2022 champions, Luminosity Gaming, won their second Championship title at the Pokémon UNITE World Championships 2023.

The 2023 competitive season has finally come to a close after two days of play at the Pokémon UNITE World Championships in Yokohama.

Despite Asia’s strong performance this year, the former World Champions were able to keep their titles for another year after a flawless grand final sweep against APAC East representatives, OMO Abyssinian.

In an exclusive interview with ONE Esports, Sean “Slashcan” Tucker explained how Luminosity went through big growing pains throughout the 2023 competitive season, and how egos can make or break a team.

Luminosity discovered that coming into the 2023 season as last year’s Champion wasn’t easy

Following their first Championship title back in 2022, Slashcan noticed at times that his team had begun to develop egos.

“The team’s ego was getting big, and it really showed when they were underestimating a lot of our opponents. I tried to ground the team and get them to put the work in, but it accumulated in March when we didn’t even qualify for the monthly finals,” he said.

As the team’s performance dipped, fans began to doubt whether they’d be able to get back to where they were last year.

The big wakeup call was when the team lost regionals. “It showed the team’s issues that we needed to work on. We went back to deal with our issues, we didn’t manage to fix everything, but we put the work in to improve where we could,” he said.

OMO Abyssinian were Luminosity’s biggest hurdle during the 2023 WCS

After their upper bracket match against OMO Abyssinian during playoffs, Slashcan felt they had faced their toughest opponent yet.

“Facing them in the winner’s bracket, we knew they were the best team. We were even hoping for Mjk or Oyasumi Makuro to beat them so we wouldn’t have to face them again,” he said.

OMO Abyssinian managed to beat both teams and qualify for the finals, and those very matches had helped Luminosity figure out how to deal with the APAC team.

“Mjk actually exposed a lot of OMO’s weaknesses that we weren’t aware of. That really helped us in the grand final and why our grand final performance was much stronger than our upper bracket match,” said Slashcan.

Make sure to follow Slashcan on YouTube for more Pokémon UNITE content and Luminosity on Twitter to stay up to date with the team.

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