B1ad3 on NAVI's Bucharest run: "Trust the process"

Natus Vincere's run at PGL Masters Bucharest ended at the hands of Vitality in the quarter-finals, but it marked the team's first playoff appearance since winning IEM Atlanta, HLTV reports.

Along the way NAVI picked up wins over Spirit and FURIA before Vitality eliminated them.

In-game leader Andrey "B1ad3" Gorodenskiy told HLTV after the loss that the roster's improved form is not down to any overhaul. "We were constantly working on the same stuff," he said. "It was just the executing of protocols and ideas was not that sharp, because this can come with mindset, this can come with your confidence, right? Because everything we have, it's there."

The Vitality series turned on map selection. NAVI picked Cache, a map they had not played for some time, after building confidence on CT side against Spirit the previous day, where B1ad3 said they were "8-4, 9-3, something like this." He added that their opponents' approach on the T side of Cache lacked structure, which gave NAVI the belief to attack it.

That belief did not carry over to Mirage and Dust2. B1ad3 pointed to the danger of letting Vitality build momentum: "I think we had chances on both maps, but as soon as you give Vitality this confidence boost or economy boost, they start cooking rounds with more random effect, where people can just guess and kill and just YOLO." He said NAVI's CT side on Mirage lacked the synergy and communication they had shown against Spirit, calling it a drop in collective sharpness rather than a tactical failure.

Asked to assess the tournament as a whole, B1ad3 traced the recovery back to EPL, where NAVI beat 9z and G2 2-0 and also took maps off Vitality and Falcons despite losing those series. He described that event as proof the team was already moving in the right direction.

He was far more critical of the loss to PARIVISION, calling it "a full disaster" in his own words, because "we should've won them, and we knew how to win them, and we started to hesitate, being nervous, afraid to lose, and eventually they just played their style and beat us."

The contrast B1ad3 draws is between execution and identity: NAVI's system has not changed since the team's early-season slump, but the confidence to run it under pressure has, by his account, only returned in patches. Bucharest's playoff run, built on a Cache gameplan against Vitality and wins over Spirit and FURIA, is the clearest evidence yet of that shift, even as the Mirage and Dust2 defeats showed how quickly it can slip.