NAVI take down 5yclone to kick off ESL Pro League Season 18 campaign
Group C favourites Natus Vincere (NAVI) got their ESL Pro League Season 18 campaign underway against the former Rare Atom boys, now playing under the 5yclone name.
The first map of the series was 5yclone's pick of Inferno with NAVI picking up the pistol, starting on the CT side. 5yclone answered back with a force buy and it was back and forth trades for the next few rounds. jL denied Moseyuh an ace clutch in round nine to see NAVI go 6-3 up. An advent 1v2 on the A site in a post plant saw 5yclone pull it back to five rounds but it was NAVI who had the lead going into the half break at 9-6 with s1mple's Nova causing the most problems for the Asians.
Source: ESL
An A spilt saw NAVI secure the second pistol as well and a jL 1v1 once again bailed out NAVI from dropping a round to the pistols. NAVI were 12-6 up before the first gun round saw kaze's quad AWP kill help 5yclone get their first CT round. s1mple and jL pulled back a 2v3 to see NAVI get back on the scoreboard. Aleksib's double helped NAVI turn around a 3v5 to help his team secure map point and NAVI picked up the map at 16-11 with s1mple and Aleksib on top of the scoreboard with 25 kills each respectively.
NAVI got their pick of Mirage underway on the T side with a B hit and Aleksib's 1v1 against advent helped them pick up the pistol. An Aleksib triple to open up the B site saw NAVI turn around a 3v5 to go 4-0 up. A JamYoung double saw 5yclone put up their first CT round in round six. An iM 1v2 saw NAVI answer back immediately. Mercury and Moseyuh's multi-kills saw 5yclone tie up at game at 6-6. Aleksib came in with another big round, a 1v1 against JamYoung to retake the lead but JamYoung redeemed himself to deny s1mple a 1v2 to keep the half score tied. 5yclone ended the half with a clean round to take an 8-7 lead with Mercury ending the first half with 21 kills.
Moseyuh held on in a 1v1 against Aleksib to give 5yclone the second pistol and were quick to secure double digits. jL and Aleksib combined to give NAVI their first and NAVI went on to tie the game and then take the lead at 12-11 as it was jL coming in with multi-kill rounds. Mercury and advent stole a 12th for 5yclone with Tec-9s but 12 was all as NAVI closed Mirage at 16-12 and it was s1mple and jL on top of charts with 24 and 23 kills respecitively.
Natus Vincere5yclone| Natus Vincere |
K - D | +/- | ADR | KAST | Rating 2.0 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Oleksandr 's1mple' Kostyliev |
49 - 37 | +12 | 82.8 | 78.2% | 1.27 |
 Justinas 'jL' Lekavicius |
44 - 30 | +14 | 83.2 | 78.2% | 1.25 |
 Aleksi 'Aleksib' Virolainen |
38 - 35 | +3 | 85.3 | 76.4% | 1.19 |
 Mihai 'iM' Ivan |
37 - 35 | +2 | 85.8 | 60.0% | 1.14 |
| Valeriy 'b1t' Vakhovskiy |
35 - 34 | +1 | 67.7 | 67.3% | 1.04 |
| 5yclone |
K - D | +/- | ADR | KAST | Rating 2.0 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Jingxiang 'Mercury' Wang |
40 - 41 | -1 | 73.3 | 63.6% | 1.07 |
| Qianhao 'Moseyuh' Chen |
42 - 43 | -1 | 79.1 | 63.6% | 1.05 |
 Andrew 'kaze' Khong |
35 - 41 | -6 | 69.5 | 69.1% | 0.93 |
| Zhuo 'advent' Liang |
27 - 38 | -11 | 59.3 | 61.8% | 0.84 |
| Yi 'JamYoung' Yang |
25 - 42 | -17 | 55.4 | 52.7% | 0.65 |
Also read
