rain: "I feel like I found my place"

Winning two tournaments in a row without dropping a single map is an admirable feat, and Håvard "⁠rain⁠" Nygaard was crucial in FaZe's double, picking up titles both in New York and in Atlanta. After having the award snatched away by Nikola "⁠NiKo⁠" Kovač at the first event, rain took the medal this time around.

rain feels that he was overhyped in the past when playing in the G2 and Kinguin rosters

The 23-year-old, who is the only member that remains from the original Kinguin lineup, answered questions regarding the grand final, their Overpass and his place in the team.

Let's start with the first map of the series here, you picked Cache, but the T side didn't look so good. Tell me about the struggles there, what was the biggest thing that caught you off guard or that you struggled to cope with against Astralis on Cache?

I think at the start of Cache we were kind of not in the game. We felt like we were a bit nervous, people weren't fully focused, we fucked up some rounds, we lost an anti-eco after we won the pistol... They just kept rolling over us and we didn't really have an answer, we kept forcebuying we didn't have the AWP on GuardiaN enough, we didn't have the nades to shut down their double AWP and stuff like that. We kind of just got shut down on T side.

Tell me then, after switching to the CT side, even after you won the pistol, a lot of round were pretty close, even anti-ecos, how did you get control of the half and then force Astralis, seemingly, to force buy, which got you back into the game?

We are playing Counter-Strike and nothing is impossible of course, so even though we are down 12-3 on the half, we still know if we get rolling and just keep playing our game, we can do the same thing as they did or even better. GuardiaN is a pretty big factor, he is always like "let's go guys, this isn't over". Even though people are sometimes quiet Guardian is always there to say "this our fucking game" anyways. And we just knew that we had it in the end.

Let's talk about playing with GuardiaN now, switching the AWPing from allu to him, what is the main difference between the two players?

I don't know, I've always been a big fan of how GuardiaN AWP's, there is something about it, when you see him flicking around and the way he moves, it's something special. I think we have more of a stable AWPer, allu can go off and have his insane games and sometimes he can be a bit off, but with GuardiaN you know what you can get. He is explosive as well, because he is a good AWPer of course, but it's more that we always know what he does and it always works out.

Astralis picked Overpass and karrigan, in the interview we did before, mention that he doesn't know why people keep picking Overpass against you. It proved again here, your CT was great, what do you think about that?

Our Overpass is pretty strong, it's the same thing as karrigan says. If you go B you have NiKo and olof there and then you have me and GuardiaN on A and we can all take our own duels and we can shut them down on executes. We just played our normal setups and stuff and it worked out against them.

You now won your second tournament in a row and are 15-0 in maps on LAN. It's a pretty strong statistic to have in this era of CS, don't you think?

Of course, it's nice to have the 15-0, but we still feel that some of games we played we shouldn't have won, we played really bad, especially against EnVyUs, we played really bad but we still managed to grind out rounds. Same against North. I think it just proves that we are a really good team. Because when we are feeling really off and it feels like we are about to lose, we still manage to win the way we are winning. It just shows how good we are.

You won the MVP award, it's your first MVP. A lot of people say that you are maybe an underrated player in this team, not getting a lot of attention. What do you feel about your role in the team right now?

First of all, I think I got overhyped because of Kinguin and G2 and stuff because I had some clutches and people were overhyping me a lot. And on this team, I feel like I found my place and how to play and I know what I can contribute to the team. And I feel a lot more confident with this team, then I've felt before at least. I think that shows up in how I play as well.

What can we expect moving forward? More of the same from FaZe and you as well?

We are not planning on stopping, we are going to grind out until we beat NiP's record. If that is possible. (laughs)