launders: "This Liquid will be the best since 2019 and will win tournaments"

I talked to Blitz at the TI, he's the coach of their DOTA team, and he asked me what I think about it, and I told him 'With cadiaN? It's going to work.' For me, cadiaN is an elite IGL, and maybe he hasn't won as much as others, and I've always held IGL's to that standard of 'Well if they don't win tournaments, they're not that good', but cadiaN is an exception for me. I think even seeing what he did at Fall Final, for example, we saw what he can do with basically nothing, even beating Astralis.

This Liquid will be the best since 2019, they will win tournaments, and they will challenge for the number one in the world spot.

I think the NRG roster is a cool exercise in what you can do with a purely NA team. I think that the people in NA have had hopes in almost all the players that are there at different points, brehze was top 20, but I guess we are questioning who is the real star of the team currently. They might not have that, but I think they're akin to what BIG is to Germany. There's something to be said about wanting to cheer for a purely NA roster even if they don't have the best talent on a worldwide scale.

There's a lot of potential there, and that might not be one of the sexiest words to describe a roster because it's been said to death over the years, but that's basically what it is. It's a fun roster to cheer for if you're from North America, and I don't think there'll be tournament-winning with the current roster, but it can still be successful as an NA team that can maybe attract better players one day.

I don't know. It seems like they will keep struggling to close out tournaments and even games themselves. I think they missed this goldilocks period of getting far in events but not actually winning.

There's always this underdog aura about them and I think EliGE changed that a little bit to make them more of a threat, but I can't say I'm confident they're suddenly going to be number one in the world. They could maybe pick up a tournament, and they'll have some good runs, but it's mainly going to be the story of how much EliGE improved the team, but that doesn't mean it will contend with Liquid 2019 for EliGE.

I think that JT is the right caller and EliGE is the right star. I think hallzerk is inconsistent, Grim's decision-making is inconsistent in mid to late rounds and tough games, and I don't think they have the same level of confidence as some of the teams who have beat them like FaZe who had a broky, Twistzz, ropz mid-round, or even a broky, frozen, ropz mid-round. It's such a consistent feature of FaZe and I don't think Complexity have that, their individuals aren't as smart when those late-round situations happen to beat the best teams in the world consistently.

Waves is a difficult term considering expectations for the region. M80 is a team that is cool and has some players, but as a North American, the only teams I'm thinking of is first Liquid, and second Complexity.

I think they have to do everything. Unfortunately, there's just no easy answer because the top teams are good at everything. They have to be fundamentally sound, have the right IGL, the right coach, the right AWPer, carve out an identity for themselves and not just be a fundamentally good team but find something that makes them stand out against the other teams.

I think it's literally everything. At this stage of Counter-Strike, if you don't have everything you don't win a tournament.

As it stands, Vitality is the only team that I have full, 100% faith in. I'm totally confident in mezii as a roster move, I thought Magisk would be such a hard player to replace but they've won two tournaments already, not ruined the structure of rounds, and he's been very smart in a lot of situations. It's not made them feel like a new team that had to start over at all.

When I watched them in their elimination game at World Final, I thought to myself that there were a lot of spots where jks would have won them the map. nexa taking over Pit from jks on Inferno, for example. jks would have easily won them that game.

There are a lot of spots for nexa to learn and there have also been some slights at the thought that jks wasn't a mood-booster for the roster, maybe nexa can shout when things are going well, but when they aren't, he's just as quiet as everyone else. In my opinion, he's just not in the same league of mood-booster as a jL or a JACKZ so he's not the guy they're looking for in that role and you aren't getting a better anchor than jks.

nexa has actually impressed me with what we've seen so far, but in the long run, I don't think this will be a better roster than the one we saw with jks.

ENCE, for sure. Maybe MOUZ because they lost their best player, but I like Brollan a lot, and even though he hasn't gotten a lot of kills, he'll take over anchor spots and other players will get some of frozen's spots and probably get more kills because of it.

Also, Cloud9, Cloud9 doesn't have an AWPer and they need one. There's never been an example in history of a team that has changed AWPer on every single map.

We had Liquid who had nitr0 hybrid AWPing at one point, and maybe the AWP is less important right now, but I think it's certainly not a thing where you can have a structure that involves changing the AWPer for every map. At least Liquid had nitr0 and then stewie as a hybrid. Cloud9 doesn't have that and if you're changing things like IGL or AWPer on every map, that's the first sign of death.