Question marks were raised when fnatic signed Burmylov at the start of this year and understandably so. Their new IGL fear had worked wonders with jambo over on Passion UA, so it always seemed a little odd that they didn’t both jump ship over the Winter break.

However, just a few short and entirely unconvincing months later, Burmylov has now been benched. And, in an entirely predictable move, he’s been replaced by jambo with fnatic saying that this was their “original plan” all along.

Typically this is the part of the story where we’d shit on fnatic for being underwhelming for years, but we’re actually pretty excited by this move.

Their roster may not be perfect (it does feature blameF) but it’s one with more potential than they’ve had in a long time, and jambo is the perfect piece to complete it.

It may have just been a fluke event, but jambo looked like a genuinely solid AWPer at the Shanghai Major. One capable of being both passive and aggressive when the situation calls for it, he has a style that should actually adapt well to tier one.

As long as fnatic ever actually get to play at a tier one event, that is.

We may have cracked our obligated blameF joke earlier on, but it’s hard to argue that he’s not playing below his means, considering where fnatic currently find themselves in the rankings. Now he’s got a proper team behind him, it shouldn’t be too long before we see him back in the big time once again.

It’ll take some time, whether that’s for the roster to click or just for the VRS system to not be bad, but like NIP, fnatic have finally built a roster that looks like it will be able to compete at a tier 1 level.

And look, we’re nostalgia merchants here at tl;dr, so we just can’t complain.

Well, until we watch blameF bait again. Then we’ll have our fun.