Vertigo removal spells trouble for several North American teams

Valve confirmed today that Train will officially replace Vertigo for the BLAST.tv Austin Major. But while the full return of Train to competitive CS2 is being celebrated by most, the few pro teams that fancied Vertigo face a new challenge.

Unfortunately for North America, a number of teams that thrived on Vertigo are now going to lose one of their top maps. For Complexity, who are already set to lose their superstar Jonathan "EliGE" Jablonowski, the removal of Vertigo means losing one of their go-to map picks. In 2024, Complexity played Vertigo 30 times, second only to Anubis which was played 32 times. But while Complexity won 18 out of 32 times on Anubis, their real home was Vertigo, where they won 22 out of 30 times.

But North America's infatuation with Vertigo isn't limited to just Complexity. Of the top 11 teams in the world ranked by average player rating on Vertigo in 2024, five of those were North American teams. Wildcard had the highest average player rating on Vertigo of any team in the world at 1.15, and the likes of NRG, M80, Complexity, and Nouns all produced average ratings of 1.11 or higher. All five of those teams played at least 22 games of Vertigo in 2024.

To contrast this, outside of MOUZ, not a single team in HLTV's current top five played more than 20 maps of Vertigo all year. NAVI perma-banned Vertigo all year, playing 170 maps of CS2 during 2024 and never setting foot in the skyscraper map once.

While Train is certainly not the only strong map for these top NA teams, it's removal does mean they are going to have to strengthen something else in their map pool. Whether or not that will be Train remains to be seen.