Astralis probably went to BLAST Premier World Final expecting to lose their first match against Natus Vincere and then fight hard to avoid elimination against one of the other two group opponents, MOUZ and FaZe Clan.
But it seems that Casper “cadiaN” Moller and his squad have managed to build much earlier than expected a playstyle that can win matches against the world’s best CS2 teams.
Based on cadiaN’s own admission, the best version of Astralis was supposed to be seen only next year. So either something went right for the Danes or something went wrong for Na’Vi. Right now, given that the Ukrainian team has been eliminated by FaZe Clan, the truth seems to be somewhere in the middle.
In the coming hours, we will find out if Astralis truly are as good as they looked in their first match of BLAST Premier World Final 2024 or if their performance was a fluke.
Group A Results
Astralis didn’t just defeat Na’Vi. They did it without losing a single map and at a very big score difference: 6 – 13 on Nuke, 6 – 13 on Mirage. The two maps were identical: 5 – 7 followed by a one-sided second half.
For Astralis, three players had a rating 2.1 of at least 1.50. Meanwhile, Justinas “jL” Lekavicius had one of his worst performances of the year, ending with a personal score of 18 – 35.
The match between FaZe Clan and MOUZ was a lot more interesting. The scores were 13 – 16 on Inferno and 11 – 13 on Nuke. FaZe Clan almost got carried by David “frozen” Cernansky, who finished with the highest ADR on the server (97.3) and a KD score of 42 – 34.
But MOUZ were just a bit better. The match between them and Astralis is about to begin. This will be a very tough test for the Danes.
