MIBR has not had an easy past couple of months; arguably, far longer, but we’re looking specifically at results instead of controversies.
With a downward spiral that was capped off with a loss against a T3 team during a bootcamp in eastern Europe, watching MIBR play recently has been a difficult ordeal; wild, considering that they were at a peak around 2017.
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So they trimmed the fat from the roster, and rebuilt; today, they faced off against the ineffable Astralis (GS #3) that has just gotten back to full strength (and quickly passed Es3tag onwards) with Xyp9x finally returning to the roster.
Many were poking at MIBR in light of their recent results, including us: stating that it should be the quickest 32 rounds played between the two teams; the absolute minimum necessary if Astralis (16-0) the Brazilian team on both of the first two maps.
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Yet Counter-Strike was failing server-side, and we were all forced to sit around for an hour and some change while waiting for someone with the tools to do something.
Once it finally got underway, the results were actually surprising.
First and foremost, yes, Astralis beat MIBR.
It took a full three maps in the best of three format, and there’s a reality where MIBR (2-0) Astralis.
We could argue that Astralis wasn’t in top form, with this being the first professional bout that Xyp9x has rejoined the old guard of Denmark CS, but MIBR put together a decent showing and managing to pull a full map off of Astralis on Astralis’ own map pick of Nuke after Astralis robbed them of their map pick on Vertigo.
With a roster rebuild, MIBR was suddenly looking as competent as they once were while streams reached over 200,000 viewers on the back of Gaules co-streaming the tourney along with BLAST Premier themselves, the rebirth of MIBR was arguably one of the most-watched events of the past week.
For North American CS fans, this is fantastic news as it offers another team within the region that can practice against other teams, raising the skill level of everyone within the region while finally managing to offer European Counter-Strike some competition.
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Granted, it’s all a bit early to mark MIBR as returning to form; three players exited the server with a K/D spread in the negative double-digits, some site-executes left a bit to be desired, and dropping their off-meta map of Vertigo (after it went into overtime) seemed to gas the team a bit.
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But there’s a massive chance at the moment that MIBR’s current roster results in a return to glory.