Legacy embarrass Wildcard out of Austin to secure Stage 2 berth

The Brazilian team capitalized on their replacement invite to the Major against a woeful Wildcard.

Legacy have defeated Wildcard 2-0 (13-10 Inferno, 13-6 Nuke) in the penultimate match of Stage 1 at the BLAST.tv Austin Major and qualified for Stage 2, making good on their last-minute replacement invite for BESTIA with a statement victory over Peter "⁠stanislaw⁠" Jarguz's men.

It was the same story for Wildcard in this series as in their overall tournament: they couldn't get anything going early and had to climb out from deficits, but struggled for much of Inferno and were embarrassed on Nuke, going down 1-11 and continuing to overextend in several situations in a meager second half.

Clip: latto puts Wildcard on death's door with P250 4k

It was the exact same veto as when the teams faced off three weeks ago in Thunderpick World Championship NA Series 1, where Legacy had dominated Wildcard 2-0 on Inferno and Nuke, and despite Aran "⁠Sonic⁠" Groesbeek's brazen words ahead of the game, unfolded much the same as before.

"Honestly I don't think that game counted," Sonic told Freya "⁠Freya⁠" Spiers in a pre-match interview. "Firstly, it was online, and the team just wasn't really in a great space at that moment. There was a lot of stuff going on, so everyone wasn't really in for the win in that game, I guess you could say.

"We're a different team on LAN, I think people can see that, people see we play very well. Compared to Legacy, Legacy players are very fast-paced, Brazilian-style kind of Counter-Strike, and we play kind of more of a strategic mix. We're pretty used to playing them in that style, so we have a good understanding of what is going to go on in this game and we're pretty prepared for it."

Clip: lux cuts down Wildcard's force-buy in Banana

That understanding wasn't evident on the server, however, with Wildcard looking disconnected for much of Inferno. A complete lack of cohesion and sloppy teamplay saw them come out on the losing side of an early force-buy war, and Legacy went up 7-5 at the break before extending their lead with a pistol win after the swap.

Wildcard found some footing once guns came up, but much like in their last four maps in Austin, couldn't come back from the deficit as Legacy closed out, 13-10.

"I feel like stanislaw might be asking too much," Alex "⁠Mauisnake⁠" Ellenberg said on the analyst desk between maps, offering his thoughts on Sonic's comments about Wildcard trying to adapt different styles to their opponents.

"He's trying to play multiple different styles, and let me just take a reference point in Vitality: apEX could call any strategy on any given round, and everyone knows how to execute at the highest level.

"But for Wildcard, the difference in pacing, rushing, 4-1 defaults [...] there are all these different moments where these players, even though they've been in tier-one for some time, they're not considering losing conditions as actively as some of the best players in the world are all the time, and they don't always try to minimize those losing conditions."

Clip: Wildcard almost give away a 1v3

Legacy were unstoppable on Nuke, clutches and multi-kills from Vinicius "⁠n1ssim⁠" Pereira powering his side to an 11-1 lead. Wildcard won the first pistol and converted a force-buy to recover from a loss in the second, but did little else as they bowed out of Austin with a whimper.

stanislaw: "It just feels really heavy on my chest right now"

"It's just not good enough, I don't know," stanislaw told Freya of his team's performance in the series and about their collapse on Nuke after the game.

"We had a good bootcamp under our belts, I felt confident on Nuke but matches are different than scrims, so maybe it was false hope. We're just going to have to go back and figure out what actually went wrong. But yeah, this whole tournament we just couldn't get anything going on Nuke against any team, so yeah, it feels rough."

"I don't think so," stanislaw added when asked about whether the changes in roles and positions might have had an inverse effect on the team. "I think that is a hindsight mentality, we all agreed to make the changes, we made the changes, we had a bootcamp with the changes, we felt good coming into the tournament. We're going to have to go back and figure out what went wrong."

"It just feels really heavy on my chest right now. I'm very sorry to all of the fans. I thought we would at least make Stage 2, Stage 2 is very stacked so I was not quite hoping for Stage 3, but at least Stage 2. Not even doing that is very disappointing. All we can do is apologize, we tried our best, we worked really hard, we've been away from home a lot this year and now we get a little bit of a break which will hopefully be nice."