flameZ: "'Era' is a big word to use before winning the Major"

There's no more impressive team in Counter-Strike right now than Vitality. Since the start of IEM Katowice, they have not lost a single match, winning five trophies before the halfway point of 2025.

Many have said this is now the Vitality era, especially after winning the ESL Grand Slam, but Shahar "flameZ" Shushan told Dust2.us' Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Moore that it's missing one crucial accolade: the Major trophy.

The full interview can be found below on YouTube, with key snippets underneath. All questions and answers below have been slightly edited for length and clarity.

Was the break during PGL Astana good for you guys?

We value the breaks a lot, because we’re staying every tournament until the last day, playing a best-of-five. There’s a lot of nerves, a lot of stress, a lot of things to go wrong, a lot of emotions. Then going to sleep at 6am, then a flight at 11am. Your body needs some time to recover. It was very valuable to not play Astana.

I do think that if you don’t play for two to three weeks with just practice in the meantime, you need to sort of find your foot again in officials.You need to find the communication, the initiative, many things that don’t come with practice. I think that’s something we’re working on within our practice. We need to be more efficient on some things. But overall I’m very happy we didn’t go to Astana and had some time off. After Rivals I was quite sick and everybody wasn’t in the best shape.

Does the event streak you’re on add any pressure to not make mistakes, given how those could be hyperanalyzed by pundits or fans?

A fan or an analyst, it’s their job to sort of see the game and judge. And you don’t have an era until the fans say you have an era. So we value the fans’ opinions, but if we lose, and we lose because we played bad, we’re going to judge ourselves first. The pressure is to withhold the standard for your teammates. We’re entertainers in some sense so we want to play good Counter-Strike, but if we’re going to lose because the enemy beat us, we’re not going to go home and be sad about it. We keep working. The main goal is the Major, and for us there’s going to be pressure. It’s a good thing we closed out the Grand Slam in Melbourne because it would have been very stressful if that continued to Dallas.

A lot of pundits say this is the Vitality era. Does that change you or the team’s mentality?

I think era is a big word [to use] before winning a Major. So I will not say we’re in an era. I will say we are the most dominant team of the year so far, and that’s quite obvious. Someone on Twitter made a good point: Liquid had like a 23-match win streak but it wasn’t as dominant as Astralis winning the Majors, you know? People would still say 2019 was Astralis’ year. So for me the main thing is winning the Major.

I’m very happy to be in the position that I’m in. I’m 21 and I already have Katowice and Cologne under my belt, and a Grand Slam! But I think the Major is going to be more important than all of them. And the goal is to just keep going and keep going and keep going.