MOUZ drop out early as Aurora spoil the Vitality party - StarLadder StarSeries Fall
A lot can change in a day.
MOUZ came into the event as favourites and looking to cement their claim as the next in line to the throne if and when Spirit fall, but they were quite comfortably dispatched by a FURIA team who have been up and down.
Having lost to NRG in the opener, this was a do or die game for MOUZ, and they opted for the latter. A heroic performance from xelex won them Mirage, but he had just 15 kills total on the maps FURIA won as he failed to get going. It's a cruel blow for MOUZ, who needed a trophy here really, and instead found ignominy.
KSCERATO though, wow. He is unbelievable. If the rumours of him leaving FURIA are true, it's hard to imagine there is more than one team he wouldn't immediately improve. He was the best player in the server on Nuke and Cache, and FURIA's best on Mirage. He just simply doesn't make positional or mechanical errors.
He went 18-9 on both of FURIA's maps, and was a large part of the reason they were so one-sided. He dropped 66 in the series, 15 more than molodoy who had the second most, and even that fails to tell the story of how much better he was than everyone else. He's a serious, serious player.
Nuke was even at the half, and the decider hung in the balance and it looked like MOUZ might just have gotten away with it, but fittingly they crumbled under the pressure and failed to post a single T side round. This was a lot down to molodoy, in fairness, who just seemed to find pick after pick and ruin MOUZ's offence before it even got started.
It's a really disappointing showing from a MOUZ team who seem unable to be more than the bridesmaid.
We'd been hyping up this Vitality run, but we failed to recognise that actually it's Aurora who are the best team in the world.
We've been hating, to be honest. We didn't love the Jimpphat move, kyxsan is good but not a needle mover, all of that - but Jimpphat has just toppled the then-tournament favourites with one hell of a game to put his new team in the grand final.
He obviously didn't win it on his own, but with XANTARES still not going supernova in the way we'd hope, it's reassuring that they can still beat a top team in a big game without it. Jimpphat turned into the superstar they needed from the backlines, with some exceptional CT work on Anubis - a map typically difficult to hold - to ensure Aurora won eight on the bounce after a disappointing T side.
Vitality hit back by turning the tables on Inferno with a crazy defence of their own, winning a 4-8 game in regulation, but Jimpphat is famous at that ramp spot on Nuke for a reason. Vitality learnt that reason.
Neither team were massively impressive on their T sides, but there was plenty to learn from how they used their pieces on the CT side - and this was a career-defining performance from Jimpphat.
Even if Aurora did let this happen...
MIBR predictably 2-0'd NRG, with an absolute shellacking on Inferno. tomaszin went 16-5 as MIBR put NRG in the blender for fifteen rounds. There's not much else to say. We're not sure how NRG ever beat MOUZ.
That left FURIA vs MIBR for the chance to play Vitality tomorrow, and FURIA came out on top in an intriguing derby.
MIBR held their own, but just lacked a little bit of magic. YEKINDAR had a ruthless game on Mirage to close that one out, and KSCERATO was once again fantastic on Nuke. Just a wonderful player.
Nuke was a close map, with MIBR going up by four at the half thanks to venomzera and tomaszin going berserk, but venomzera went from 15 kills on the CT side to just one on the T side, with FURIA pulling off the comeback thanks to KSCERATO going two better. 17-3 on the defence.
A ridiculous player.
