G2 eliminates NAVI while Vitality survives Legacy series

The penultimate day of BLAST Open Porto’s groups has wrapped up, sending four more teams homebound.

Two, Inner Circle and M80, didn’t put up much of a fight, which is a big disappointment for IC especially. After their great opener, they would’ve wanted more from this. But, them aside, the other two teams had a bit more going on in their series.

Though not necessarily in the close game sense.

NAVI’s cold streak

G2 vs NAVI was supposed to be a banger, but instead we got G2 taking comfortable care of business.

Ancient was the series opener, as picked by NAVI, but we wouldn’t have blamed anyone for thinking it was G2’s pick. From the word go, Aleksi and co were outmatched, losing pistol and failing to convert a promising forcebuy on round two. They recovered three rounds to tie it up at 3-3, and then got steamrolled for six straight. That repeated itself in the second half, with NAVI winning their force, but they still managed only three for the half before G2 closed it down.

The big star of this map was, as he so often has been recently, HeavyGod. This man is elevating himself higher up the HLTV top 20 rankings every time he plays.

Inferno was more of the same for him, though this time MATYS joined in on the fun.

G2 ran NAVI’s defenses ragged on the series’ second map. The aforementioned MATYS was a mid-to-late-round demon, giving G2 multikills any time a round got particularly close. He did have a worse CT half, which partly platformed NAVI’s 10-4 to 11-10 comeback, but HeavyGod never let it get away from them. He provided his usual steady A holds from pit side, with NertZ doing the job on B, giving G2 the map win in the end.

NAVI will likely have to take a long, hard look at themselves in this elimination-induced break.

There have been murmurs about change within their org for a long time now, and they are only getting stronger. At some point, something must give; b1ad3 can only do so much.

It seems we’re in a transitional era of CS2, as the other game we want to discuss highlights.

Vitality show signs of life

Vitality should be grateful for ZywOo.

Legacy gave Vitality a real scare here today, from round one, map one, pistol on Nuke. The Brazilians played an exquisite CT-side, neutralizing Vitality’s threats and reading their gameplan perfectly. Not a single Vitality player had a positive rating on T-side, not one. So naturally, Legacy carried a 10-2 lead into the second half. Unfortunately for arT’s team, they capitulated epically.

As Vitality started stringing their own rounds together, you could see the mental shift.

Legacy became more uncomfortable in their macro decision-making, and the game turned. It went from 10-2 to 11-4, to 12-8, to 12-12. In overtime, Legacy finally figured it out and won two of their T-rounds, only to give Vitality three straight and lose the opener.

This could’ve broken a team for the series, but to Legacy’s credit, they came back.

On their own pick of Mirage, they found a new lease on life. It did take them a bit; the first half went Vitality’s way, but they were CTs and Mirage is a very CT-sided map these days, so you can hardly blame Legacy. Especially when they became a well-oiled machine when the sides switched. Vitality could only manage all of two rounds on their T-side, giving Legacy a 13-9 map win and sending us to a decider.

That decider? Dust 2.

Normally that’d be a pretty bad sign for Legacy as D2 used to be Vitality’s absolute home turf, their comfort pick. But recently they’ve lost it quite a bit, dropping from an 82% win rate over the last 12 months to 43% over the last 3 months.

That was before this game, though.

Unfortunately for Legacy, they couldn't get a foothold in this one. Their CT-side, which has carried them in this series so far, only got them a 6-6 half, which was a bad omen. They had struggled with T rounds the whole series, and that trend continued. try was their only player who showed up on the offensive end, and that just wasn’t enough to make a dent in Vitality’s defenses. Pretty quickly, Vitality worked their lead up to 11-6, and despite Legacy putting up two, apEX charged Vitality to close it down 13-8.

So, while Vitality’s era is likely over, their run at BLAST Open Porto isn’t yet.

That will be to play for against FUT tomorrow at 18:30 CEST; we wouldn’t miss it for the world. It’s going to be a banger.