hampusball gets rolling

BLAST Premier group stages are a perfect breeding ground for upsets.

There’s new rosters — 9 out of 12, actually — and… we’ll just call it a ‘forgiving’ format.

EG beat Heroic in Spring groups this year. OG beat FaZe and Astralis in 2022’s Fall groups.

This year’s benefactors are NIP — who bounced back from a opening day loss to Complexity to rally in the lower bracket and then defeat Vitality in the Group A final.

By doing so they became the first team to qualify for BLAST Fall Finals in Copenhagen, a breath of fresh air for a team that never quite clicked under Aleksib.

This win is a huge confidence boost, but our next question is the important one: Is it sustainable?

Brollan getting 50 kills in two maps may not be, but this is a NIP roster that should have some serious rifling depth. In theory, none of REZ, k0nfig, hampus, or Brollan are bad fraggers. It’s designed to be a team without a weak link.

Buuuut none of them are really consistently great fraggers either. headtr1ck is still raw, and they have essentially put Counter-Strike’s four most inconsistent riflers on the same team.

Beating Vitality is a great sign, a showcase of the team’s potential and of hampus’ style of calling.

But let’s not get too carried away with a result at a BLAST group stage. NIP have shown flashes before — to truly prove themselves, we’ll need to see just a little bit more.

ICYMI in our match section, the finals begin today:

🇪🇺 OG vs.  🇩🇪 BIG - match page

🇩🇰 Astralis vs. 🇺🇸 Complexity - match page