3 key takeaways from Train’s first Tier 1 match

BLAST Bounty Season 1 kicked off on Jan. 15, with the top 32 teams in the world battling in a single elimination bracket. Following Valve's announcement of Train's inclusion in the Austin Major, BLAST confirmed that Bounty would follow suit.

On Day 1 itself, Train returned to the server after Fnatic picked the map in the series against Spirit. Here's everything we learned from Train's first Tier 1 CS2 match.

Danil "donk" Kryshkovets kicked off the map with back-to-back multi-kills from E-Box. That kickstarted a solid hold for the Russian side, taking four in a row. In Round 4, fans got their first taste of the new Ivy flank, as Fnatic walked through CT-spawn to merge into a failed B-take.

Once guns came out, Fnatic started getting a bit more comfortable on their T-side — with Benjamin "blameF" Bremer surprisingly providing explosive entry kills. The lack of classic pop-dog was apparent in the match, taking away some of the entertainment on A. But that was made up for by the splits that regularly hit both sites, allowing Fnatic to tie the half 6-6.

Ivy was once again center-stage as Spirit attacked that avenue in their pistol round. With guns in their hands, Spirit showed off their own playbook for Train. Looking well-drilled, Spirit applied constant pressure across the map, giving donk the freedom to crack open sites at will. A's red train, played a crucial role in Round 19, as Fnatic was caught out by Myroslav "zont1x" Plakhotja's fake.

Spirit was quickly at match point, but Freddy "KRIMZ" Johansson and Denis "Burmylov" Buraga found impact plays in back-to-back rounds to keep Fnatic alive. In the end, Spirit's star power and stratbook proved too strong. Train's first CS2 match in Tier 1 ended with a 13-10 win for Spirit.

Despite being just the first match of Train in Tier 1 CS2, we learned a lot about how the map may be played going forward. A few features of the map stood out in particular.

The biggest change to the map's layout was obviously the changes made to Ivy. The shakeup to the CT angles around the Ivy-Connector created a new mechanic for duels. What was once a 1v2 fight for CTs like Emil "Magisk" Reif instead transformed into a game of angles as Magixx controlled his battles perfectly, rarely peeking at multiple players. That's what allowed him to put 20 kills onto the scoreboard.

That doesn't mean, however, that the Ts were just targets in a shooting gallery. Create enough pressure on the A-site and CTs would be forced to shift their gaze. And while T wraps through Ivy existed in CS:GO, too, CS2's iteration clearly allowed safer passage. We saw both Fnatic and Spirit regularly succeed in the move, clamping down on B-defenders from both sides.

Train has always been a CT-sided map. But when the CS2 version launched in November, the map flipped into a T-haven. In a recent update, however, Valve pulled back T-spawn. The update didn't even make the cut for patch notes, but had a big impact on how the game played. Shifting the T-side timings brought back Train to some familiar duels.

Instead of beating the A-main Molotov, Ts were meeting it head-on, allowing CTs to slip into E-Box. That's where donk found so much success, especially in early rounds mowing down Fnatic's splits. A small change on paper, the T-spawn change has clearly been a big improvement.

Sometimes the absence of a feature is more apparent than its presence. The lack of a ladder in pop-dog has cleaned up a lot of issues in CS:GO's Train meta. Every round, players such as Kirill "Boombl4" Mikhaylov used to hang onto the ladder, bobbing up and down to bait CT-utility. And when the time for an A-hit came, the Totem Drop was nearly impossible to stop.

While Voo correctly called it "one of the worst spots in CS," its stair-shaped replacement didn't get used nearly as much. Perhaps with time, pop-dog will find more of a use than just A-splits, but for now, some of the entertainment value has been taken away.

With how dire things had been on Vertigo, Train's first-tier match in CS2 was always going to be a success. But the map really impressed, giving the right amount of individual freedom and structure. And it's only going to get better from here.

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