on medic and scout respectively, adding experience and fragging power to their line-up.
dd+5abs languished at the bottom of the table for the majority of Season 23 Premiership, until victories over Infused, LEGO, and Foreskings propelled them to a playoff spot. The addition of feeling, Admirable, and django to the roster is a large shuffle for the team, who have struggled in the off-season so far with disappointing results in both of the DreamHack Summer Qualifiers, only winning a single map.
Admirable with his game face on (picture by Getawhale)
Admirable is a player perhaps known best for his casting and behind-the-scenes work, but has a wealth of experience gathered from years of playing in Premiership. He was last seen playing medic for coolclan in Season 19 Premiership, surrounded by upcoming players struggling to play at a low Premiership level. Whilst Admirable is not known for his exceptional gameplay as medic, his experience and motivational qualities within a team environment can provide much when his ubers cannot.
Admirable spoke to us about why he has come out from the shadows to join this team:
Honestly I still love this game even eight and half years later. Every offseason I look at the ETF2L recruitment section and theorise what sort of fantasy team I could put together, I even trialled (unsuccessfully) for Planet Express last season. Perhaps this season in particular appealed to me because I see so many up and coming players, but an obvious lack of grizzled veterans.
Watching dd+5 abs make it to the playoffs was an incredible story last season, but beyond that the team already composed of exciting players that I have followed for some time. It feels like every season for the last two years Tomas has talked to me about playing together, but it never happened until now. I've got time to invest in competing at present, so I was more than happy to try out when asked.
I think I can bring a lot of experience and offer some insights to the team. It has been a year and half since I competed seriously in 6v6, so I've got a lot of work to do shaking off the rust, but my natural strengths lie in being a good communicator and a good teammate. That seems to have been enough to get my foot in the door, now I just have to actually get good at medic!
When I do actually compete I give it my all and I think this roster is equally keen. Qualifying for DreamHack Summer and making ETF2L Playoffs would be the two obvious goals to strive for in the immediate future, but my personal motivation is to see how good I can get individually and see what I can bring out of the team. Hopefully a name change for starters… smh.
His newest partner in crime, django, is a player with no prior history in Premiership or indeed in many teams. Whilst his abilities on scout have been noticed by top players such as fellow Icelandic citizen Hafficool, he has never had a stable team in which to prove his worth. His potential on scout is yet to be fully tapped, but appears to possess a reasonable level of raw fragging ability. This will be his time to prove himself.
shappie gave us the team's thoughts on these roster moves:
Well, we have gone with Admirable because from the trialists we had, we enjoyed playing with him the most. Before we started trialling Admirable, we had in mind trialling CondoM, but LEGO reformed and he came back to LEGO. We also have trialled pablo, raptor and cube. We kinda enjoyed playing with pablo, but after his first trial, he decided that he is not keen enough to play seriuos tf2 again. Raptor, was good, and he is great young talented player, but some of us, thought that old man Admirable is better than young talent. We picked him because he was giving us the advices and telling the conclusion, what went wrong, and on which places we should improve to reach better results. The gamesense and calls that he brings in team are awesome, and the best part, that he is great buddies with feeling!
After the season ended, we had no plans in looking for a new scout, because we were happy with our current lineup and didn't wanted to change anything. But after several weeks off season, ixy decided to leave us because he wanted to focus on his school, and we all understood the reason, and wished him best of luck! Then we got stressed that we are going to be able to find same good scout as ixy. But then, feeling offered us to try django, same, young talented scout, just from Iceland. After several trials, we were impressed with his keenness and the results that he brought us, so we decided to keep him, and finally finalize our roster, so we have all 6 players and we finally can begin practising properly and reaching our new targets.
We are not hoping to win any play-offs or anything, but in our plans we have, to be between top 5 best european teams in prem. Also, we think, that this roster is strong enough to repeat the same madness like last season and guaranntte our selfs a play offs spot. But this season, we will have two new strong prem teams, which are Bagser Five and Top5 rocket,who are also talented people and we are looking forward giving them a great games!
The roster for dd+5abs is now complete, with:
- Scout: django
- Scout: Sjoeberg
- Roamer: dd5f
- Pocket: feeling
- Demoman: shappie
- Medic: Admirable