Group D has definitely left the best until last; a scintillating match-up between a resurgent Fnatic with the king returning against a Faze team who've been hot recently albeit a bit inconsistent. Both of these teams performed exceptionally in the BO2 phase each going 5-1 with convincing 2-0s over dig and tsm while taking a map each during their match-up. Yesterday we saw 2 sub-par performances from these teams with Fnatic dropping a map to TSM, which one would've expected to be 2-0 while Faze looked out of sorts against Dig, only just scraping the series 2-1.
Maps:
Faze ban Nuke, Fnatic ban Cache (It could be mirage but Cache would be standard)
Faze pick mirage- It's become Faze's new stomping ground after inferno was removed from the map pool. The last two times these teams matched up on it Faze won. Interestingly, Fnatic picked it yesterday (which is why I doubt Fnatic will ban it) into TSM and somehow managed to lose it. This map favours Faze 60-40
Fnatic pick Overpass: It's a map which is not typically a strong map for Fnatic but one that they've had decent results on in the past. The reason I suspect that they will pick this is because Faze do not play it and do not play it well as we saw yesterday. The removal of Inferno put a big dent into Faze's map pool as they used to perma-ban Overpass but now Nuke has become their perma-ban. This map favors Fnatic 75-25
Faze ban cobble, Fnatic ban train
D2- It's a map which these rosters have never played each other on. Fnatic did show on day 2 that it's a map which they are comfortable playing, thrashing Dig 16-6 on it. We haven't seen Faze play it at all during e-league even though they didn't ban it for the BO2s. We also didn't see them play it at all during their major qualifiers. However, they did beat Nip and Nikosports on it in ESC so we could see a surprise on this if it gets to the third map, which I expect it to.
Further thoughts- I'd give Fnatic the edge in this match-up although I don't think it really justifies the 75-25 odds we are seeing on lounge at the moment. I think the best opportunity in this match lies in a bet of there being over 2.5 maps (it will go to map 3). I feel that Faze's map pool isn't deep enough to be able to 2-0 Fnatic yet I feel that Faze has a good chance to take either Mirage or Cache given what we've seen from Fnatic this tournament. Both 'Fnatic to take at least 1 map' and 'Faze to take at least 1 map' seem like deent bets but a bet on over 2.5 maps gives much better combined odds at 2.13 so therefore, I'll be betting on that.
My advice: Medium bet on Maps Total over 2.5 @2.13