The full Monte

Turns out the team who did the best out of the Paris Major was Monte.

Well, out of the underdogs at least. They clearly didn’t end up better than Vitality.

They secured a spot at the next ESL Pro League and won their first LAN trophy in Jönköping over a resilient Eternal Fire, who survived way past their expiry date multiple times thanks to some heroics from their stars.

A carry performance from woxic in the semi-finals, a crazy ace from XANTARES in the grand final, some superb rounds from Wicadia… it felt like Eternal Fire couldn’t lose.

Monte, though, held strong - and a step-up from br0 in the big moment saw him topfrag the final after a relatively quiet event. In fact, it was sdy who was the hot hand through the rest of the tournament - averaging a kill per round up ‘til the final.

Not bad for a guy s1mple spent months degrading, really.

Monte didn’t have an easy path to the final, either. They were the ones who took down the ESL Challenger titans Virtus.pro, who have spent the last two years making these events look a bit silly. Eternal Fire needed a bunch of overtimes to beat MIBR in their semi-final.

The big worry for VP is that fame never really showed up. fame is one of their star riflers, but he was kept pretty schtum in nearly every game, occasionally popping up with a big round but not being the consistent dynamo he is at his peak.

The biggest disappointment? TYLOO, formerly Rare Atom, made up four of the five lowest rated players. advent ended on a 0.54 rating.

It’s easy to scapegoat the IGL, but he does average a 0.80 rating while playing in Asia. He might be a bit of a liability inside the server.

The final standings were:

1st 🇺🇦 Monte - $50.000

2nd 🇹🇷 Eternal Fire - $20.000

3-4th 🇧🇷 MIBR - $10.000

3-4th 🇷🇺 Virtus.pro - $10.000

5-6th 🇺🇸 Nouns - $3.000

5-6th 🇪🇺 GamerLegion - $3.000

Astralis are done playing

If you can beat them, join them. Wait, huh?

Well, it’s exactly what stavn and jabbi have done. They’ve left the best Danish team Heroic to join the ever-rebuilding Astralis.

The outgoings are anchor b0RUP and device’s FACEIT friend Buzz. Whilst b0RUP was a shoo-in, the last spot was a close call between Staehr and Buzz. Buzz’s form simply dropped at the wrong time, worsened by Staehr’s mirrored improvement.

And hey, it’s easier to kick freebie Buzz than someone you chased for years and paid for, we suppose.

This move leaves Astralis with a pretty solid lineup: jabbi and stavn have shown what they’re capable of in the past stat-wise. Even if for stavn that does entail dropping off in big games, but hey that’s why they have device.

The new roster is genuinely exciting, which makes it weird that the announcement was anything but.

Although we guess it was hard to top Heroic’s earlier announcement, around how both players demanded their IGL’s head if they were to renew, only to then decide to leave negotiations for a spot in Astralis.

It also didn’t help that Astralis failed to hype it at all. They just dropped a post the day after their BLAST elimination. There wasn’t even a Tweet between their event debrief post and the announcement.

This roster will debut at BetBoom Dacha in December, so if you are genuinely excited, sit tight.

ENCE lose a pair

The falcon has landed.

Or, well, flown south for the winter.

Snappi has officially departed ENCE, much to the surprise of the man who has been living under a rock. Rumours are he’s Falcons-bound, but this essentially confirms it.

Not too surprising; but the fact that sAw is also leaving might come as a shock.

With no mention of where he’s going, it’s open to plenty of interpretation. Some expect him to go to G2, some think OG (who we completely forgot about) and some just simply have no idea.

It seems they might not be the only ones leaving, either. Dycha posted a meme that seems to suggest he’ll be the only one staying. Yes, we are reading into a shitpost. No, we’re not okay.

Rumour is that every single member of ENCE has offers from other teams, including Dycha, but no names have been made public just yet.

fnatic keep haemorrhaging players

Lads, you need to sign some players.

fnatic lost mezii and roeJ, and their genius idea to replace him was… to bench another player, apparently.

With jks’ benching, we among others thought an Aussie reunion at fnatic might make sense. They need a star, and dexter surely knows him well. Instead, fnatic benched dexter.

It’s not that that is a crazy decision - in fact, it’s probably quite smart. Not as smart as not signing him in the first place, obviously, but not a stupid decision. It’s just… you already committed to it, and you already need two players.

You now need two star riflers and an IGL. Where on Earth are you going to find those at this point?

For dexter, we expect he’ll either end up back home chilling, or he might end up in NA fronting a project out there. Decent money, they sort of speak English out there and they need IGLs.

Seems like a perfect match.

fnatic play a game on Wednesday. Lord only knows who is going to play for them.

ZywOo reminds everyone who’s boss

FaZe Clan’s 18-game streak is over.

And who else but ZywOo to end it?

We heard the rumors. We saw your tweets. How ZywOo was ‘finished’ after four maps of ‘okay’ (read: Good for everyone else) form as Vitality bombed out at IEM Sydney with a dead roster.

FaZe had destroyed all that stood in their way on CS2, but the streak had to end eventually.

Their 18-game run (13 on LAN) began when they sent Vitality home in last place in Sydney — it’s only fitting it ends against the same team, in the grand final of BLAST Copenhagen.

The final looked to be going the usual FaZe fashion. It had a plucky veto from karrigan by letting Vertigo through, a few bullshit full eco wins, and FaZe getting 7 rounds on their T side of Nuke.

But everything they did, Vitality did better.

At 11-11 on map two, at crunch time, the exact position FaZe usually level up, it was Vitality who won on a full eco. It was Vitality that mounted the T side comeback.

And it was Vitality that hoisted the trophy.

Replacing Magisk was supposed to be an impossible task. But, on debut no less, mezii and Vitality are champions once again.

The final standings were:

1st 🇪🇺 Vitality - $200K and World Final Qual.

2nd 🇪🇺 FaZe - $85.000

3-4th 🇺🇸 Complexity - $40.000

3-4th 🇷🇺 Cloud9 - $40.000

5-6th 🇪🇺 NAVI - $20.000

5-6th 🇩🇰 Heroic - $20.000

🤔 Weird

🔃 Out with the old, in with the new

😈 We do a little manipulation

This TL;DR was written by aizyesque, NER0, Horizzon and napz.
Crash_ coded the email and aizyesque copy edited.

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