Thunderpick WC 2025 Groups Day 2: Everything to play for

We’ve had a hell of a day here at the Thunderpick World Championship in Malta with every team making their first outing for the group stage. No one is out yet so there’s everything left to play for tomorrow. Here’s a look at the next match ups.

Group A – S tier face off

The groups format for day 2 is pretty simple: winners play winners, losers play losers. That means our match ups are going to be The Mongolz v. FURIA and OG v. 9z.

The Mongolz v. FURIA

Now this is a match up I’d expect to see at most S tier events these days. The Mongolz are the defending champions of the Thunderpick World Championship and they certainly made their presence known with a clean 2-0 against 9z. When we spoke to Techno4k ahead of the first day, he said they’d managed to fit some practice into the break between ESL Pro League and this tournament so it seems they may be back on form.

FURIA, on the other hand, are continuing on their rise as they took down OG without too many problems at all. The whole team looks solid, even if Yekindar told us he thought they could have played better. So this is a difficult one to call. If I’m predicting with my heart, I’d love to see Mongolz in the finals so this one goes to them.

OG v. 9z

This is a toughie but I’m just going to have to give the edge to OG after today’s performance. They showed teeth and had FURIA on the ropes in their first bo3, even taking a round advantage on map 1. That’s not to say they won’t have their work cut out for them against 9z, let’s just remember that although 9z lost 13-3 and 13-5 today, they did so to a team that placed 2nd at the BLAST.tv Austin Major. Writing them off this early in the tournament would be a disservice to a team that already fought their way through the TPWC South American qualifier and then the closed qualifier.

Group B – As expected

Group B was actually quite spicy today with Imperial managing to take a map off Navi. Sure, things got a lot harder for them once Navi locked in but they went down swinging.

If you came into today wondering who Team Venom are, you wouldn’t be the only one. But the Aurora v. Team Venom match up was much closer than I anticipated. On paper, this should have been Aurora’s for the taking but it seems some of their bad ESL Pro League luck may have followed them to Malta.

Navi v. Aurora

Despite their IGL Aleksib suffering from illness right now, Navi still put in a day’s work and took down Imperial. It didn’t start off too well but Nuke and Dust 2 were decisive wins. For this team, it’s a question of staying consistent, one wrong move can cause them to unravel. We can only hope Aleksi recovers quickly and is able to keep playing.

The same can be said for Aurora, they took down Team Venom in a 2-0 that was what I expected to see but again, it was a bit too close for comfort. This is going to make for a really interesting game that I just can’t bring myself to call.

Imperial v. Team Venom

It really seems like Imperial are here to win on the power of friendship, a strategy that I’ve definitely seen work before in the world of esports. Taking that map 1 off Navi was no mean feat and if they can bring that energy into this next match up, there’s a very real chance they’ll be the ones making it through the elimination game tomorrow.

Team Venom also came out swinging against Aurora, yes they were beaten but they were no shrinking violets against this team. Another tough one to call that could really go either way. This is definitely a match to see tomorrow!