No Surprises As FaZe and Vitality Reach BLAST World Final 2023 Grand Final

It was always going to be these two. The two top teams in our BLAST Premier World Final 2023 power rankings have gone all the way, reaching the Grand Final. How apt it is, that the two clear best CS teams in the world get to go head to head for the chance to win the final Tier 1 tournament of the year.

Of the two, who can we expect to see lift the trophy in Abu Dhabi? Let’s take a look.

FaZe and Vitality’s Run

At the BLAST Premier World Final 2023, no team has an easy route to the final. FaZe and Vitality may be the best teams around right now, but they’ve still faced strong opposition to reach their current positions.

For FaZe, they’ve had to take down G2 and MOUZ along the way. With frozen now bedded into the lineup, the team hasn’t lost a step since replacing Twistzz. They were the kings of CS2 for the first couple of months, and they’ve now got the opportunity to show why at the end of the year.

In our BLAST Premier World Final 2023 Semi-Final preview, we spoke of the importance of mezii to Vitality. When the team faced NAVI, that was proven to be true, with the Brit coming in clutch to see them through to consecutive Grand Finals. It wasn’t all down to mezii, though. Throughout the tournament, we’ve seen a massive overperformance from IGL apEX, with the rest of the team in flameZ, Spinx, and ZywOo continuing to show their class on the server. Regardless of whether Vitality can see this through in Abu Dhabi, they will be a scary prospect in 2024.

Possible Grand Final Maps

In any Grand Final, the map veto is a crucial moment that can decide the entire series. Let’s take a look at what maps we might see in tomorrow’s BLAST Premier World Final 2023 Grand Final.

One thing that’s important to remember is these teams are rolling it back after they met in last month’s BLAST Premier Fall Final 2023 Grand Final, too. There, the map pool was Vertigo, Nuke, and Mirage. Allowing Vertigo there was seen as a total wildcard from FaZe, who have perma-banned it throughout the current tournament. However, if FaZe doesn’t ban Vertigo, we’ll almost certainly see Inferno as Vitality’s map pick. If we had to guess, given Vitality stomped FaZe at the Fall Final, we think it’ll be a Vertigo ban and an Inferno pick.

The second map will come down to FaZe’s decision. Nuke is the likely choice, but we’ve seen them pull out Overpass lately. It should be between those two, with the third map being a straightforward Mirage decider. Both teams are right at home on Mirage, so it should make it through the veto.

Our prediction for the map pool of the final is as follows:

Inferno
Nuke
Mirage

And our prediction for the final is a tight 2:1 win for Vitality, seeing out the year in style.