Team Liquid and Spirit headline BLAST Bounty playoffs

The BLAST Bounty quarter-finals are now set as we finally get to see some LAN action this season.

There’s quite clearly two bangers and two ‘you could miss this’ games, but we won’t be missing anything. LAN CS is back, baby.

The two early games are the thigh-rubbers, with Team Liquid taking on Spirit to start proceedings in Malta. Liquid have been surprisingly solid so far with new addition Jorko slotting straight in, but this is the first real test and he’s going straight in at the deep end.

Your first tier one LAN game being a quarter-final against donk has to be pretty terrifying.

Spirit will be overwhelming favourites, but for us we’d just like to see Liquid compete. Jorko is super young and if he’s not ready yet we won’t be massively concerned, but if he can stand up and deliver on LAN we’ll be positively giddy about this roster. For Spirit, this is business as usual - give donk the ball and let him shoot.

Everyone’s got a plan until they get donked.

Mano a mano this is an intriguing clash, but donk just outranks everyone by an order of magnitude. It’s a relatively even comparison but one team has donk, and the other doesn’t, so you always back Spirit. If Liquid take a map and look competitive in the other two, we’ll be enthused, and a win would have us on the hype train officially.

The other game that has us dreaming is FaZe vs The MongolZ, with loads of new blood on offer.

We’re totally all-in on JBOEN and can’t wait to see him on LAN; what we’ve seen so far has us all tingly and if he’s as good as we think he is FaZe have one hell of a prospect on their hands. On The MongolZ side, they’ll be a fun watch because absolutely nobody has any idea what to expect. Is tikuak ready for the step-up? Is DarkMeister real? Are The MongolZ still good?

shrugs

It’s always fun to see completely new players on the big stage, and at least one of them is going to get a huge win on their LAN debut for their new team. We’ve got no clue how this one will go, and we’re like kids on Christmas Eve waiting for it.

3DMAX vs MOUZ does not have us as excited, if we’re being honest. We’re keen to see PR and xelex on the new-look MOUZ, of course, but this should be a routine win if they’re even close to as good as the previous iteration. Kursy doesn’t move us as a signing for this 3DMAX team, and we foresee quite a simple semi-final appearance for MOUZ.

We’d love to be proven wrong, though.

paiN vs Astralis is the last game, and it’s the least exciting because neither team made massive changes and neither are particularly big hitters.

We’ll back Astralis, but we don’t expect either team to go any further than the semi-finals. Astralis are a solid if unspectacular team, while paiN always seem to let us down whenever they get deeper into a tournament and we’re not falling for that again.