Astralis’ victory at DreamHack Marseille showed the world that they were back. At IEM Sydney they got second place and look to be the best team in the world. For the Astralis core, it was a return to the top. This was where they had started at the beginning of 2017 before their slow decline as they were eclipsed by better teams of the era. For Emil “Magisk” Reif though, it must have been surreal. He hadn’t reached this peak since EPICENTER over one and a half years ago. By the end of 2017 he had been in exile from the Danish scene and playing in OpTic. Since the shuffle, he has been reintegrated back into top Danish CS and now stands as one of the players in the best team in the world.

Magisk’s story is fairly typical of many young stars. He first gained some international notoriety on the original SK lineup before they recruited the Brazilians. He played alongside players like: Jacob “Pimp” Winneche, Andreas “MODDII” Fridh, Michale “Friis” Jorgensen, and Asger “AcilioN” Larsen. At the time they were a moderately successful online team with their best on LAN result being the CEVO Pro League Season 9 LAN finals where they got second place to Tempo Storm. During this time, Magisk had shown talent in online games, but was unable to repeat that same performance on LAN. He was still too young, too raw, too inexperienced.

In the middle of 2017, Magisk joined Dignitas. Dignitas was the second best Danish team in the world and led by Mathias “MSL” Lauridsen. He was a leader who had a reputation for bringing the best out of his young stars. He had done it before with Philip “aizy” Aistrup and Markus “Kjaerbye” Kjaerbye. Magisk alongside Kristian “k0nfig” Wienecke quickly became the two stars of this team. K0nfig took on the old roles of Kjaerbye while Magisk played a passive solo role in the default before joining as a second entry man (in either the primary or secondary squad) for the execute.

It was a potent combination and alongside MSL’s tactical approach, they were able to rise to the top of the scene and become one of the best teams in the world. They won EPICENTER by defeating Fnatic, Na`Vi, and Virtus.Pro. It felt like the fulfillment of the potential we had seen in MSL as a leader, and magisk/k0nfig as star players. In this system, Magisk flourished and by the end of 2017 was one of the top five players in the world. He defined the CT-sides of Dignitas on critical maps like cobblestone and Overpass for the team. He looked to be on the verge of breaking into superstar status by the end of that year.

However it was not to be. North and Magisk never reached that potential. The last run of that five man lineup ended at ELeague Atlanta Major 2017. It mirrored Magisk’s own end as a superstar player. In that tournament, North played off against Virtus.Pro in the round of 8. In that match, Magisk went nuclear. By the end of the first half, Magisk had dropped 28 kills and had single-handedly killed Virtus.Pro’s T-side attempts. By the end of the half North were up 12-3.

Tragically, it wasn’t enough and North squandered that lead and were eliminated from that Major. Soon after Ruben “RUBINO” Villarroel left the squad of his own accord and was replaced by aizy. That was the start of Magisk’s decline as the team restructured to play a more loose individualistic style. In that system, k0nfig shined, but Magisk floundered. The team tried to rework him in different spots and positions, but they could never find the magic again and by August 2017, he was removed from the roster.

In the following six months, he played on OpTic’s Frankenstein-esque EU roster that stitched together a bunch of leftover EU players in hopes that it could all somehow work together. That hype ship never left the harbour as they had no significant results to speak of. By the end of that run, it felt like Magisk was out of the Danish scene.

Then the Danish shuffle happened where Kjaerbye left Astralis to join North over a conflict in roles. This left Astralis needing a new player and they ended up with Magisk. It felt like a lateral trade at the time, however he became the exact piece that they needed. To understand why, we need to understand the context he was entering.

Astralis in the previous roster, Peter “Dupreeh” Rothmann and Kjaerbye had a conflict in roles. It was fine at the beginning of 2017 as Dupreeh had hit a slump and Kjaerbye was at his peak form. However by the middle of 2017, the roles had reversed. Kjaerbye was declining and Dupreeh was on the rise in his new role as a high pressure lurker.

In the game, you could see that Dupreeh wanted to do more in the game as he always shifted the line, whereas Kjaerbye felt constrained in the Astralis system and couldn’t perform to the same levels he had. This was mitigated somewhat when Nicolai “dev1ce” Reedtz had to take time off to recover from personal injuries as this shifted Dupreeh into the main AWP role. During that brief period, Kjaerbye got more freedom and had a resurgence in form, but so did Dupreeh.

That was probably what created the conflict between the two players and so when dev1ce came back into the lineup, the team tried to resolve it by having Dupreeh keep AWPiner and move dev1ce back to a rifler role for the ELeague Boston Major 2018. It was a disaster and so the role conflict rose up again and Kjaerbye finally decided that he’d rather play with North than stay on Astralis.

So when Magisk came into the lineup, he filled out the roles they wanted. Dupreeh got to go make the plays he wanted, Magisk become the passive lurker and the two of them swap interchangeably in the entry pack depending on circumstance (though Magisk usually goes in before Dupreeh). In Astralis, he has found his role within the system on both a macro and tactical level.

When you consider how the Astralis team functions, the two primary stars are dev1ce and Dupreeh. Magisk needs to only be the third star, to do his role, and sometimes go off. With the current forms of the players, this works perfectly and so now Magisk no longer needs to feel the pressure of having to carry the game as he did at the height of Dignitas/North. In those teams, both Magisk and k0nfig needed to have good games for the team to have a chance.

In this team, Magisk knows that all he needs to do is his job in the system and that together they will win titles as a team. But if he does go off, he can push this team over the edge. Look at the IEM Sydney finals where he powered Astralis to the edge against FaZe’s miraculous performance and could have been in the conversation for MVP if Astralis had won. Magisk has come back from exile in OpTic and has found himself once again in the Astralis system. He has been reintegrated, become a star player once again, and is now playing on the best team in the world.

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