cadiaN: "We are far from our A-game, but some things are moving in the right direction"

The Danish IGL says Astralis' struggles have been exaggerated by the community.

Astralis have been in a state of flux for a prolonged period, but that era seemed to have ended with the return of Nicolai "⁠device⁠" Reedtz to the active roster at the start of 2025.

Results haven't picked up as much as expected, however, as the Danes haven't appeared in a LAN playoff bracket this year.

Their next chance will come at PGL Cluj-Napoca, where a win against SAW put them in the 1-1 pool. After the game, Casper "⁠cadiaN⁠" Møller spoke to HLTV about their form, his adaptation to rifling, and their recent online successes.

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After the second day, you are in the 1-1 pool. Today was a pretty comfortable victory I would say, so how are you feeling about your performances here?

I think against paiN yesterday, we definitely had our chances on Nuke. We kind of threw away a little bit of the lead on the T side, and on the CT side we had some good opportunities to win as well, but in the end, they ended up winning some of the rounds that we feel like they shouldn't.

Today we played against SAW, who already announced that there's a departure of two players, so in some ways, it's a bit risky in terms of how their decision-making is going to be in the game, are they going to take more chances, and are they not going to play to their normal playbook. But as we hoped, we had them under control for most of the game, and it was nice.

Talking about 2025 for you guys. device came back at the start of the year, so did you maybe expect to have more of an upturn in results when he came back?

I'm not sure. Most of our losses, we lost to NAVI at BLAST Bounty, we lost to Spirit in Katowice, those are teams that are just better than us right now. Then of course you can try to remove the loss to MIBR, where we definitely played under our level, and then GamerLegion had a very successful run.

They are a team we want to be better than, but I think overall people are also making it worse than it is. Also now playing the online qualifiers, we won six games and lost one, so I think things are moving in the right direction. I don't think we are playing [at a] top level, we are far from our A game, but I still think that some things are moving in the right direction.

I wanted to ask about your online form. You are one win away from Dallas and you qualified for BLAST. How important is it to get a win streak going for the confidence in the team?

I think it's good. One thing is the confidence you get from playing the online games, another thing is booking up your calendar with the right events, and I think that Lisbon is important for the world ranking in terms of invites for the Major, the MRQ, or going directly there. Dallas is a tournament that you might want to add.

It's not necessarily the most attractive in terms of the fact that you have to be in the US for a very extended period of time if you play that and then the Major, but right now we can't skip every event, we have to try and get to some of them as well.

Talking about getting back some confidence. Your calling style relies pretty heavily on confidence, doing some gamble stacks, doing some aggressive plays, and things like that. So is starting off at least online to win making it easier for you as well to implement your game style?

Yes, I think most playstyles require a bit of confidence, but I think when you know the philosophy you feel like you have an advantage in many scenarios. That's also how we felt in the games, we haven't always executed well on these advantages, but that's an ongoing theme.

We are talking through these rounds and these scenarios to try and improve them for next time, but I think our level right now is trending upwards, slow and steady, that's what wins the race. We haven't maybe been able to catch up completely to the form we had at the World Finals yet, but I think it will come with some time.

Something you mentioned in a previous interview were your struggles on the CT side. Yesterday and today they were a lot better, so is there anything special you guys can do as a team that makes it easier?

It comes down to decision-making and multi-fragging, and right now both of those two things have been a bit lackluster in our CT sides. Then you kind of get snowballed sometimes when an important piece somewhere in the map gets traded, and then it just gets awkward and uncomfortable.

But I think it's also a mix of when you then start losing on CT, you start to play overly safe, but you still need to be aggressive and search for information. So you don't just lean back and let the Ts throw everything the way they want and peek everything the way they want. We still have to find our solutions for the CT side, but we have some good ideas, and we'll try to implement them for the next games. As you said, some of the CT sides have been better, so that's good.

You've been a rifler now for a few months, so how are you feeling in the role? At the start, I felt you guys maybe forced the double-AWP setups too much, and you're doing them a lot less now. Is that down to you being more comfortable on the rifle now?

I think there's still a lot of things to learn from the role and the positions, because I'm competing against players in these positions who have been holding Ramp on Nuke for maybe six, seven, eight years, and I've now been doing it for three or four months. I'm still getting used to some of these things.

But when we're communicating well and we're playing up to our game, I think my rifle is doing really well. We've seen it in some halves, but also when things are a bit chaotic and the IGL brain takes over, I can feel that I'm not focused enough in the duels, and then I get punished.