Grim on BLAST Rivals S2: "The better we do here, the more confidence we'll have going into the Major"

Passion UA is about to play BLAST Rivals 2025 Season 2, their first big tournament since IEM Cologne, and our parental website HLTV caught up with Michael "Grim" Wince during the media day in Hong Kong to discuss the team's goals and what they have been up to lately.

Passion UA had decent results lately, as they reached the finals at DraculaN S2, and won the Urban Riga Open S1. But they're definitely one of the underdogs in BLAST Rivals S2 as they're in group A alongside three heavy hitters: Spirit, Falcons, and The MongolZ.

In his interview with HLTV's Danish "Nohte" Allana, Grim talked about the difficulties of integrating Kvem into the team after playing the previous season with Danny "Cxzi" Strzelczyk.

I'd say definitely there were some growing pains when we got Kvem. A lot comes down to the fact that when you pick up a new player who isn't too familiar with playing in international rosters, there's like a lot of things kind of lost in translation. Especially as a NA team, sometimes the comms get a bit crazy, and it was a bit hard for him to understand some things.

But with more time with us, understanding our accents, us understanding him, and just getting on the same page also with in-game stuff, I'd say definitely has been a lot better since like the first month for sure. Because I think the first month we bombed out at DraculaN and then the StarSeries loss was also a bit unfortunate. But getting to the finals at a recent DraculaN and winning the Riga LAN, like you said, has definitely helped our confidence. I think all of us are excited to play matches again for sure, because it's been a while.

Grim was also surprised that Kvem is "extremely vocal" like Cxzi, even though he didn't play too much for international teams.

According to him, Kvem has been helping Johnny "JT" Theodosiou in the tactical department.

"He's always telling JT he wants to add this play to our book or do this play in rounds, he's been helping a lot with mid-rounding and just ideas in general to flow around and help JT a bit," Grim said, before adding that Kvem's firepower is "very good."

Passion UA have traveled to Hong Kong to play at BLAST Rivals S2 after four weeks of straight practice. Grim is feeling good about their game right now, though he noted that a lot of teams are coming from IEM Chengdu, so they're kind of "warmed up."

He's hoping that Passion UA can win at least one or two matches in BLAST Rivals S2, despite their tough group.

I would say we would definitely like to win at least one or two of those and see where we're at against the big dogs. Because like you said, we only played DraculaN and Riga recently, so we haven't really played a tier-one team in a pretty long time. I guess the last one was NAVI at StarSeries.

But yeah, it'd be nice to see where we're at going into the Major. The better we do here, the more confidence we'll have going into the Major. We have one more event before that, too, just to iron things out. But yeah, I'd say overall, playoffs would be pretty great. Not sure if it's too big of a hill to climb right now, just because I don't know where we're at exactly since we had four weeks of practice after the LANs.

Passion UA will debut against The MongolZ tonight at 09:00PM. The top three teams of each group will advance to the playoffs.