TaZ to stand in for G2 and m0NESY at BLAST Premier Spring Final 2024

Counter-Strike

June 10, 2024

Daniel Morris

In Collaboration with Thunderpick

G2 has announced that its coach, TaZ, will be standing in for m0NESY at the BLAST Premier Spring Final 2024. The move comes after the Russian AWPer failed to obtain a visa for the event in London, leaving the Polish legend to stand in for the event.

G2 stand-in buff?

Credit: Stephanie Lindgren | © PGL

TaZ standing in for m0NESY will see G2 play a second consecutive event with a stand-in. The last of course was IEM Dallas 2024, which G2 won with Stewie2k standing in for HooXi. However, losing HooXi is not the same as losing m0NESY. Over the last few months, m0NESY has made a strong claim to be the number one CS2 player in the world, and not having him on the server will massively impact G2’s performance in London.

Due to wanting to recreate the success from Dallas (VISA issues) m0NESY will not be travelling to London for Blast and so we will be playing with a stand in pic.twitter.com/niP4jWrW5B

— G2 CS (@G2CSGO) June 10, 2024

In our BLAST Premier Spring Final 2024 power rankings, we put G2 second-to-last, and there’s a reason for that. We think the drop-off as a result of this stand-in will be too severe for G2 to find any success in London. TaZ is a Counter-Strike legend, and his time on Virtus.pro will live on in history, but his playing days are long behind him. It’ll be fun to watch him take to the server once more, but we’re not expecting much.

Who will AWP for G2?

With their star player gone for this event, it will be interesting to see who will AWP for G2. The obvious choice in our eyes is HooXi. Yes, G2’s bottom fragger and IGL should pick up the Big Green for this event. We’ve seen HooXi as a secondary AWPer for G2 on a semi-regular basis, and he’s definitely more than capable of hitting his shots. On the CT-side especially, HooXi has had some cool highlights with the weapon.

Alternatively, G2 might choose to go AWPless altogether. It won’t make their lives much easier in terms of fragging, but their economy will be much stronger resulting in more buy rounds. Let’s see which route they take.