Welcome to the PGL Banana Cup Austin 2025, an incredible tournament in which such legends of the game as dav1deuS, dgt, and snow of paiN-fame will take on plucky Asian underdogs The MongolZ in the semi-finals.

Wait, no, this is a Major semi-final, isn’t it? Christ, BLAST do not have any luck with good Major playoff brackets, do they?

This is a match between two teams that everyone expected to lose their respective quarter-finals. Both have already made history, and both will already be thrilled to have made it as far as they have.

For The MongolZ, this game marks a landmark moment not just for them after all of their stage struggles but also for their entire continent – no Asian team has ever gone this far in a Major.

For paiN, a team with five Major playoff debutants, it marks something of a passing of the torch within South American CS.

A team that has highlighted the talent that resides outside of Brazil, they also had to beat FalleN’s FURIA in order to get here. And considering snow genuinely was FalleN’s student, that’s honestly pretty f–cking cool.

Maybe we did dog on this game a little bit at the start of this piece, but we’re actually pretty excited for it.

MOUZ vs Vitality should obviously be the better game, but when two teams meet in a situation like this, it’s often the basis for magic.

We expect The MongolZ to win – and that will probably be the best case scenario if we want an actually competitive final. But both these teams have already surprised us at this event, so we’d be foolish to count paiN out entirely.

Either way, we consider ourselves to be winners. In one instance, The MongolZ (a TLDR favourite) get to a Major final, and in the other, snow (a TLDR favourite) gets to a Major final.

We really do always stay winning.