B1ad3: "If FaZe don't win this event you can say there's only a phantom left of their domination"

Natus Vincere's skipper sat down to chat about bringing Andrii "⁠npl⁠" Kukharskyi into the fold and how the team is trying to gain valuable information in Abu Dhabi to set up a strong start for 2023.

Once an opponent dreaded by all, the current Natus Vincere does not strike the same fear into the hearts of their opponents. Emil "⁠Magisk⁠" Reif, who will be on the server facing Natus Vincere in their first match at the BLAST Premier World Final, said as much in his pre-event interview with HLTV.

There is good reason for this. Natus Vincere comes into the final event of the year with plenty of question marks surrounding them, partly due to the underwhelming recent results the CIS powerhouse has produced, and partly due to the speculation surrounding their roster. Unsubstantiated rumours abound regarding players they may look to sign in the off-season, but one certainty is that they are experimenting with a six-man roster, with npl set to play his first matches for the main squad here in Abu Dhabi.

Natus Vincere's coach, Andrey "⁠B1ad3⁠" Gorodenskiy, spoke with HLTV to address how the team will implement npl, his thoughts on the roster as 2022 draws to a close, and his assessment of the state of the CS:GO scene now that the titans of Natus Vincere and FaZe are no longer dominant.

Let's start with the biggest talking point about NAVI at BLAST World Final which is the implementation of npl. Have you figured out how you'll do that?

Yeah, we did it before, so we have a more vivid picture of how to do it because of this experience. There were no difficulties, we were just trying to understand what map to do it on because the issue with npl is that we want to give him roles that he's comfortable in. The roles that he was practicing in NAVI Junior

We even sacrificed our strong players from the main squad to give npl positions. You'll see this on some maps, it's just for npl to be able to show what he's capable of and so he won't have obstacles or circumstances that will drag him down. We just want him to be in his comfort zone.

Is this something that you learned from the previous time you did this, having a player rotate in and out of maps?

You mean about the comfort zone?

Yeah, the way you're giving him roles that make him comfortable even sacrificing some of the better players.

If we had more time I would even give him different roles. On some maps I would make him lurk, without mattering if he played it or not, just to watch how he reacts. On some maps he would play in the core, if we had more time. But for now, for the end of the year, we want to know how much potential he has, that's why we're putting him in his comfort zone on maps that he was playing before.

So you're testing out how ready he is.

Yeah, because for the organization it's very important to jump into 2023 in a strong position and with enough information to understand our strengths and how we can operate with that and what we should do with the lineup.

Going into the off-season, what thoughts do you have? When b1t started playing it was also a map here, a map there, and eventually he was folded completely into the team. Is that what you hope to do this time around?

Yeah, yeah. For now it's more to see how strong he is, maybe it will be half a year or maybe only two months. It depends. For us it's important not only to test a new player, but also be able to perform well as a team here. That's why I'm trying to optimize everything to not damage our map pool completely.

Talking about map pool, the new patch is being played here. What are your first impressions?

I think Anubis is a pretty easy map, it's pretty easy to understand how to approach it. The only thing I'm afraid is that everyone will understand that and it'll be hard to play it. I hope it won't be so fast and we'll have some advantage. But we're going to need time, we just had a five-day bootcamp and we couldn't spend all of our time on it because we were focusing on npl. I think we understand the map and what's going on, but we need more time to shape up everything. Some details here and there aren't perfect, so we need some time and maybe even here we'll find some teams we can practice against.

A lot of teams are still using the M4A1-S in practice, but for me, I think that one of the stupid things was to make it as strong as it was before. It affected results a lot. I'm pretty sure that results would have been different this year if it weren't for the silencer buff, so in terms of this last patch, I think that at this event everyone will realize much better if they should use it or not. I think they will still use it because it's still pretty good.

From the practice we've had, some people still use the silencer, but for me personally, I can't understand why. I think they're still experimenting, but the A4 is much stronger. The silencer still has advantages, like spamming through smoke, it's incredibly overpowered on some maps. The sound, you can't hear it, and the tracers, you don't see them. But overall it's good that they fixed it. We didn't have problems with the AWP, I think only one time s1mple had one bullet left when he realized, but if you adapt to this and reload in the middle of the round in positions where they can't hear you, I don't think it's a huge problem. Anubis is a good map, they just need to close the sky because you can throw nades everywhere.

Do you think teams are comfortable enough on it as of now, do you think we'll see it played much here?

It depends. From my feeling, like Vitality, they prepared for the Major and then they had a lot of time because they skipped the Fall Final. So in that case, they had more time to prepare this map. My feeling is that if I would have more time on it, then I could easily pick it. But of course it's always dangerous to pick it blindly if you don't know what the other team does. The map is pretty easy, you just need time to practice tactics like defaults, executions, to be precise and perfect. In that case, I think it's a really easy map.

You put Vitality as an example, the team you'll be opening against. What do you think of the match-up? Talking to Magisk he said that NAVI is NAVI, it's a 50-50 game, but that you don't impart the fear you used to.

I think that there's a lot of strong teams these days and you must always be aware whether it's Vitality or not Vitality. In the tier one level, when we play events, we don't usually meet weak teams. The last one was Fluxo, but even against them you have to be very careful. You must have a perfect mindset, you must respect them and prepare the same game plan as against the best teams. If they're a weak team and you don't do that, they become stronger and you'll get lower and closer to their level. It's always about the mindset.

We're at a changing point for our scene these days and next year it will be even stronger. For us, of course Vitality is a strong team, but I'm saying this to show the problem. These days we don't try to specify if 'this team is Vitality,' we must respect all teams at least in the top 20. You can see Outsiders winning the Major, Heroic winning BLAST, and there are more teams that want to be there. I think that after this event we'll understand more.

If FaZe don't win this event you can definitely say that there's only a phantom left of their domination. It's only left in people's heads. This is very important, to stay in reality at each event, we had this same problem in NAVI when entering 2022. You must always be in reality and understand that there is no such thing as 'if you were dominant, now you'll be respected or granted some wins.' That's very dangerous thinking.

The preview we did for this event is that there is FaZe and NAVI, the teams expected to be the strongest in the past years, but lately we've seen then the likes of Outsiders and Heroic rise up. At such an 'experimental' event as this, with a new patch and teams already with their minds on what may happen in the off-season, do you think this can be good for Outsiders and Heroic to try and establish their moment as the best in the world?

Absolutely. It was the same after Cologne, I think. There were changes and some players from FaZe were saying that it's not good when you change all of the time because teams that are stable will have an advantage for three or four months. But as we saw after the break FaZe weren't dominating.

For Heroic and Outsiders, I think that the main thing is that Outsiders will be influenced by their wins a bit later. If they win one or two more events, in that case, we'll see another team. What I'm trying to say is that you have more hunger before you win and that can be a surprise for them. You saw their coach, he was like very confused, saying 'how is this possible?' That tells me everything. It's very interesting to see how they will perform here, and if they will get used to winning it can be dangerous.

I haven't seen any team in Counter-Strike that is winning and then after three or four months is as good as before. They always start to play a little bit worse and others come from behind much stronger. I always think about this, actually, and I always think if we'll come back to our level as NAVI and how to stay there. Not only thinking it, I'm very interested in how to do it.

For Heroic I think that it's even more dangerous because they were struggling for a long time and they were close enough to the titles for a long time. For me they're a more dangerous example. They can become very confident in themselves and in that case you add something that you were missing, if they can find this confidence and dominate for half a year. But as I said before, I don't see teams that we can't beat.

Teams do something and I know their strats, so I always know how to beat these teams, but they become stronger, they're more in the meta, and it always comes down to the little details. Some clutches, mind games during or before the match... When I analyzed our previous losses we were always really close to winning, even against FURIA. We just choked at some point, we stopped playing at the same level as before. Heroic, Outsiders, they can be the winners of this event or the next event, but it's really hard to predict.