A new Ninja appears

At the eleventh hour…

We’ll let you in on a little secret. Though we are bona fide gamers, we don’t stay up til 5am to finish and send this email. Some of us even have families and children, and can’t stay up all night.

The newsletter is usually done and dusted by midnight European time, and we were chilling. Phil had put the kid to bed, Jack was off mourning the queen in his own… unique way and napz was probably enjoying some local Dutch delicacies.

Then NIP, at 11pm CEST, dropped a bomb.

Plopski was out, and the forgotten man, Aleksib was in.

That’s great and all. Really happy for you. Even if you did make us stay up later than usual. Really cool. Just one question.

…what?

Brollan joined to talk Swedish, hampus was already IGLing and came in as a leader, and Plopski… alright, fair enough. You did have to cut Plopski, realistically talking. The guy is just not it, at this level at least.

NIP have been splashing the cash recently, with an expenditure of probably over $2m in the last 14 months or so, on buyouts alone. This one probably suggests that they’ve given up on device ever coming back; else he would have been the obvious replacement for Plopski.

Supposedly, the roster lock for the RMR - and therefore the Major - was tonight, or tomorrow. Not only was this a last minute move for us, it was for NIP.

Will this move work? Lord only knows. Brollan didn’t want to go international on fnatic, hampus has to go back to being ‘just’ a player and has nearly always been on Swedish speaking teams, and they still don’t have an AWPer.

Predicting NIP is a waste of time, though. It’s like trying to guess what Kanye West is going to say next.