After losing in the first round to Heroic in two tightly contested matches, FaZe was able to turn it around in their recent lower bracket series against BIG. In that series, FaZe’s tenured rifler Håvard ‘rain’ Nygaard was able to find the form that was missing in their opening match and lead his team in output. After his performance, I was able to catch up with him about his form, team expectations, and more.
This victory over BIG keeps you guys in the tournament, how does it feel going forward?
It feels really good, we had a really good game against BIG, we had a lot of good plays from everybody, and we feel pretty good playing on the stage.
So, your next opponents are going to be the new Astralis lineup, how does it feel going into that game and how do you prepare for a team that is so new?
Well, it’s like you say it’s a brand-new team so we don’t know what to expect. We watched some of their games and of course k0nfig has been playing really good, so we’ve just got to figure out a way to play around with him and make him play worse than he should.
Being back in front of the crowd after you missed out at the Major, how did it feel to hear that roar?
Playing in front of the crowd is always such a good feeling, it gives me more energy when I play, and it makes me feel so much better.
Obviously, you played with karrigan before, in that earlier iteration of Faze, what is different this time around would you say?
With karrigan? Well we have different players now of course, we have broky and Russ [Twistzz] and he needs to do a lot more fine tuning and it’s an experience for broky at least, but it’s just a different playstyle and like the way we should play.
You mentioned broky there, karrigan has a bit of a reputation for being very good with young talent, like Bymas for example, seeing that first-hand what is that like?
Karrigan has always been really good, even with me at the start when he joined the team. I didn’t have much experience from an IGL and he guided me through my career and helped me out a lot.
If it comes down to it and you get to come up against NAVI, what do you think your chances would be in that situation?
I think we can have a good chance if we show up on a good day, we can’t get into the game slowly and we need to be on point from the start or they will pretty much steamroll us. We need to be on our entire A game if we meet them.
What are the goals for you personally going into 2022?
Just improving my personal level and improving as a team.
Final question, you had a monster performance on Dust2 and it seems like any time I turn on a FaZe game on Dust2 you’re dominating, would you say that it is your favourite map to play these days?
It is my favourite map, but I also have the best positions for it like A rotator. You have a lot of freedom, and you have a lot of good places to throw utility and you get to play around a lot more than with what you would have on say B or on long. I think I just have a good position, but I know how to play it well.
