Astralis vs Cloud9

ECS Season 5 Finals,

Now that the online league of ECS has come to a close, we have eight teams who made it to the offline event that is the ECS Season 5 Finals. The coverage of what is to come starts now as we take a look at the first group A match-up between North America's Cloud9 and Danish superteam Astralis.

Astralis :

Coming into this ECS Season 5 finals with the latest offline event of the ESL Pro League Season 7 finals, Astralis are looking for the full online league sweep by taking both the ESL Finals and the ECS finals. Astralis was the first place qualifiers in the European region. It is safe to say the confidence levels of Astralis coming into this event are high, placing highly in almost every event they've been in this year and even establishing a new playstyle that is catching many teams on the back foot as they try to recover from a grenade stack and mid-round calls from in-game leader Glave, that turns would be failed rounds into opportunities to upset and tilt the enemy team.

Astralis' map pool looks like this; Inferno is 20-3, Mirage is 12-4, Overpass is 10-4, Nuke is 7-0, Train is 4-3, Cache is 4-1, and Dust 2 is 2-0

Clodu9 :

Cloud9 have been under some serious pressure in both the North American and International scene. With current in-game leader FNS who was bought out from under Complexity, Cloud9 have struggled to find a secure playstyle adapted by FNS. Cloud9 have also been rumored to be trying out different available European candidates as a replacement for FNS. If a replacement is not found in time, this could lead to some infrastructure issues within the team that could lead to an early exit from the ECS offline Finals.

Cloud9's map pool looks like this; Mirage is 10-8, Inferno is 10-6, Train is 8-5, Cache is 7-5, Overpass is 6-3, and both Nuke and Dust 2 have yet to be played.

Map Pick/Ban :

This is a best of one series. Which means that each team will ban three maps and the map left over will be the one played. Atralis, being good on nearly every map, will ban out the best maps of Cloud9 and take the fight to them on any other map. Bans for Astralis will include; Mirage, Cache, and Train. Cloud9 will ban out Overpass, Nuke, and Dust 2, leading to Inferno being the remaining map to be played. In which case the advantage goes to Astralis for having more games played and an overall higher win rate.

Final Thoughts:

When looking at these two teams after seeing not only the map pools but the infrastructures of each team, it is clear that Astralis are currently firing on all cylinders while Cloud9 are struggling to find a replacement in time for this event and are likely not practicing with the in-game leader that is going to lead them during this offline event. Cloud9 are not in a good spot and Astralis will take full advantage of this Medium bet on Astralis.