There's hardly any time left until July 6, and the questions have piled up enough to fill an article all on their own. And it's not just about the new Premier season. A week before the update, the AK-47 | Aphrodite vanishes from the Armory, older collections have had a "last chance" tag hanging over them for months, and Major stickers are living without capsules for the very first time

Summer is traditionally one of the biggest windows for organizations to seriously rethink their rosters. This year, the first season of 2026 wrapped up with a Major — and for the first time, that Major was IEM Cologne, an event that used to do the exact opposite and kick off the season right after teams came back from their break. Now most orgs have nearly a full month before BLAST

July 6 brings an update that kicks off a new Premier season — which means fresh ratings rolling back into matchmaking, a rank reset, and the familiar grind back through your calibration matches. But the competitive side isn't the only reason we're waiting on this patch. Alongside it, the collections in The Armory Pass will most likely finally rotate — the very shuffle the community has been waiting on since

When Cache landed in CS2, you'd have been hard-pressed to find a single person in the community who doubted it would slot straight into the Active Duty pool right after the IEM Cologne Major 2026. And that's exactly what happened — which is why the announcement itself wasn't much of a banger, unlike the map's actual release. It had been playable on FACEIT long before that anyway, first in FMPONE's