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The head: New blood

You’re going to need an IGL. The head of the beast. Exodia The Forbidden One. The brains of the operation. There’s a few ways to go with this one, but our personal favourite for making sure it doesn’t work is the new blood: a guy who has never IGL’d before but is described as an ‘intelligent player’.

Image via: ESL

This is usually a player who never quite cut it at tier one as a star, but because people don’t want to be horrible, they just say they’re intelligent and keep it vague. You know, someone like interz, who any day now will become a pretty rubbish IGL, or TACO. Sometimes this is a player who was a star who slowly got worse, or decided to become an IGL far too early and ruined their hands completely.

However, perhaps the more insidious version is an older player who is ‘helping the younger players’, which has literally never happened.

Okay, it has. I’m exaggerating for effect. That’s sort of TLDR’s whole thing.

You know the type. An old star who has lost the magic. A coldzera type. flusha. f0rest. They used to be world class players, they fell off a bit and now they’re going to magically transfer their ‘experience’ through osmosis to some new talent. It’s just like the way mentoring works on Football Manager in the minds of the people who constantly suggest this. You just sort of put an older player near a younger one and they absorb this sort of vague ‘experience’ that made coldzera so good.

Not the killing people. It was the experience. He wasn’t experienced on stage because he kept getting there by being good, he was good because he kept playing on stage.

There’s a lot of reasons this never works, and it nearly always makes the deadest team you can imagine. The first, and most obvious, is what I’ve just alluded to. You can’t just make young players better by putting them next to someone who has played the game for longer. Yes, it works when you’re new to the game, and yes, you will get better by playing with and against better players - but coldzera and flusha are playing in tier 3 because they’re just a bit wank nowadays. You aren’t actually playing with a top player, you’re playing with the ghost of one.

You haven’t visited Paris just because you had a croissant from the Lidl bakery.

In fact, it often makes it worse. They’re used to playing at the top of the tree with the best of the best, and so they’re going to expect things from the rookies that they aren’t able to do or used to doing. You could argue this would eventually help them once they get used to the standards, but it usually manifests as the old timer just trying to ‘carry’.

It’s like how Wayne Rooney is a horrendous football manager. He expects everyone to play like Wayne Rooney or Cristiano Ronaldo. coldzera expects everyone to play like fer in 2016.

Or, he wants everyone to play like TACO… which brings me on to my next point. They don’t let go of the past. coldzera isn’t going to start being a guy who sets up his teammates. f0rest still wants to put out highlights. GeT_RiGhT still thinks he can clutch, for crying out loud.

They’re going to keep the good spots just to drop a 1.05 and talk about the good old days. That’ll help. Make sure the new players can’t get into any good positions. Make them learn how to be subservient to a guy on an ego trip.

That’s not the only two types of new blood IGLs. You can get a completely untested guy who did sort of well on his ESL Challenger team. I don’t recommend this one, as sometimes it works out. If you want a sure fire dead team, you need an NBK- type, not a potential kyxsan type. Sometimes, new guys have new ideas, and many of those ideas are downright awful (which is why nobody has bothered to try them before), but some of them are good.

You don’t want to accidentally get a good one with good ideas, even if the rest of the team is as dead as CIV 7. I’m trying to bury a team, not a good player’s career here.

The heart: Little engine that couldn’t

You need some passion. Or a complete lack of passion. Or some anger. Really, you just need a support player whose vibes are completely opposed to your stars and IGL. If you have a calm IGL, you need a lunatic. If you have an apEX regen, get a jks regen. It’s quite simple.

This doesn’t just extend to IGLs and supports - you need a smooya to piss off Snappi.

The best kind of personality clash you can get is one where it seems like they might get on while they’re winning. When things are going well, everything is great. As soon as you lose a game, things start going tits up. That’s perfect, because this team is going to lose a lot, and you want it to blindside the players to make sure they’re not used to it yet.

You want your support players to not only have personality clashes with everyone else; you also need them to be rubbish, but sneakily rubbish. Your best bet is to look for a player who is well-liked by the teammates who cut him (why did they cut him if he was good AND nice?), or someone who is described as having ‘the best aim on the team’ by a player whose rating is like 0.40 higher than his.

I hate to keep ragging on him, but interz is about right. JACKZ too, though he’s not as bad, does seem to bring bad luck on these sorts of teams. F1KU. Plopski. These types of players. Other pros swear they’re fantastic, but you have to believe your eyes, and the results will follow. These are great players to sign when it comes to killing your team because they’re really hard to remove - because players love them.

Plopski can do all the roles you don’t want to do! It doesn’t matter that he’s making you lose, you’re having fun.

In fact, in this scenario, you actually want them to get on with the rest of the team. es3tag is an absolute model pro who according to pros has great mechanics and an incredible knowledge of utility, and people love to wax lyrical about how amazing his movement is. Everyone loves him.

But he’s absolutely cack. I’ve watched him play. He’s pony. He can’t play the T side and he’s about average on CT. He doesn’t kill anyone, his clutching is not really worth talking about, he has no stand-out attributes in the server. Oh, except his movement is superb - I’ve never seen somebody move so smoothly to their death.

He’s perfect.

What I’m saying is, you can sign a team with clashing personalities and guarantee a burnout pretty quickly. If you want a team that stays deader for longer, you need to not drive a stake through its heart, but slowly boil its heart like one would a frog.

The hands: Harbingers and journeymen

There’s a very special type of player in Counter-Strike that you don’t see very often at all in traditional sports. They do exist - I would argue Ravel Morrison, and at this very moment, Dele Alli, are great examples - but they’re much more common in Counter-Strike, simply because each individual matters more on a CS team and there’s more bad teams.

Obviously basketball only has five on a team too, but there’s only really the NBA worth talking about.

This is a type of player I’m dubbing ‘The Harbinger’. A player whose mere presence on a team limits it to being somewhere between ‘dead’ and ‘wish it were dead’. A type of player who has been on many a bad team, and usually one or two good teams for a short lived period of which their career is built. This type of player is called a harbinger because their presence signals doom.

If you want to build a dead team, you need a harbinger.

My personal favourite example of this is MICHU, who was almost literally a harbinger of doom for the glorious Virtus.pro team. He replaced the legendary TaZ right and failed to stop the slide, even though he himself was playing okay. At this point, you have hope in the player. You can see the potential. A good player in a bad team, a guy who just needs the right environment. Things were falling apart around MICHU, and it wasn’t his fault.

But he had that death stink on him, and boy did it show.

He went to Envy and Evil Geniuses straight after, and while it’s not entirely his fault those teams went the way of the Roman Empire, he kept being on bad, stinky, necrotic teams. You need him.

There are others, of course. Calyx spent a while as a bit of harbinger, but redeemed himself on Eternal Fire. EspiraNto is basically the prototype for this. gade. nexa. Honestly, since 2018, valde is one too.

He’s a great example because he’s clearly an excellent player (or at least was) and is generally very well regarded. He passes the eye test, there’s no nasty rumours about him, and his signing would be met with pretty universal appraise - but North collapsed around him, OG have never been anything other than dead, and he joined TSM.

TSM! You need a sixth sense just to find their games on HLTV. They employed, at one point in time, JACKZ, valde, interz, MoDo and CYPHER. Now I like CYPHER, but it’s like he was trying to catch something by joining that team.

Illustration by ANDY. Source: BLAST

That TSM team is the absolute pinnacle of the dead team I’m trying to help you build. Honestly, I’ve tried to workshop a more dead team and I’m really struggling. It has everything - a double pivot of support players who are well-liked, an IGL who used to be an intelligent star player who lost the fragging power, and two stars who were massive gambles.

Getting stars on dead teams is difficult, and CYPHER had all the hallmarks of a harbinger. He had one good event, at the Major, and we all know the dangers of signing someone after a good World Cup. Looking at you, James Rodriguez.

MoDo was a massive gamble, but not in the sense that he might have been good - more that he was so blatantly rubbish that it might have been too obvious they were trying to build a dead team. You have to at least pretend you’re trying to build a good team so that you can maintain it for a while. MoDo was never going to work. You might as well have put smooya in.

For that reason, if I were to build an even more dead team, I’d keep the core of valde, interz and JACKZ and instead have HS as a star player, and draken as the AWPer. Ah, imagine. draken is just good enough - he’ll play well in every third game and make you believe you’re improving as a team, and HS has literally never been on a good team despite supposedly being a player.

Seriously, HS’ reputation and his output are not even close to being in line. He’s always been terrible, despite being well-liked by fans. He would ensure this team never did anything, while still maintaining the illusion that you’re trying.

The other kind of useless star player is the journeyman. Journeymen aren’t inherently bad players and you can actually find some very useful ones, but there’s always a reason they’ve been on lots of teams and never found a home. They aren’t harbingers because they don’t generally stick around long enough, and by the law of averages they will have been on at least one good team at some point.

A player like innocent is what you’re looking for here. Multiple teams, none of them ever really coming close to the top tier but occasionally pretending to, lots of doomed international projects where he has come out with some credit. He won’t ever push the ceiling and he won’t ruin your floor down, he’ll just exist.

My personal choice to ensure death would be loWel, who basically never spends an extended time on a team, allowing you to cycle in another player you just remembered, just to maintain a facade of progress. He’s had flashes of competence (often mistaken for ability) without any kind of consistency, success or aura.

Form is temporary, death is permanent

It’s easy to build a dead team - just pick bad players who hate each other. It’s simple, but I’m trying to build a lasting monument to mortality. A team that exists not in the afterlife, but in purgatory. A team that simply floats in the ether, neither attempting to succeed nor improving towards a goal.

Death is permanent, but dead teams are temporary. It’s important to strive for permanence to stay true to the word, and for that you need a lasting death stink. You have to chug along, losing, without disbanding. You can change players, ideas and parts until you build a Ship of Theseus - as long as it’s manned by Captain Hector Barbossa, who I’m reliably informed is a dead pirate captain. By Google. I couldn’t remember his name.

He’s dead, is the point. Or actually not quite dead. He’s sort of in death purgatory. Like OG.

To maintain that level of agony, you need a plan. I’ve just laid out exactly what you need to keep building dead teams, so if TSM ever decide to come back, they know who to hire to maintain their CS department.

You, because you’ve read this whole article. Well done, you. You’re ready to build something truly terrifying.

For your first task, respond to this email with the absolute worst, deadest team you can muster up - and I’ll grade them for you.

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