Shotzzy, OpTic ready to feed off the home crowd at CDL Major I

There aren’t many constants in the Call of Duty League, as the first stage of this season has demonstrated, but Anthony “Shotzzy” Cuevas-Castro is one of them.

Two years ago, Shotzzy was named league MVP and won a world championship with the Dallas Empire, playing on a dream team that included Ian “Crimsix” Porter, James “Clayster” Eubanks and Cuyler “Huke” Garland. Crim and Clay in particular are guys whom Shotzzy credits for essentially teaching him how to play COD.

But today, Crim, Clay and Huke have all moved on, playing for franchises that have struggled in the 2022 season’s early goings, while Shotzzy is with OpTic now, the esport’s most popular team, and posting MVP numbers once again.

“My initial reaction was I just couldn’t believe it,” he told Nerd Street of the merger of Empire’s and OpTic’s rosters to create OpTic Texas. The org will host its rabid fanbase for Major I at Esports Arlington Stadium starting Thursday and continuing through Sunday. “I didn’t think it was true.”

Not only is it real, but it appears to be working.

OpTic off to hot start

The newly formed OpTic Texas roster -- which includes Empire teammate Indervir “iLLeY” Dhaliwal as well as OpTic Chicago holdovers Brandon “Dashy” Otell and Seth “Scump” Abner -- got off to a bit of a slow start. They got knocked out in the opening round at the Kickoff Classic, then went 0-2 on opening weekend.

In the weeks since, however, OpTic have won their last three matches and only dropped one map in the process.

Shotzzy described melding the team’s talents as “easy.”

“Scump, he’s a more strategic slow slayer, and I'm just kind of an annoying fast-paced sub, so we mesh really well,” he said. “Then Dashy, he’s always been a mid AR. That’s what his playstyle is -- he's never been classified as that, but he’s always played like a main. And then iLLeY, he’s always been that scrap player. Whatever needs to be done on the map, he does it.

“Our play styles just fit well together.”

MVP, MVP, MVP

Photo credit: Kyle Miller / ESPAT

While OpTic appears to be transforming into a formidable opponent before our eyes, Shotzzy is once again realizing success on an individual level.

Shotzzy currently ranks fourth in the CDL with a 1.13 overall kill/death ratio and is top five in hardpoint kills per 10 minutes, Search & Destroy kills per round, and SnD K/D, according to BreakingPoint.gg.

Some of that, he acknowledged, is a greater comfort level with the latest iteration of COD, Call of Duty: Vanguard.

“Competitively, it kind of gives me the same vibes as [Call of Duty: Modern Warfare] just because the movements are kind of the same,” Shotzzy said. “The time to kill is probably the closest time to kill … to MW. It’s definitely similar to MW.”

Correcting early mistakes

Despite his own resurgence and history of winning individual awards, the focus is on winning a world championship together -- and while OpTic Texas may have a stacked roster whose skills complement one another, it was clear from the first couple weeks of results they weren’t quite firing on all cylinders yet.

They were willing to put in the work, though, to get it turned around.

“After those two losses, we just played a lot of COD just to get better and get a lot of reps on certain maps,” Shotzzy said. “Our biggest problem in those matches was our SnD. I felt like we were making a lot of individual plays.

“When you make individual plays, it’s more a thing where you want to make a play because you see an opening to do it, but there’s a really high risk of it not working. Instead of doing that, we came up with more strats saying, ‘Hey, if I am gonna do this, make sure I have an AR watching over me -- and not only that, make sure someone ‘nades this just in case there’s a guy there.”

Major prediction

With their SnD issues resolved for the time being, their Control “amazing” in Shotzzy’s own words, and Hardpoint able to be tightened up but fine, OpTic think their map pool will be the key to victory at Major I.

“Whatever map we’re struggling at the most, we want to perfect that,” Shotzzy said. “Any of our mistakes we’ve been doing constantly we’ve been working on.”

In this case, that means practicing up on Gavutu.

“If we can perfect that, our map pool looks really good,” he said.

Of course, OpTic also will have the backing of the home crowd, a feeling Shotzzy has never experienced in COD but is very much looking forward to.

“I’ve been on the receiving end of hate,” he said. When I teamed with [Crim] -- the thing with him is, he’s not actually a villain, but he is a troll. He loved to make people mad, that was just his thing, so everybody always booed on us.

“Now that I’m OpTic, everyone's gonna be cheering us on, so I'm excited to see how that goes.”

Why not Halo?

Photo credit: MLG

Interestingly, Shotzzy revealed that were it not for the influence of guys like Crim and Clay, and were it not for the opportunity to play for OpTic this season, he may have jumped ship to the Halo Championship Series, which has seen a huge uptick in popularity since the release of Halo Infinite.

Prior to jumping into the COD scene, Shotzzy, who’s only 20 years old, won a world championship in Halo in 2018 with Splyce.

“I grew up playing Halo,” he said. “Playing Halo when I was a child was just so fun and I kind of miss those times, so when I was watching the trailer, I was thinking, ‘We’ll see how this offseason goes.’”

Fortunately for COD fans, the offseason went incredibly well.

“But when this situation came up with OpTic, I had to take this opportunity,” he said.

Lead photo credit: OpTic Texas