tarik on 2018 MIBR lineup: "We pulled the plug way too soon"
As many North American Counter-Strike fans know, after the wonderful Major victory in Boston, Cloud9 went through a bit of a tumult. Despite winning the most prestigious tournament, the Major victory was not enough for the squad to look past their differences, and North America's one and only Major winning team blew up shortly afterwards.
Jake "Stewie2k" Yip and Tarik "tarik" Celik left the NA lineup to join some of CS:GO's most established legends on MIBR. With those two joining two-time Major winners Marcelo "coldzera" David, Fernando "fer" Alvarenga and Gabriel "FalleN" Toledo, the Americas superteam was born.
The team started out incredibly well with a victory at the ZOTAC Cup Masters 2018 Grand Finals, which turned out to be their only tournament win as a team. Strong results followed with semifinals at the FACEIT 2018 Major, 2nd at BLAST Pro Series Istanbul and ECS Season 6 Finals, along with another semifinal finish at ESL Pro League Season 8. However, semifinals weren't enough for a team with a grand total of eight Major wins, and MIBR's short international stint ended with another Brazilian chapter following.
In a Sentinels content piece, tarik looked at the most iconic moments of his career, which included a 1v4 clutch against prime Astralis played to absolute perfection.
Thinking back to his fond memories with the team, tarik concluded, "We actually were pretty good on MIBR. I think we pulled the plug way too soon. I think we played together for four or five months but we placed finals multiple times or top five throughout. This is one of the events we got to the finals of that arguably we should have won."
He continued, "There's also Istanbul which is really sad, the BLAST event there that we also should have won. But yeah, this was a huge clutch. It was hype."
The potential of MIBR giving the Stewie2K and tarik roster more time raises a lot of tantalizing alternative histories. The failure of this roster would see Stewie2k go on to join Liquid and ultimately win the Intel Grand Slam while tarik would join NRG, leading to a second powerhouse NA team. What do you think? Did this roster have more gas in the tank, or would tarik and Stewie2K sticking around hurt Liquid, NRG, and MIBR more than if history played out the way it did?
