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GUIDES
Simple Radar
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At least, NA fans have to hope so.
ESL have drilled another nail into an already very metallic-looking coffin, fnatic are trying to revive their corpse and Brazil have been dead for a while.
And it was all looking so good for Brazilians.
Look, this isn’t the biggest or the most glamourous event, but PARI Please had potential to be interesting. When BetBoom got knocked out by 9 Pandas - not actual pandas, it’s a team with seized on in 2023, so maybe more embarrassing - it looked good for MIBR and FURIA.
FURIA might have lost to Eternal Fire, but they snuck past Aurora twice to qualify for the semi-finals, while MIBR kicked out BetBoom and beat Movistar to make half of the top four Brazilian.
Then they both lost.
Eternal Fire continued their impressive string of results as they smashed MIBR 13-2 on Mirage to complete the 2-0, with both Wicadia and XANTARES dropping a 100 ADR series. That’s a paddlin’.
It could be worse - FURIA lost to 9 Pandas. This time it was the actual animals.
Okay, it wasn’t, but they probably would have lost to pandas in a fair fight. It’s fair to say the FalleN move hasn’t gone to plan just yet. arT looks lost (more than usual), yuurih has fallen off pretty hard and FalleN hasn’t rolled back the years consistently either.
For crying out loud, he got bodied by iDISBALANCE. That’s not to say iDISBALANCE is bad, but it’s been years since he was good. Unlike Falle-
Ah, yeah. We see the problem.
9 Pandas face Eternal Fire in the Grand Final today, on the Monday. The Brazilians must have thought the final was on Sunday.
Who’d have guessed that losing your star player would require some changes? That’s rhetorical please don’t reply to this email.
After losing mezii and roeJ, fnatic is in rebuild mode. Whilst early “rumours” (wishful thinking) suggested a return to the Swedish lineups of yesteryear, the first piece of this roster puzzle is a Last Jedi esque-subversion of expectations. If a report by playzone.ck is to be believed, the historic org is trying to sign Slovakian wonderkid MATYS from Sampi for a whopping €170.000. Do they know how many Battle-Scarred Gut Knives you can get for that?
In fairness, we have no idea how much we can trust that number, and apparently it’s also still being “negotiated”. But still, what might fnatic see in MATYS that’s making them willing to spend this big?
Well, let’s start with his stats that are nothing short of exceptional.
In 2023 the 21-year-old has averaged a casual 1.22 HLTV rating, just slightly higher than NiKo’s 1.21. Yeah, sure MATYS hit that rating against worse opposition, but you can only piss with the cock you’ve got. MATYS has undeniable talent, and if he manages to carry over even a chunk of his performance to tier 1 it’s going to be a spectacle to behold.
His action-heavy roles seem to be more of a roeJ replacement right now, so if fnatic finds a mezii replacement it might really be their time to shine again.
If this rumour is correct, this might be the start of a beautiful thing for fnatic. Trusting scouts and developing talent, like ENCE and Gambit (now C9) did so effectively. So, not a super team, even if you Swedes really want one.
If MATYS is signed fnatic would still need a fifth, with Swede nilo being amongst the fan favourites.
Bad news, North America.
ESL has announced their invite distribution for Katowice and Cologne in 2024, and have reduced North American world ranking invites from two to one.
Except, it’s not like the spot has gone to another region. It’s been replaced by global world ranking invites. If the teams are good enough, they’ll qualify anyway.
When we look at the current ESL world ranking, though, we can kind of see the logic.
Whereas there used to be Liquid, Complexity, and EG (In 2020) fighting for those two, now it’s Complexity and… Nouns? Party Astronauts? Wildcard?
Yes, NRG are coming back. Plus, it’s hard to get ranking points as an NA team with a fairly sparse LAN scene and fewer CCTs to farm. You can see why it seems unfair over the pond.
It also adds to the lore of ESL as NA-killers after the North American Pro League was cut. There’s reasonable outrage at the decision.
But this is Katowice and Cologne. It’s not a charity. It’s the two biggest non-Major events of the year.
Want to qualify? Get the ranking points. NA has the players to do so. It’s time to put up or shut up.
