In the afterglow of the Astralis’ DreamHack Marseille victory, I started to dissect what I had just witnessed. Astralis’ run through the tournament was the most dominant victory path since FaZe’s victories last year at ESL New York and ELeague 2017. Looking across the individual forms, teamplay, tactics, map pool, and the field I came to this conclusion. There is no team in the world right now that can stop Astralis.

To understand what I mean, we have to first understand how teams become the best in CS:GO. Broadly speaking, a team’s strength can be broken up into three categories: individual skill, teamplay, and tactics. A great team will need some combination of all three, while the best teams are often the masters of two of the three traits. These traits are then exhibited through the meta as paradigm shifts as the individuals, teamplay, or tactics come to define and set the tone for each time period.

When NiP were the best they had the some of the most individually skilled players and incredible teamplay. The same could be said of Fnatic later on. When VeryGames and EnVyUs were the best teams, they had a combination of individual skill and tactics. SK is the closest all-arounder, but I believe their teamplay was what set them apart from the rest of the teams in the world. For FaZe, it was their individual skill that put them above the rest when they were the best team in the world.

For Astralis, they currently have the best teamplay and tactics of any team in CS:GO. Their system is rock solid and it’s clear that every player knows what role they are playing within the system and how their role interacts with the each other. When the system breaks down into the late round, their decision making as individuals and a team has been clean, precise, and decisive. Astralis have always been among the best teams when it came to teamplay and before Nicolai “dev1ce” Reedtz’s injury, they were the only team that could consistently contain Marcelo “coldzera” David. I suspect the reason was because Coldzera was the best mid-to-late round player in the game, but Astralis had the best mid-to-late team play so Coldzera couldn’t capitalize as often on Astralis as he did against other teams.

What stopped Astralis from winning titles from mid 2017 to the end of the year was the individual skill. They had a nice spread of skill through each of their roles, but individual players on the team wavered. Markus “Kjaerbye” Kjaerbye was named the MVP of ELeague Atlanta Major 2017, but by the middle of 2017 that form was gone and he slowly declined. Dev1ce was one of the best players in early 2017, but his level of play started to dip the further the team went into 2017 until his injuries. Lukas “gla1ve” Rossander had an excellent start for Astralis, but his skill tapered off as you’d expect from such a volatile role that he plays. As for Andreas “Xyp9x” Hojsleth, he’s incredibly consistent, but he is a supportive player who gets his impact from winning clutch rounds. He is one of the best clutch players we’ve ever seen in CS:GO history, but no one can win every clutch consistently. The only player whose individual form increased throughout the year was Peter “dupreeh” Rothmann as he mastered his new role within Astralis as a lurker and later on AWPer.

This problem isn’t in the current Astralis lineup. After Kjaerbye left Astralis, the team recruited Emil “Magisk” Reif. He has since been integrated into the team as he took on Dupreeh’s old roles and Dupreeh took on Kjaerbye’s. This worked out fine as Dupreeh was in better form by the end of 2017 than Kjaerbye was on Astralis. As for dev1ce, he has reached peak form again as one of the world’s best players. Xyp9x is still Xyp9x, and gla1ve had a standout performance in this tournament, though I think it will fall off as time goes on.

The question mark I had was for Magisk. His play had fallen off in early 2017 in North and did a stint in the weird OpTic EU lineup. He hasn’t reached the star levels he was once at, but in this team he doesn’t have to be. With dev1ce and dupreeh being the two main stars, he can be a third star that shows up sometimes. So long as he does his role and follows the system, he doesn’t need to carry in order for the team to win like he did when he was on Dignitas.

So with the recent lineup shuffle, Astralis have increased their individual skill. They have fixed up their roles so there are less conflicts within the team. The addition of Magisk has had the team rebuild their structure and tactics to fit him in and in the process given them a new look. Dev1ce has recovered from his injuries and is back to peak form. All of this culminated into a dominant victory at DreamHack Marseille.

I said earlier that Astralis’ run through that tournament reminded me of FaZe’s ESL New York 2017 run. However there is one critical difference. At the ESL New York run, FaZe ran over the entire competition through pure raw individual skill with fundamental teamplay and tactics, and a leader that could bind it all together. At DreamHack Marseille, Astralis bulldozed through the competition, but they did it through their teamplay and tactics (even though they were all individually great). They clearly had an answer, response, and adaptation for anything the enemy could throw at them.

Perhaps the best argument for why no one can stop Astralis is by looking at the field. The two most stable teams in recent times have been Fnatic and Mouz. Fnatic were destroyed by Astralis at Marseille and have almost no edges in that matchup. In a direct matchup, Fnatic have the best player in the server in Freddy “KRiMZ” Johansson, but outside of that, man for man Astralis outmatch them. In terms of both teamplay and tactics, Astralis surpass them. It’s just a bad matchup for Fnatic and even in some of the best conditions possible they couldn’t beat them. Look at the map on Mirage, which is Fnatic’s best map. In that game Fnatic dragged Astralis into the forcebuy duels that limit the effectiveness of Astralis’ teamplay and tactics and they still couldn’t close it out despite that having those advantages going for them.

As for Mouz, I think they can match Astralis and even outperform them in terms of raw skill, but they don’t have the necessary teamplay or tactics to match up against Astralis. So while Mouz have a chance if a few of their stars go off, it isn’t a consistent plan to win. On top of that, Mouz have a problem with their map pool as Astralis can pick things like Nuke or Overpass directly into Mouz and get a free win in any bo3 series.

You could argue for Na`Vi as they have the best player in the world by far in Oleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev, but we saw that matchup in the finals. Na`Vi have a map pool problem just like Mouz. While Astralis couldn’t constraint s1mple, it doesn’t matter if the rest of the team can’t match up in teamplay or tactics.

All of the rest of the teams are currently in flux. SK hit a massive slump and have replaced Epitacio “TACO” de Melo with Jacky “Stewie2K” Yip. While Stewie2K is a much better individual player, TACO was a glue guy who brought on great teamplay elements to the team and without him they will have to reinvent the entire way the team functions and from what I saw at DreamHack Marseille they are far from a completed product.

Cloud 9 have brought on Pujan “FNS” Mehta as a leader and that should make the team more consistent, but I don’t think they have the ceiling to match up against Astralis in terms of skill, teamplay, or tactics. Liquid have a better shot at it, but they seem to have issues performing consistently right now and haven’t figured out what to do with their roles considering they let Russel “Twistzz” Van Dulken AWP.

The most important factor of all is Finn “karrigan” Andersen’s FaZe. Both iterations of FaZe in 2017 were a thorn in Astralis’ side as they continually stopped Astralis. Karrigan consistently did well in the map pick ban phase. Individually, Karrigan kept showing up against Astralis in the direct matchups and called his best games against them. The problem with FaZe though is that Olof “olofmeister” Kajbjer is taking personal leave and the temporary replacement is Richard “Xizt” Landstrom. Those two players aren’t even in the same stratosphere individually speaking.

On top of that, olofmeister played a critical role in the FaZe system as he helped karrigan bring in some structure and teamplay element, to the team, which Xizt doesn’t seem to do. We’ve even seen the direct matchup now and it doesn’t look pretty, though the star players of FaZe didn’t show up, so there is a potential caveat in there. An additional problem I have with FaZe right now is that everyone knows Xizt is a temp player, so how hard are they going into practice with a guy they know will be gone in a few months anyway?

The final thing we have to bring up is that the map pool has changed. Cobblestone has been taken out and it was the permaban of Astralis. In it’s place Dust2 is coming in and Astralis were a strong Dust2 team before it was removed and it hasn’t changed much. On top of that dev1ce is one of the best Dust2 AWPers and with his resurgence in form, it seems like another good map that Astralis can now go to. In the current map pool right now, the only map they don’t like to play is cache and even cache was a pretty good map for them in the previous roster and should still work for them now.

So when we look at how the map veto works out, Astralis will almost always be able to draw a Nuke ban because almost no one else plays it. They can then choose to ban the enemy’s best map or cache depending on how good the other team is and will still be able to go to one of their own best maps in Overpass.

There are just too many win conditions for Astralis. They have a good spread of skill and form across all of their positions. They have the best teamplay and tactics. Their enemies are all in a state of flux or have exploitable weaknesses. Their map pool seems to be the best in the world. I don’t think anyone in the world can stop them right now and they are setup to take over the entire CS:GO scene in the upcoming months.

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