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GUIDES
Simple Radar
© 2026 TLDR Media, All Rights Reserved.
It won’t be XANTARES this time.
Blast Bounty played its first Semi-Finals on Saturday with the teams we all expected. We all expected Eternal Fire to make it, right?
Starting with the boys from Turkey, they were on a dream run that wasn’t going to stop here. They faced a green G2 roster that struggled to deal with the turks’ confident style of CS. HeavyGod had a notably poor series, with jottAAA consistently outplaying him. Weirdly HuNter showed and XANTARES didn’t show up – yet, EF won the series 2-1. We all expected that right?
This G2 team clearly needs some more time. You have to hope this was a learning moment for HeavyGod and that he’ll pick it up from here. Or maybe he’d just say “jottAAA life game”.
On the other side of the bracket, NAVI and Spirit faced off.
We’ve been pretty curious to see if NAVI would recapture the form they had in their dominant run, and Spirit was a great team to test that out against.
Unfortunately for all Finns and NAVI fans, they got Spirit bombed. As with most Spirit games, donk was amazing. He had 129 ADR on map one and totally bullied NAVI. We’re out of superlatives to describe his game – just insert your own at this point.
You can’t help but be impressed with this Spirit team. Their CS looks unstoppable when it’s rolling. If your team plays perfect CS, the creature from the donk lagoon will just effortlessly slide your faces off anyway.
Watching these games you can't help but wonder what the final will look like, in many ways Spirit is the final evolution of Eternal Fire.
We suppose you have to keep reading to find out what happened.
It seems Valve has finally figured out how to use a calendar.
They’ve gone from dropping random updates with five-month gaps and no prior notice to giving us a five-month lead on upcoming content. Better late than never.
After introducing Premier Season One with CS2’s release, it turns out Valve didn’t forget about its existence after all. They’ll be rolling out Season Two this week which will run through the Austin Major. Along with it, there’ll be a special commemorative medal for those who earned a CS Rating (CSR) during Season One, plus a breakdown of your stats to help you see just how much better than Snax you really are.
And if, by some miracle, you're still one of the few playing Premier instead of FACEIT, your CSR will be recalibrated for the new season based on your performance in the first. This means you’ll need to win 10 matches to earn your new rating.
But that’s not all – Valve has also been cooking up some changes to the weapons.
First, the M4A4 will drop in price from $3100 to $2900, matching the M4A1-S. Honestly, we’re starting to wonder if there’s even a point in buying the M4A1-S anymore, especially for us lowly level 5s who need every bullet we can get.
On top of that, the FAMAS is finally getting some love, after being largely ignored by the community due to its almost unusable status compared to other – much better – options. The rifle will receive buffs to its standing and crouching accuracy, along with an undisclosed price cut.
Oh, and Train will finally be taking Vertigo’s spot in the competitive map pool. Thank God.
Could this be a step in the right direction for Valve when it comes to actually updating their game?
Six-month seasons that align with Majors and map pool changes would be too good to be true, so, knowing Valve, it probably isn’t. We remain hopeful.
If we told you a team had cut GuardiaN and replaced him with nawwk, what year would you think it was?
When we saw the link on Twitter, we assumed it was one of those joke posts. You know, when someone quote tweets ‘device signs with NIP’ and the HLTV link doesn’t immediately show the date.
We’re terminally online.
2020 was our guess. nawwk was flying high on NIP before getting cut for device, and his stock was probably high enough to get a good move. GuardiaN probably was still playing by then. We didn’t bother to look it up, but it felt spiritually correct.
Alas, no, it was in this fine year. nawwk has reunited the Apeks core on BC.Game, replacing GuardiaN. GuardiaN was the coach for this team who stepped in when anarkez was kicked, and the team decided to keep him on.
He wasn’t very good.
He wasn’t horrendous, but he certainly was nothing like the GuardiaN you’re imagining. He was at best a middling tier three AWPer, which is probably far more insulting than just calling him crap.
nawwk is a clear upgrade, but it probably isn’t going to make BC.Game anything too crazy. jkaem and CacaNito were with him on the far less succesful version of Apeks. Lekr0 can probably still one-deag people (this isn’t an elaborate joke – he is genuinely on this team) and pr1metapz seems decent enough.
We’re not expecting fireworks, though. Just someone better than Grandpa GuardiaN.
Well, who’d have guessed it - Spirit made light work of Eternal Fire.
To the Turkish team’s credit, they did win a map, which is a lot more than we thought they’d get, but the rest of the series was… brutal.
Seriously, Eternal Fire won 16 rounds to take Anubis, they only won another 17 rounds in the next three maps as donk and sh1ro pounded them and both ended the series with 78 kills.
At one point it actually looked like they were smurfing. sh1ro pulled off a 1vs3 that we wouldn’t have attempted in our wildest dreams, and donk? Well, donk just looks like he’s playing a pre-fire map against some of the best players in the world.
We don’t want to take anything away from Eternal Fire here, beating Vitality and G2 to get to this final is a good sign for what’s to come from them for this year, but the gulf between them and Spirit couldn’t have been more evident.
jottAAA may have considerably raised both their floor and their ceiling, but it’s still going to take a lot for them to ever win an event with this calibre of competition.
As for Spirit, we’ve honestly just ran out of superlatives for them. Something changed with them over in Shanghai, and they now look like all those little mistakes that may have cost them before are now longer present.
We could be about to see a level of dominance we’ve not seen since 2018 and it really wouldn’t surprise us at all.
We actually have no idea who can stand in their way, but we know we’re going to have a lot of fun watching people try.
Final standings:
1st 🇷🇺 Spirit – $288.125
2nd 🇹🇷 Eternal Fire – $85.625
3-4th 🇪🇺 NAVI – $22.500
3-4th 🇪🇺 G2 – $17.500
5-8th 🇷🇺 BetBoom – $25.000
5-8th 🇪🇺 HEROIC – $25.000
5-8th 🇧🇷 paiN – $15.000
5-8th 🇪🇺 Vitality – $3.750
