Despite elimination, dev1ce’s return to Astralis brought fresh air to the organization cover image

Despite elimination, dev1ce’s return to Astralis brought fresh air to the organization

In his debut, dev1ce put out the best numbers of the AWPer position for the team in 2022.

After a break that lasted almost a year, Danish player Nicolai "dev1ce" Reedtz finally returned to the servers. Even though Astralis was eliminated in the CCT North Europe Series 2, the AWPer performed well.

Alongside Benjamin "blameF" Bremer, dev1ce showed that he's still a force to be reckoned with. Astralis played two matches in the CCT tournament, won against Tricked, but lost to HEET and said goodbye to the tournament. Still, dev1ce posted a positive rating in all of the played maps.

Best AWPer's performance for Astralis in 2022

Since the four-time Major champion departed from Astralis at the beginning of 2021, the Danish squad struggled to find a good replacement for the AWPer position. The rock bottom was in late 2022 when Astralis didn't get one of the spots for the IEM Rio Major 2022.

It didn't take dev1ce more than one map to show that he had what it took to at least fill the hole that he left. In his "debut," the AWPer decimated Tricked in Mirage. The funny thing is that on the other side was one of Astralis's attempts to replace dev1ce with Philip "Lucky" Ewald.

The performance resulted in a 1.71 rating in Mirage. But he still kept the level high in Nuke and closed the BO3 with a 1.66 rating, leading the board in the match. But more impressive was that the first match of dev1ce was already the best one that an AWPer had in Astralis throughout 2022.

Time to rebuild with dev1ce

It took one tournament for dev1ce to bring some fresh air to Astralis. Still, the team is very different from the one he left. The Danish squad is in its worst phase, and his companions, Andreas "Xyp9x" Højsleth and Lukas "gla1ve" Rossander, are far away from the level that they once were.

But blameF demonstrated that dev1ce won't have to carry the whole responsibility of bringing Astralis back to the top tier of CS:GO alone. Perhaps that's what the AWPer needs to get back to his higher level of performance — less responsibility for being at the top.

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