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

Some maps become a personal curse. For years, that map for Nikola "NiKo" Kovač was Inferno — the place where, back in 2018, his first real dream of a Major fell apart. And then, on June 21, 2026, in the most fitting venue imaginable — Counter-Strike's cathedral in Cologne, the LANXESS Arena — on that very same Inferno, everything finally clicked into place.Falcons were closing out FURIA. Third map, the

Heading into IEM Cologne Major 2026, Vitality made no secret of how much this event meant to them. They wanted to become the first team ever to win three Majors in a row and put to rest any hope the community still had for real competition at the top of the pro scene. But in Cologne, Vitality didn't look anywhere near as confident — or as terrifying — as they