CS:GO Team Fnatic and the Terribly Long Rebuild

Bio

Fnatic are one of four teams that have dominated Counter Strike. The history of CS:GO can be divided into roughly five eras. The NiP era, the Fnatic era, the LG/SK era, the parity era, and the Astralis era. Since their dominant peak, Fnatic have toiled in mediocrity, through an attempt at a reunion, call ups from their academy team, the Godsent debacle. They’ve been rebuilding since 2016, and it looks like that effort is finally coming to fruition.

The team unfortunately made several missteps, including removing their homegrown IGL, Golden, who came up through Fnatic Academy and led them to their first tournament win since blowing up their team. It looks like this time, however, they’ve finally found a winning formula and look ready to take on the top tier of CS.

Map Pool

Fnatic have a pretty average map pool. They play mostly Mirage, Inferno, and Overpass, with 75%, 50%, and 43.8% win rates respectively. They most often ban Train, which makes sense in an Xizt led team.

They are willing to play a lot of maps though, which is encouraging. They are willing to play Dust 2 and Nuke, which rounds their map pool out nicely. They played a fair amount of Cache, but it shouldn’t be a huge problem into the future. I could see Fnatic being one of the teams to pick up Vertigo rather quickly.

I would like to see Fnatic start to specialize a little more in their vetoes. Teams with top five aspirations need to have a signature map, something that their opponent is afraid to play, and that’s something that Fnatic don’t have right now. Overpass might be a good map for them to focus on, as it gets played in the top tier right now, but no team has really claimed it as their own. It could be a playground for JW, and Brollan might find success in bathrooms on A site as well.

Leaders

K/D Ratio: Krimz 1.16

Sometimes it feels like NiP and Fnatic are linked. The two best Swedish teams of all time, who have had legendary series over the course of CS history, seem to surge and fall together. That certainly seems the case with Krimz, as we are starting to see prime Krimz again right as f0rest is returning to form, and it’s wonderful.

Krimz is an excellent foil to Brollan, in large part because of how safe Krimz plays. He’s an ultra efficient player, and is able to lock down bomb sites to provide safety for the rest of his team. An important anchor on their CT side, Krimz’s consistency is key to Fnatic’s success.

Clutches: Brollan

Brollan’s clutch stats surprised me. 13 1v1s, 10 1v2s, 2 1v3s, and a 1v4 is a pretty good resume, especially for a 16 year old. Keeping a level head and playing smart is one of the hardest things to do in CS, and the fact that he’s able to compete at this high of a level and still clutch the way he does is incredibly encouraging. Those numbers should only go up as he gets older, and the ability to win clutches like that is always useful, regardless of team situation or fit.

Flashes: Xizt

Fnatic actually has a pretty good distribution on their flash statistics. Xizt has the best Flash Assist average at .07 per round, with .79 thrown per round. Krimz and twist both throw around .8 per round, although they both have much lower FA averages. That all tracks, as I’ve already written at length about how a team’s best player is likely to have solid flash stats, as those are the players you’d want to save for the mid round.

Unsurprisingly, JW and Brollan both throw under .6 flashbangs per round, which matches up with their opening duel statistics. Those two players are taking aggro frequently with support from their team, which means they don’t throw a lot of util.

Opening Kills: JW

JW is far and away Fnatic’s best opener. He takes 25.7% of Fnatic’s opening duels, which is the most we’ve seen so far through these previews. He averages .14 KPR and .12 DPR, with a success rate of almost 55%.

While JW is one of the better opening players we’ve seen, at least statistically, the rest of Fnatic is sorely lacking. JW is actually the only player on Fnatic with a positive opening duel ratio, which puts astronomical pressure on him. This is an especially fun dynamic as it’s the opposite of how the team worked when JW was playing on prime Fnatic. He used to be the riskiest playmaker on the squad, and could be so inconsistent due to the steadfast olofmeister.

Fnatic finally look ready to make a run at real relevancy again, which should be exciting for any long time CS:GO betting fan. There’s an old adage in basketball, that the league is more fun when the Lakers are good, and the same holds true for Fnatic.