What to expect from M80 v. FlyQuest

The first half of the 2025 season is well underway and just now M80 will play their first LAN tournament, at least with a full lineup, as Nils "k1to" Gruhne stood in for Ethan "reck" Serrano in the start of the year.

Their ESL Pro League Season 21 debut will be against FlyQuest, in the opening round of the Stage 1 Swiss group. Here's what to expect from M80, in case you haven't been keeping up with them.

M80 are finding their form

The absence of reck due to a broken leg undermined M80's first months as he couldn't join them in Europe for the BLAST Bounty Season 1 and the ICE Invitational. The team returned to the United States empty-handed and suffered a tough loss to MCS in the IEM Dallas NA Open Qualifier, this time with reck playing.

Since then, however, M80 have gone back to winning ways as they breeze past teams such as Nouns, NRG, and BLUEJAYS (formerly BOSS) to qualify for BLAST Open Lisbon 2025.

• Lake and slaxz- were the driving force for M80 in the BLAST Qualifiers, but the rest of the team also played well

• M80 beat teams better than FlyQuest last year

• Reached the quarterfinals of ESL Pro League Season 20

FlyQuest's struggles continue

Despite swapping the Australian AWPer Alistair "aliStair" Johnston for the European import Iulian "regali" Harjău, FlyQuest remained a group stage team so far in 2025. This is disappointing, considering they nearly reached the Perfect World Shanghai Major Elimination Stage in December.

• FlyQuest didn't make it past the online phase of BLAST Bounty, IEM Katowice Play-in, or PGL Cluj-Napoca groups

• FlyQuest don't have a map to call home as their best maps are a coin-toss in the past three months

• regali is the only one on their roster with a positive HLTV rating (1.05) this year

Previous matchups

M80 and FlyQuest have never played each other.

Likely vetoes

While this is speculative, we tried figuring out how the veto will play out by analysing FlyQuest and M80 maps in 2025.

• FlyQuest ban Mirage (it's their permaban)

• M80 ban Nuke (it's their permaban)

• FlyQuest pick Dust2 (not much else they could do)

• M80 pick Anubis (one of their best maps)

• FlyQuest ban Ancient (they-re 0-3 in it this season)

• M80 ban Train (why risk it?)

• Inferno is left over

Theoretically speaking, FlyQuest have their hands tied in the veto process as they don't have a map to call home and Anubis, their best map in the past three months, is also M80's playground.

This should provide M80 more than enough leverage in the veto and therefore, play a comfortable series.