With Season 32 well underway, the first casualties of the season have emerged as MONGI MODE falls victim to internal strife. Faint Gaming, true to their name, have scavenged through the remains, picking up Matthes to replace Rising on the roster due to the German soldier being unable to attend Copenhagen Games 2019.

Faint Gaming currently sit in third place in the standings—keen to retain their good form of Season 31 and make playoffs again. They are elbow-to-elbow with both SVIFT and L’En Avant de Guingamp with only 4 points separating these 3 teams.

Faint Gaming will also be looking forward to competing at Copenhagen Games 2019. Last year’s edition marked Rising’s return to top level TF2 after roughly three years of hiatus. The famed Roamer finished first with Ascenchiladas at Copenhagen Games 2018 for his first reappearance, but only returned to online play with Faint Gaming last season, ultimately finishing 4th after clinching the last playoff spot to in extremis.

Smirre explained how Faint ended up picking Matthes.

We learned quite recently that Rising cannot attend Copenhagen games and we quickly looked for a replacement. We looked at our options and agreed that Matthes would be the best fit for the team since he could both play the season and attend LAN, and also got previous experience playing with Polygon at i63.

Those are some big shoes to fill for Matthes, who was yet to play his first official when Rising started his hiatus, but the Englishman has already shown his ability with MONGI MODE, especially during the Premiership Qualifiers, easily getting the better of the three other teams to be the first to win their spot in the top flight. With his already strong DM and his drive for improvement, getting into an experimented team such as Faint Gaming could be what will finally allow the player to break through in Premeiership.

Matthes shared his hopes over his new team as well as his own ability to improve with us.

It’s a great change stepping into Faint after how the atmosphere was during the last few weeks of playing on Mongi Mode. Everybody seems to be comfortable in following maincalls and I'm really excited to play with PolygoN on soldier again, I think we have the potential to play super well together even if it might be hard to challenge the raw experience that Rising has compared to myself.

I'm not known for being the most consistent or strong-willed player but I'm going to work my hardest to improve some of the blocks I've dealt with as a player before and I'm very confident I'll be able to prove I'm capable of much more than I have shown. Playing out the rest of the season should be a great way to start and we're definitely looking to take rounds and points that might not be expected of us, but LAN is a much bigger priority for me and I want to show off much bigger performances than are expected of me especially in terms of my deathmatch ability.

Replacing the old Rising for a new player on the rise, the Faint Gaming roster is now:

• Scout: counou
• Scout: ixy
• Roamer: Matthes
• Pocket: PolygoN
• Demoman: Smirre
• Medic: Ombrack