Heroic Rebuilds CS2 Roster With Seven-Man Approach

After selling their trio core to Team Falcons for unfathomable amounts of money, Heroic let go of its entire 2024 roster and was forced to rebuild. The Norwegian organization is coming into the new year with an interesting approach, with its new lineup featuring seven players.

Heroic decided to recruit the core roster of Sangal Esports, a promising squad filled with young prospects. The likes of SunPayus and maden have also found their way into the team. The updated squad features the following players:

• Alvaro “SunPayus” Garcia
• Linus “LNZ” Holtäng
• Simon “yxngster” Boije
• Yasin “xfl0ud” Koç
• Andrey “tN1R” Tatarinovich
• Eetu “sAw” Saha (Coach)
• Pavle “maden” Bošković (Substitute) 
• Linus “nilo” Bergman (Substitute) 

Seven player roster

That’s right, Heroic has signed seven players for its roster. The idea of having more than five players was prominent in 2020, when top teams such as Team Vitality and Navi were running six-man rosters. The idea was to have certain players swap out when playing specific maps, but these rosters were abolished and have not been seen at the highest level until today.

A new face making it to the starting lineup is tN1R, a 23-year-old Belarusian rifler who formerly played for GUN5. Sitting on the bench is ex-Falcons player maden and nilo, a young rifler with brimming potential. 

I’d like to highlight Heroic’s strategic decision to pick up three players from the Sangal Esports roster, as the latter’s Valve Ranking spot in 18th place will be transferred over to the former. This means Heroic is eligible to receive direct invitations to upcoming tournaments such as BLAST Bounty Spring 2025 and IEM Katowice since they are within the top 24 teams in the world.

If Heroic had not picked up at least three Sangal players, they would have their Valve Ranking spot voided and must play lower-tier tournaments to build up rankings which would take tons of time.

Though this roster might seem a little underwhelming to the naked eye, I think this is a brilliant approach considering how supposedly inexpensive this roster costs to build. Heroic has reportedly made close to $10 million in 2024 selling off players, starting with stavn and jabbi to Astralis at the start of the year, NertZ to Team Liquid recently, and their trio core to Team Falcons for a confirmed $6 million alone. 

My point is that these guys at Heroic’s management know how to do business, and they’ve had to rebuild their rosters multiple times already, so I trust they know what they’re doing. To continue further, the team is under the watchful eyes of coach sAw, who had built two rosters, ENCE and Heroic, only for them to be bought out entirely. If I’m trusting someone to build a team from scratch, it’s sAw. 

Details of how this seven-man lineup will operate have not been shared yet, but it’s going to be exciting to see it play out. Heroic’s first gig is the Closed Qualifier for BLAST Bounty Spring 2025, which runs from 14 to 19 January.