BIG knock Wildcard out of PGL Cluj-Napoca 2025
BIG eliminated Wildcard from PGL Cluj-Napoca 2025 on February 17th following a 2-1 victory. They met in the 1-2 pool of the Swiss group stage and Wildcard lost the decider despite having a man advantage on six rounds.
The series kicked off on Ancient and BIG completely dismantled Wildcard's defense as they pulled a flawless T-side. Wildcard had a good chance to grab at least one round but Marcel "hyped" Köhn prevented them from doing so.
At least Wildcard saved themselves from the embarrassment of getting 13-0'd as Peter "stanislaw" Jarguz and Love "phzy" Smidebrant won a heroic 2v5 in the second pistol. However, that wasn't enough to stop BIG's momentum and the German team closed out Ancient in the first gun round.
Wildcard found a way to reset after that Ancient loss and played much better on Inferno, their map pick. They had great mid-round calls to outplay BIG's CT-side and secure a 7-5 advantage for the second half.
Things were looking really promising for Wildcard after phzy single-handedly destroyed BIG's T-side pistol with a cracking Dualies ace. From a moment it looked like Wildcard were going to run away with an easy victory, but BIG put up a good fight and Inferno would have gone to overtime if it wasn't for Tim "susp" Ångström denying the B bombsite to BIG in the final round.
It all went down to Nuke, a map in which both teams have a mixed record. Wildcard strolled to a 5-1 lead on their CT-side, but a couple of silly mid-round mistakes prevented them from getting past seven, thus giving BIG a lifeline for the second half.
There was a lot of back-and-forth at the start of the second half as both Wildcard and BIG won rounds with just pistols, but the German team came out on top of it and wrecked Wildcard's T-side economy early on. BIG never looked back after they got ahead in the scoreboard and closed out the map with ease.
WildcardBIG| Wildcard |
K - D | +/- | ADR | KAST | Rating 2.1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Love 'phzy' Smidebrant |
41 - 41 | +0 | 72.3 | 61.7% | 0.91 |
| Tim 'susp' Ångström |
32 - 44 | -12 | 64.2 | 71.7% | 0.89 |
 Aran 'Sonic' Groesbeek |
35 - 43 | -8 | 71.6 | 65.0% | 0.89 |
 Josh 'JBa' Barutt |
31 - 42 | -11 | 58.6 | 66.7% | 0.81 |
 Peter 'stanislaw' Jarguz |
30 - 42 | -12 | 65.1 | 65.0% | 0.80 |
| BIG |
K - D | +/- | ADR | KAST | Rating 2.1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Johannes 'tabseN' Wodarz |
41 - 34 | +7 | 81.1 | 78.3% | 1.23 |
| Karim 'Krimbo' Moussa |
44 - 31 | +13 | 79.9 | 83.3% | 1.18 |
| Marcel 'hyped' Köhn |
45 - 33 | +12 | 72.8 | 75.0% | 1.17 |
| Jon 'JDC' de Castro |
41 - 36 | +5 | 77.2 | 71.7% | 1.16 |
| Can 'kyuubii' Ali |
40 - 37 | +3 | 72.3 | 81.7% | 1.15 |
The elimination must leave a bitter taste in the mouth of Wildcard's players as they could have defeated BIG, The MongolZ, and Virtus.pro in the tournament.
With Wildcard out of PGL Cluj-Napoca, all there is left for NA fans is to cheer for Complexity, who will play an elimination series versus SAW today at 12:00PM.
