FaZe opened the tournament with a dominant win over ORDER, mimicking the start of IEM Katowice 2018, a tournament that featured the same group stage format as well. Moving on to the BO3 part of the group, FaZe will be taking on Renegades, over whom they have a 5-0 LAN record.

NiKo is confident that they will beat Astralis if they meet them in Sydney

In our interview, we discussed Richard "⁠Xizt⁠" Landström's addition to the team, the Marseille defeat to Astralis and FaZe's early-2018 struggles.

You got Xizt in the team now, can you give me some first impressions, playing with him and everything fitting in the team?

Basically, we just looked for a player that knows how to play the game, the role we need, a really experienced player, an all-around player who is going to sacrifice for the team, which is needed. That's why he was one of our first options. How he fit in the team is, I would say, quite okay. Since olof was that kind of a guy, he just took over his role. We didn't have much time to practice so that's what we are lacking the most right now, we are just trying to fill him into what we had before.

We haven't had great result on the last event, I didn't expect us to lose in the quarter-finals, I don't think it was our real result, I think we will show our real face with him at this event.

You played Astralis in the quarter-finals in Marseille and they went on to beat everyone pretty dominantly. Does that make the result seem worse than it is in a way? Do you think you could've beat some other team if you were drawn against them, with that same level you had in Marseille?

With the same level that we played at against Astralis, I don't think we could beat anyone. We played pretty bad, on the other had Astralis played a great event. That two combined resulted in that match against Astralis. But as I said, I don't think we showed our real face against them, that was our biggest issue. I'm pretty sure that if we face them this time we are going to beat them.

Coming here to Sydney, what was the general feeling, what goal have you set for the event?

I think the goals are still pretty obvious for us, it's just to win events. I can't say less than that. We are just going to try to use this as more practice and preparation for the next events because there are so many.

You played a lot of events since the start of the year, placed high but got no wins. Is it a bit frustrating, the record you've had since then?

Yeah, it was really really frustrating losing the ELEAGUE Major final and Katowice especially. The Major final we kind of got over it, we didn't really throw it away, Cloud9 also played really good, but I felt the Katowice one we really threw away, especially on Train. That felt really bad and we felt kind of depressed because it sort of killed the motivation in the team. We needed some time to regain it, and I think we did it, but we are still not showing it. It was also a bit stressful once olof stepped down from the team, that also dragged us down.

Tell me about the Renegades matchup, what do you expect there?

Coming up against Renegades we obviously feel really good. We never had issues in group stages, I expect us to win pretty convincingly as we won against them every single time we played them. There is not mutch to say, if we play as we usually do, we should be able to close it out pretty easily.