Aleksib: "makazze [has] Ancient as his wallpaper on his phone"

Natus Vincere are through to the BLAST Rivals grand final, where they will face Vitality , the team they bowed out to at IEM Rio and lost the BLAST Open Rotterdam grand final to, both times without being able to win a map.

To get there, Aleksi "⁠Aleksib⁠" Virolainen and his men had to make it past the local favorites, FaZe , in the semi-finals, where they took a quick 13-5 Dust2 before struggling to close out Ancient.

"They understood that they're down 9-3," the Finnish in-game leader said of that second half, "and it's pretty hard to crack us if you try to play a default-ish style on Ancient, especially with the one week of practice they probably had. Who knows how little they practiced on Ancient.

"So they needed to rely on explosiveness, they needed to rely on getting a plant as fast as possible, and in the end, they showed some individual class by winning the important clutches."

FaZe even took a 10-9 lead at one point, but in the end Natus Vincere persevered. "We knew that as soon as we wake up, as soon as we make sure that they don't get to the position they want, they'll need to start playing more slowly, and that's likely when we're going to come out on top," he added. "I'm glad we trusted the game plan and didn't stop believing to close out the game eventually."

One of the reasons Natus Vincere pulled through was Drin "⁠makazze⁠" Shaqiri , who had a 1.40-rated performance on that Ancient and has proven time and time again that he's a critical component for Natus Vincere on the map.

"Even when we came here, I was asking why he had Ancient as his wallpaper on his phone, like whenever he unlocks his phone," Aleksib said, laughing. "I just keep saying that it's like his home, and people are trying to intrude.

"He just loves the map, and he's comfortable with any duel. Whenever he dies, he could even die three times, and he's still asking for the same duel, just with like a one-second difference or whatever. Sometimes you just have players like this, who enjoy a certain map, and this is it for him."

Now, Natus Vincere are fully focused on the task at hand, which is trying to dethrone the best team in the world. "We need to understand how the games went last time. We ended up losing, and we didn't win a map," the Finn said.

"We need to understand that we have nothing to lose now," he added. "We want to win very hard; we're always doing twice the amount of work when we're going to face them next, to understand how we can beat them.

"We just can't be nervous tomorrow. We need to play with the same comfort level that we're playing these other teams, and to understand that with three tournaments remaining for us, Vitality is going to be in each one, and it seems like we're playing against them and they're the final boss, so let's just enjoy it."