Well, turns out Lucky wasn’t so Lucky after all. Astralis announced this week that they were benching him in order to sign Farlig, the 22-year-old AWPer from FunPlus Phoenix.
Farlig hasn’t played since FPX failed to qualify for IEM Winter last year, a break of over three months, and comes into an Astralis that has been struggling to find form after the departure of most of their historic roster.
Before the break, Farlig’s performance wasn’t exactly incredible. According to HLTV he averaged 1.07 last year, with an ADR of 71.3 and .7 kills per round.
Those numbers aren’t awful considering he was technically on a tier one team, but they’re eerily similar to the stats Lucky had last year and Astralis has already decided he’s not working out.
Farlig’s signing is a confusing one; Lucky was very bad this year, for sure, but Farlig doesn’t seem like he’s going to be all that good unless Astralis has some diamond in the rough theory going on with him.
Instead, Farlig’s signing in some ways feels like an abandonment of the idea that Astralis is competing for the best roster in the world. Sure he could, and I hope he does, surprise everyone but as Scrawny said when the announcement came out, on paper, he does not fix their problems.
The other question is what will happen to Lucky, who confirmed in a Twitlonger that he still is under contract with Astralis.
Despite his performance this year, it would be sad to see the 19-year-old go the way of Bubzkji, who hasn’t played since Astralis released him and is now working as an analyst at a TV station.