Astralis have started their BLAST Premier Fall Groups run with a win, taking Evil Geniuses out 2-0 with victories on Dust2 (16-11) and Nuke (16-10) with Andreas “Xyp9x” Højsleth back in the lineup as Lukas “gla1ve” Rossander is taking leave ahead of the birth of his first child, which tasks Emil “Magisk” Reif with in-game leadership.
Evil Geniuses weren’t expected to come out guns blazing and the loss comes as no surprise, however, as the European-North American lineup is playing with a makeshift lineup featuring coach Damian “daps” Steele and Teodor “SPELLAN” Nikolov, who are standing in for Peter “stanislaw” Jarguz and Vincent “Brehze” Cayonte, two players that are on the sidelines to work on their mental health.
One of the big questions that remains to be answered is how all of this roster turmoil will affect Tsvetelin “CeRq” Dimitrov, as the Bulgarian AWPer has been seriously under-performing so far this year and his form continued to drag in the opening match against Astralis until the final half of the series, in which he turned things around individually and found impact while wielding the AK-47.
“We play practice and it goes well, but then we play matches and I just go blank,” CeRq said when asked about his form after the match. “I’m working on it.”
Magisk delivered for Astralis as a fragger and IGL
Evil Geniuses picked Dust2 to kick the series off, and were given the terrorist side to start. Despite going down 0-3, daps and his men managed to take an 8-7 lead at the switch after a competitive half in which Michał “MICHU” Müller downed 15 players and scored over 110 ADR.
Astralis started off with a 5-0 partial score on the attack to lock things down until they gave up a disjointed play on the A site to a Desert Eagle buy by Owen “oBo” Schlatter and company, but it wouldn’t prove enough to turn the tides of the map as the Danes went on to close it out 16-11.
On Nuke Astralis were the dominant team from beginning to end on the attack, taking an 11-4 lead with Magisk putting in heaps of work despite moonlighting as in-game leader, downing 22 players to hit over 120 ADR in the first half.
The Danes took the CT side pistol, setting themselves up for a quick victory, although Evil Geniuses scored several rounds to cover up the one-sided result going all the way to double digits before Astralis closed it out 16-10.
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