Well, well, well. The first split of the new season has finally come to an end. Now, despite all of the ups and downs, twists and turns, pop off moments, and outright terrible performances (BDS, Vitality, I’m looking at you), one fact has indeed stood the test of time yet again. It's not the fact that EU keep on winning, that’s a story for another day. The fact that I’m talking about is that Faze Clan, without fail, cannot get over the hump.
Let's have a history lesson, shall we? One year ago, at the Fall Major in Sweden, Firstkiller, Ayyjayy and Allushin made it to the semi finals, losing to the best team in NA at the time: NRG. That netted them a 3rd-4th place finish in their first event with FK, not too shabby. Then, ROSTER CHANGES. Allushin, despite having an incredible LAN performance, gets kicked in place of Sypical who was coming from Spacestation Gaming at the time. Fast forward a few months to the Winter Major in Los Angeles (bring me back plz). Faze put up another good showing, but still ended up losing to eventual Grand Finalists Team Queso in the lower bracket semi finals. This netted them a 4th place finish on home soil at the Youtube Theater. The spring major didn’t happen, I don’t know what you guys are talking about. Then you had the Gamers8 LAN that took place in KSA, a crew battle-style tournament, where you’d expect having two of the best 1v1 players (Firstkiller and Ayyjayy) and at one point the best 2v2 player (Sypical) would be the perfect chance to make a statement LAN win. Lo and behold: knocked out in semi finals, by Guild of all teams. Another 3rd-4th place finish. Now comes Fort Worth, The World Championship. Surely this is the moment, when the lights are at their brightest, that they show up and show out. Then the best team in NA at the time, G2, shows up and knocks out Faze in the semi finals. 3rd-4th yet again, and this time it was accompanied by Satthew jokingly making fun of me at the elevator after the game (he’s such a cool guy). This was an absolute howler for Faze fans.
Where was I? Oh yea, ROSTER CHANGES. Faze, despite actually being arguably the most consistent team of the season, decide to change out the mechanical genius that is Ayyjayy in place of a more solid, defensive minded player in Mist. With the addition of the former Dreamhack Montreal winner (shoutout The Peeps) many Faze fans were hopeful that this is what the roster needed in order to make it over the line. Here comes the most recent Fall Major in The Netherlands. I think you can guess what happened here. Semi finals, 3rd-4th, knocked out by the best team in NA at the moment: Gen G. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? On a side note, despite Faze always losing in the semis, Gen G are actually the first team at LAN to knock out Faze and then go on to win the event.
So here we are, after well over a year of trying to figure out who Jason’s (FK’s) best teammates are. It’s been even longer when you date back to his time on Rogue, who also made multiple roster changes to accommodate this very, very gifted player. But where do we go from here? Maybe the answer to winning a LAN is to try and make yet another upgrade. The problem is, there isn’t really any defensive minded player who’s better than Mist, and good luck upgrading on one of NA’s best players in Sypical. Is the answer to just stick together and try to form consistency? Well they’re already consistent, and Firstkiller’s teams aren’t known for sticking together for too long. This one is definitely a head scratcher for all the Faze fans out there. The only thing we can hope for is that Azfura stops tweeting #FazeUp before these events, maybe that's the only way we can win. As always, thanks for reading!
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