Kataomi` on The International 2026: “I don’t think any team is really that good right now.”

I think we mainly overthought our drafts. We messed up our picks in the second, third, and fourth games of the Grand Final. We tried to learn from that—it resulted in a second-place finish—but now we’re ready.

I don’t think any team is truly dominant right now. All year long, there’s been a different tournament winner every time. No roster has won two tournaments in a row.

You can’t say, “I’m so successful, I can’t learn from these noobs because I’m the best.” You can always learn from other teams and even just from public streams.

I think we had an excellent hero pool and a deep understanding of the map—how it changes as the game progresses—and at that moment, we were ahead of other teams in that regard. But then we let our guard down a bit, and our opponents, after studying the replays, caught up. We started playing more sluggishly, and we had to go back to analyzing other teams’ demos. It’s impossible to be completely consistent and win every tournament this season: it’s very long, there are many championships, and the standard is extremely high.

In many ways, our team imposed this meta on the rest of the field: if someone plays certain heroes successfully and wins, others start taking notice and copying them. I created a meta with Winter Wyvern; now every five-man squad plays it, and the hero is constantly in the ban list. When your strategies get banned, you have to look for new options.

I think it’s wrong to put that kind of pressure on myself and the team, as if the tournament were a make-or-break event and any one bad game would ruin everything. Going into it with that mindset is harmful. We try to focus on our own game, on communication, and on supporting each other, without getting hung up on mistakes: a mistake can always be corrected, and we can learn from it. This isn’t the end—it’s just the group stage, where we’ll gradually find our rhythm.