Astralis are certainly a long way away from getting back to the dominant days of being a dynasty in CS:GO. And while the team’s returning sniper superstar in Nicolai “dev1ce” Reedtz looked exceptional in his first couple of matches back, they still fell in tragic fashion today in only the second round of CCT North Europe Series Two.
Prior to their match today, Astralis won their first match with dev1ce back in the lineup two days ago against fellow Danish roster Tricked, with dev1ce showing almost no signs of rust. Dev1ce dropped 56 kills across the two-map victory against Tricked, with almost half of those coming via the AWP, and over a third recorded as opening kills.
Dev1ce was almost equally as prolific today against HEET, with a nice 69 kills across two overtime maps. But despite his outstanding play, Astralis still suffered two gut-wrenching OT losses to French squad HEET despite holding multi-round leads in both second halves. The MVP award of the match went to a different sniper, HEET’s Aurélien “afro” Drapier, who’s AWP accounted for 55 of his 67 kills.
For Astralis, it wasn’t solely a one-man show, with Benjamin “blameF” Bremer putting up big numbers in both matches as well. No one else stepped up when it was needed, though, with longtime “clutch minister” Andreas “Xyp9x” Højsleth staying quiet and recently promoted academy player Mikkel “MistR” Thomsen still getting acclimated to a higher level of competition.
Despite the results, Astralis and their fans can be happy to see dev1ce playing so well so soon into his return. Dev1ce’s last recorded match before the Astralis victory against Tricked was a win with Ninjas in Pyjamas against GODSENT at IEM Winter almost exactly a year ago today.
For both dev1ce and Astralis, though, tougher challenges and stiffer competition lay ahead. But if the goal was to get dev1ce warmed up before bigger events on the schedule, then mission accomplished.
