The Recap - EP03

by OnlyJoshinTV

Welcome to The Recap, a new weekly content series covering Counter-Strike in the ANZ region with a touch of global action here and there. We aim to provide a regular series covering our region, from ESEA Open, ECL, and global events, to local LAN and online tournaments hosted here at home.

The Winter Rostermania (well, Summer elsewhere) is alive.

Rostermania ANZ

In the ANZ scene, there hasn’t been much movement in the rosters.

Vantage started us off with replacing Omichella with Nauh. Vantage figured that they wanted more puns on their name so they couldn’t ignauh the Nauh.

Nauh has been an upcoming rifler within various teams such as Sylyx, 1620 Kings, yellow, Paradox, e-LEMON-ators, The Big Dogs, Five5, Cobro Cobro’s and Golf Club.

He is another player that was scouted by yellow and cheeseball. He joins the likes of cookie, forevint and Drox.  

Nauh showed significant promise towards the tail end of e-LEMON-ators and the Big Dogs against T2 ANZ where his average HLTV rating was 1.35.

Nauh will also reunite with his ex-teammate in Drox who has been impressive on Vantage so far. Vantage finished 5^th in the ECL Season after being knocked out by Mindfreak.

With the Omichella / nauh swap, I feel like it is a little bit of an upgrade for Vantage. It isn’t a move that will lift them to the next tier of CS2.

Vantage also announced that Jynx was officially signed and is going to be the ingame leader going forward. (N1ghtraid AWP/IGL moving forward) Skullhunter had announced previously that he had left Vantage.

Jynx is an ex-Fortnite player who was the ingame leader with RKON on their breakout season. He’ll bring a different style compared to Skullhunter. However, I think we’ll need to see more before we can make any judgement calls.

With other roster moves, Mantra are still looking for one more player. I wonder if they’ll look at Omichella.

Rostermania International

On the international front, we’ve seen that G2 has benched nexa and is rumoured to bepicking up malbs from M80.

I’m not shocked at all. The justification for picking up nexa and benching Australian star, jks was shaky at best. The reasoning that we got was that “jks didn’t call mid-round and nexa does”. The stats didn’t match up and it showed that jks was a much better player than nexa.

There were a whole range of justifications that were ultimately flimsy and it showed on the server. They essentially traded a win condition (jks playing well) for a step back. JKS’s average rating against a top 20 team at that stage was 1.04. Nexa’s was 0.94.

The move for malbs is a no brainer. He is a huge fragger in that M80 roster and has elevated that M80 roster beyond the sum of its parts. Malb’s rating against G2 was like 1.27 which is incredible. He’ll add another win condition to G2 where it isn’t reliant on m0nesy, nik0 or hunter to pop off.

People have said that G2 didn’t need to do a roster move. I felt that a roster move had to be done with nexa. It hasn’t worked out as they hoped, and it was ultimately a mistake to replace jks with nexa. Thankfully, it wasn’t a roster breaking one like Furia and Cloud 9.

One of the sadder moments during Rostermania was the announcement that Cadian was being benched from Team Liquid. His IEM Dallas 2024 interview sounded like an exit interview from Team Liquid. People knew it was coming but it was just a matter of when.

I have no idea what is going on behind the scenes with Team Liquid. I would just find it unfathomable on how people did not believe in cadian’s system.

Cadian’s system under Heroic led to strong and consistent deep runs in many tournaments. His system is emulated by many different Australian teams. Their VODs and demos are watched by many up-and-coming players within the Australian scene. Brace, yourwombat and Roflko highlighted that they had been watching a lot of demos from Heroic.

I hope this isn’t the last we’ve seen of Cadian. He is really one of those rare players who can capture the emotion of a situation and have a strong strategic and intellectual prowess on CS2.

He is definitely up there with karrigan, gla1ve, GeT_RiGhT on revolutionizing the Counter-Strike strategical scene.

That is the recap for this week and hopefully, all of you guys are staying warm and comfy during this cold winter!

Updated to reflect that N1ghtraid Awp/Igl moving forward and not Jynx.