2025 has been a tough year for FaZe Clan. Now, the struggling team is hoping to tackle their woes by benching Jonathan “EliGE” Jablonowski and replacing him with Jakub “jcobbb” Pietruszewski.
EliGE is viewed as one of the greatest players in North American Counter-Strike history, yet his time with FaZe only lasted seven months. He arrived on the team in January after departing Complexity. Although EliGE’s individual form was decent on FaZe, it failed to match the same level of star quality that he had brought to Complexity, and there have been constant questions raised over role clashes with Havard “rain” Nygaard that prevented both players from reaching their peak levels.
During EliGE’s time with FaZe, the team placed fourth at PGL Cluj-Napoca, third at PGL Bucharest, and inside the top eight at the BLAST.tv Austin Major. A poor return given the expectations placed upon FaZe in CS2, they had previously made roster moves to try and tackle the issues with Helvjis “broky” Saukants being benched for Oleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev and subsequently returning to the roster after s1mple’s loan expired.
There has been plenty of speculation over EliGE’s future, with HLTV’s Striker stating that stipulations within the VRS rulebook prevented FaZe from making an additional change to their roster earlier.
As rumours continued to swirl, it had been suggested that EliGE would be part of a swap deal with Liquid that would see EliGE and Russel “Twistzz” van Dulken trade places, returning to the two teams they had enjoyed the most successful periods of their careers with in the process. However, that deal has yet to come to fruition, and FaZe has instead replaced the American with 21 year old Polish player, jcobbb.
Image Credit: PGL
Who is jcobbb?
Most recently seen playing with Betclic Apogee, jcobbb is an aggressive player that comes with a high reputation from his time spent in tier two Counter-Strike.
A familiar face to FaZe given that they played against him earlier in the year at PGL Bucharest, jcobbb struggled in that game but impressed during the event as he put up strong performances against both Astralis and The MongolZ.
A surprise signing for FaZe, he represents a shift in signing strategy for the NA organisation, who have preferred to go for established talent in recent years after previously bringing in the likes of broky and Aurimas “bymas” Pipiras during the COVID era.
Fans won’t have to wait long to see jcobbb debut for FaZe, their next game is set to be their opener in BLAST Open Season 2, which will be played against Danish team ECSTATIC on August 27th.