“It’s normal on another team to have arguments left and right.”
Those are the words from the winningest Call of Duty player in the history of the esport. Ian “Crimsix” Porter is still mesmerized by how well his Dallas Empire team gets along, especially when it needs to make adjustments to its own gameplay.
The defending Call of Duty League world champions were forced to make changes before the second season of the CDL even began, along with the 11 other squads. A new 4-vs-4 format had the team’s previous shot-caller, James “Clayster” Eubanks departing for the New York Subliners.
Now it’s Cuyler “Huke” Garland’s job to serve as the main voice in the Empire’s communication structure. The Dallas Morning News jumped on a call with Huke to watch a couple matches from an Empire scrimmage against the Seattle Surge.
The 21-year-old broke down some of the Empire’s plays on two different hardpoint maps, showing why Dallas is primed for another strong season.
Here are some clips from that recording, and Huke’s own dissection of each play.
The break
Huke and I watched these maps from Anthony “Shotzzy” Cuevas-Castro’s perspective via his Twitch recordings. The 19-year-old CDL MVP is the Empire’s disruptor on the map, causing havoc in the enemy’s spawns and running rampant to give his teammates space.
He made a huge play at the start of this Garrison hardpoint rep. Here’s the clip:
Just because Shotzzy made the play of running straight down the middle of the map this time doesn’t mean it will work every time. However, Shotzzy getting two eliminations while staying alive left Seattle struggling for the entire remainder of the map.
“If you don’t do it a lot in scrims, and nobody expects you to do it, then you do it randomly, it will probably end up working,” Huke said. “You definitely don’t want that to happen.”
Hardpoint decisions
Check the score and minimap after this play. The Empire got a chunk of the first hardpoint and already have rotations for the next hill. Plays like this can be devastating in a league match.
This wasn’t the only heads-up play from the youngster on Garrison.
Ignore the Empire’s enormous lead for a moment and look at what Shotzzy does in the opening seconds of the video. He has the hardpoint right next to him and could easily get a couple seconds.
Instead he runs into the brick room and lays prone. Had he gotten on the hill, it would have given his position away and there were no Empire players to back him up at the time.
Shotzzy gets an elimination and delays the Surge’s rotation to the next hill. A small moment made a big difference.
He makes a similar play in this next clip, in which he could’ve battled for the remaining 10 seconds on the current hill. Instead he rotated to the next hill. That’s something Huke has focused on heavily as shot-caller, making sure teammates are making the right positional decisions.
The Empire don’t have much resistance to decisions like this, Crimsix explained in a phone interview.
Handling mistakes
It’s not always daisies for the Empire. They aren’t invincible. Huke explained a mistake his team made on the next map, in which the Empire made poor positioning decisions on Raid and lost their good spawns.
Dallas escaped with only a small deficit, but the same mistake in a league match against an Atlanta FaZe or OpTic Chicago would be costly.
Crimsix’s contribution with map knowledge on Raid has been crucial. He played for the best team in the world when the map first debuted in Black Ops 2, so he’s had to provide guidance.
The Empire have no qualms with anyone offering suggestions, and that’s what led them to a championship in 2020 and a quality offseason to follow.
“We identify a mistake, we say it once on how to fix it and everybody listens. That’s so crucial in a game with so many micro adjustments,” Crimsix said. “Being able to identify a mistake and adjust it on the first go is (expletive) huge. You can improve in scrims as a whole as a team so much faster than anyone else if you can do that.”
Speaking of mistakes, this last clip is what happens when communication isn’t at its best.
Shotzzy takes out Sam “Octane” Larew after a good callout from Crimsix, then proceeds to wipe Seattle without anyone shooting at him.
The three-point attempts were probably for show, but Huke had a description for that kind of mistake.
“What Shotzzy just did,” Huke said, “that should never happen to your team.”
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