Immortals coach Packing10 on his ever-changing roster: ‘We think synergy is a myth’

Immortals’ VALORANT team qualified for the first North American VALORANT Masters tournament after placing third at the Challengers 2 closed qualifier, solidifying their spot as a top-eight team in North America.

They’re led by head coach and general manager Michael “Packing10” Szklanny, who began his coaching career in Overwatch with Hammers Esports before joining Immortals Gaming Club to coach the LA Valiant beginning in 2019. Even while working with the Valiant, he also took on the coaching and general managing role with Immortals’ VALORANT team last May. Along with Jordan “Gunba” Graham, Immortals have developed a reputation for finding and developing talent in the nascent VALORANT competitive scene.

Read more: North American VALORANT Masters Power Rankings

Nerd Street Gamers spoke with Packing10 to find out more about his background and coaching philosophy and how Immortals’ roster has developed since last year. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Nerd Street: You started out your coaching career while also taking 18 college credits per semester in flight school and raising a kid. How did you do it?

Packing10: It was exhausting. Through 2019, I actually retired from coaching at that point. I didn’t think I was going to get back into it, like, late 2018 and then, I had an opportunity to coach a team in Europe a little bit for Overwatch. I decided to do it just to pick up a little bit of extra money for my house, and we ended up making a LAN in Paris, and I got to go out and do that.

Then Valiant reached out to me and then they just got it on a snowball and just kept building and building, and then I ended up taking over the head coaching role. When that was all going on I said initially that I wasn’t going to let coaching affect me continuing my life. I know for a lot of people it was really easy for them to move out to California, but there were a lot of stipulations I had going into coaching. I needed to be able to keep going to school. I was doing 18 credits worth of school and I was flying five days a week to make sure I got my flight hours.

My wife and I had our first son, and I was coaching and all those different things. It was very stressful and time consuming, to say the least. Thankfully I was very good at managing time and multitasking.

Nerd Street: So when you started flight school you were never preparing for a career in coaching?

Packing10: I think I was kind of done. I was like, “listen, it’s time for me to move on with my life.” I was coaching because I got out of the Marine Corps in 2014 and I had really bad PTSD, so that’s why I picked up gaming. I was doing that for a while, and the first coaching job I got was $100 a month. It was the greatest opportunity I ever had thinking back on it because it really did change my life. It was something I didn’t really plan on doing forever, so essentially when I thought it was time for me to be done, I said, “yeah, I’m going to retire and I’m just going to focus on my family and school and make a good living as a pilot.”

The opportunity just came from the Valiant and [Director of Competitive Esports Michael Schwartz]. Once I saw the writing on the wall about a month in that things were going to be increasing exponentially over the next couple of months in terms of opportunity and things like that. Luckily for me, I have a great support structure and my wife was more than supportive of everything I needed to do. It was a crazy time for sure.

After 2019, packing10 had to rebuild the Valiant roster. Photo: Activision Blizzard

Nerd Street: When you started with the Valiant, you came into a team that was already built. Moving over to VALORANT, you had to build a team from scratch. What was it like coming into an already built team versus having to build your VALORANT team from the bottom up?

Packing10: In 2019, the team ran its course, and then in 2020 the LA Valiant waxed their roster from management, so we had to build a completely new roster in 2020 for the LA Valiant. We learned a lot and we had a lot of good structural ideas about how we needed to run that team and what we needed to do to be successful.

So building that team in 2020 with the Valiant, we made sure that we were doing everything from the ground up. We were prioritizing getting great staff, and then once we got great staff we ran about 1,500 player tryouts. We did this huge open tryout thing — there were three to four different blocks going on at the same time six to eight hours a day. There was one coach, and we had 11 spectators recording everyone’s POVs. We did that for a couple of weeks and we really realized that the open tryout system can find you a lot of good players.

When we went into the next year when VALORANT was coming up, we were talking with our boss Mike who said, “hey, listen, we can build your team here. Every other team is just going to be the CS:GO friendship circle,” and we didn’t want to see that happen here. We said just give us the opportunity, we promise you we’ll make a roster that is worth it.

We did the same kind of screening process we did on our normal applications, and then from there was a mix between looking at the statistics of how the players were performing, to the eye test from the players, to any innate abilities of leadership or communication skills. We ended up finding some really good players.

I think through that open tryout process we got three players which were [Noah “jcStani” Smith], [Amgalan “Genghsta” Nemekhbayar], who are both still with us, and [Joseph “Bjor” Bjorklund] which is still playing on a really high level team. Then we found [Yannick “KOLER” Blanchette] maybe a day or two after, and then [Peter “Asuna” Mazuryk]. Every player we had in that first iteration of the roster could be argued that they are still successful players.

Read more: 100 Thieves VALORANT rising star Asuna proving himself to fans, his parents

Nerd Street: Why do you think having an ever-changing roster works well for you?

Packing10: If you’re not performing, then we have the opportunity to replace you, and we’re going to do everything we can to not overreact on situations, but remain diligent in having a very good scouting list of players we could try out at all times. We evaluate performance every single day, and if we feel we need to make changes then we’re going to be demanding. We’re going to make changes. We have the ability to do that within the organization, and they trust us with that because they trust the philosophy works.

We’ve had success with it. This year we’ve just kept getting better and better because every single time we end up either trading players or cutting players, everybody always says, “oh Immortals are going to suck now because they got rid of Asuna and [Quan “dicey” Tran],” and then we come back the next tournament and we do better.

People were giving us a hard time getting rid of [Jason “jmoh” Mohandessi] and [Jason “Neptune” Tran]. Flash forward a month, and we win the open qualifier and then place second and third in the next two tournaments, and here we are preparing for Masters.

Nerd Street: It seems like when you have that kind of mindset of always being replaced, that pushes your team to always want to perform at their best.

Packing10: I think it does a majority of the time, sometimes it’s unhealthy. In every good success there’s a little bit of fear. Whether you’re playing in a game and the game is close and you’re afraid of losing or you’re starting to get complacent and you’re afraid you’re gonna lose your paycheck, all of those things always end up coming back to finding a positive net growth somewhere.

We don’t want players to feel like their stats are bad and they’re going to get kicked. That’s not the case at all. We want players who end up doing their job for their team and do what’s asked of them. We want them to put in the maximum amount of effort to be successful.

Something Gunba and I say a lot is one of the things that’s unforgivable for us, is if people are lazy and then we lose. Because we’ve both been in situations before where we’ve had a great opportunity to be successful, we’ve had a team that can win, then we let our foot off the gas, or some of the players got complacent and we weren’t on top of them, and then we ended up losing. It’s one of the things that is an unforgivable sin in this game. If you get complacent, and you get lazy and then you go into a big tournament like this or First Strike or something like that and you don’t put that effort in there and you lose, it’s something you regret for the rest of your life.

Nerd Street: Do you see any balance between having the best players at all times and having synergy within the team?

Packing10: It’s something we talked about a lot. We think synergy is a myth. If you have players play together for a month or two, they’re gonna get that understanding of what they need to do as teammates, but I’ve talked to some people who weren’t going to make any roster changes for a year because they want to see their team synergize. That’s not what happens. Players have the talent to make it or players don’t have the talent to make it.

There’s teams that give them an extra six months of them playing Tarkov or World of Worldcraft or whatever they’re playing on the side and not focusing on what’s important, which is improving every day and trying their best to win. If they’re not doing that then we don’t really see the value in them.

I think synergy is important in a lot of ways, but in terms of being able to win games, it’s not something we fall back on. If we have the best players, and we have a good strategy, and everyone has a good understanding, it doesn’t matter what happens.

Nerd Street: It sounds like you place more value on players that want to win rather than players that are going to work well together.

Packing10: We want players that are talented. That comes first. Talent comes before all. That’s a big saying we’ve had here for a long time. It doesn’t matter if a player has a little bit of an attitude or a little bit of an ego, if you’re talented and we think you can make the team better, then you’re welcome here.

It’s our job as staff to make sure that that player is integrated into the team properly and that we can solve those problems if they come up.

Nerd Street: When you first started the team, what did you envision for the team when you first started looking for players?

Packing10: I think we had no idea what we envisioned. We said, “let’s go in here, let’s do it the right way, and let’s look at these players. Let’s be super objective about it. The roles don’t matter, we can reassign people roles.” We still do that, and that’s something that we do more than any other team, is bring people in who are duelists and move them to lurk, or whatever the case may be.

Whatever we did, we didn’t want to settle on players just to have a team. As I said, we ended up getting three players out of those open tryouts and we graded them all on tons of different aspects. Do they have mechanical talent, an ability to lead, are they criticizing other players or are they trying to improve the team, and how do they take feedback from other people?

We evaluated those skills and if they had the fundamental skills, they should be a good player. They should be able to grow into a good teammate, and let’s see what happens. No one really knew what was good and what was bad, and that’s why everyone was always importing those CS:GO players because at least they had the tactical shooter fundamentals. If they have those, then they can be successful in the game no matter what, it doesn’t matter how they use abilities or how they think, but we wanted to try to be ahead of the curve on that. We wanted to teach players how to play VALORANT and not CS:GO.

Lead image credit: Riot Games