The news is out! Karrigan seems to be making the move to join Falcons, replacing Kyxsan. So the big question on everyone’s lips is, will this actually work? I think it could and in this article I will try and outline how this could become a success.
Before we get to how the Falcons can make this work, we have to revisit a little bit of Karrigan’s career, which is a problem. Karrigan has been playing CS for such a long time it’s hard to easily digest all the different lineups he has been in and try to contextualize how good or not they were compared to the rest of the space in any given year. But lookingr at a lineup like the 2013 Mousesports lineup which had:
- Karrigan
- Troubley
- Approx
- Nooky
- stavros
The first thing you might realize reading this in 2026, is that you probably don’t recognize any of the other players apart from Karrigan. These weren’t the cream of the crop back in 2013, and the same can be said for a lot of the early years of CS:GO for him as an IGL. Not that he didn’t occasionally have a star player, but often it was a trying to do more-with-less situation. Certainly if compared with the likes of Verygames and NiP that dominated a lot of the early CS:GO discourse at the time. I think in large part this era of his career taught Karrigan that he sort of had to try and win the tactical part of the game, as opposed to the mechanical one. He also very clearly had his own way of viewing the game that didn’t always agree with everyone else. For example his early work with TSM that later became Astralis looked promising, but the team as whole decided to go with Gla1ve instead, which was a somewhat controversial situation at the time. In retrospect it’s hard to judge that if you look at the results, but I think a lot of it also came down to the fact that the rest of the team didn’t want to play the kind of CS Karrigan wanted to play.
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We’re skipping over a lol of history here, but this is why the Faze project in my opinion became such a success for Karrigan. This was a time in his career where he had enough control and influence over the team that he could build the culture of the team and shape the game the way he wanted. I don’t think it was written in the stars that this was going to work out the way that it did, but I think once the core engine of Faze was up and running, it did something almost unique in CS history. The core of faze for me was the dynamic between Karrigan, Ropz, Rain and Broky and if you’re in the mood throw Olofmeister in there too. Between some of all of these players there was some magic that appeared to exist which meant no matter how far behind in a game they were, all it would take was one round of what became known as “faze bullshit” and the whole game was reset from that moment. They weren’t great at getting ahead in games. When they did have good starts they weren’t good at keeping them either. But they were impossible to get rid of.
I think that stickiness, that undying faith that no match was ever truly over before the final round had been played, that was the Faze that Karrigan built. The problem in my opinion is that once you removed enough of the core with Olof retiring, Ropz going to Vitality and Rain to 100T, that dynamic was broken forever. I’m almost tempted to say it wouldn’t have mattered who else they would have got, because any new players to the lineup wouldn’t have felt first hand what it meant to be part of that ride. So to the newer generation of Faze, they never felt what it was like to have Broky noscope clutch a round while being 7 rounds behind, only to make a comeback into overtime and win. But the real Faze, they knew and they felt it the second it happened. And so, by the way, did all of us watching. You could feel it through the broadcast, it was in the air immediately.
So what does any of this have to do with Falcons? Well for one thing, if Karrigan is joining is means Niko has realized that him as the IGL maybe just isn’t the best option, which already I think leaves more room for Karrigan to try and rebuild the core magic. The other upside is the fact that rest of the team apart from Niko, haven’t actually ever been in team with Karrigan. But importantly, they’ve felt the same Faze bullshit the rest of us did. They know it can work. Even if from the outside we might not understand exactly how it worked, we’ve seen the results so many times that its hard not to believe. I think this effect gives Karrigan even more room to influence the team culture. The one interesting conversation might be how much Zonic is willing to give up control of the team, but given how rough the Falcon’s results have been generally, he might not have enough influence to shut down Karrigan, if he even wants to.
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The most critical thing in my opinion, is that while Falcons are a team that can start strong and look to dominate games, they almost had the inverse situation from the Faze one. They would suddenly disappear from a game after losing just a single round. So why not patch that hole in the Falcon’s game, with the one guy who is universally known to never give up and always have one more plan to win? I think if this new project finds even a little bit of success early on, it can spiral in a team that could be difficult if not impossible to stop. What’s really crazy if you think about it is, this lineup might hold a lot of careers in its hands. Zonic needs a big win, Karrigan does too. Niko has been relegated in the minds of many as a big game choker. Kyousuke and m0nesy are young, but could also be wasting some of their prime years in a team that isn’t delivering the results their skill levels would demand.
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I know every new Falcon’s lineup we always say the same thing, something to the effect of “on paper, this could really work”, but I think this version has a much bigger chance than any of the previous versions, if they can just find a smidge of that bullshit.
