Astralis’ crazy Nuke streak reaches incredible milestone

The Astralis era of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive shows no sign of coming to an end as the team passes another incredible milestone.

Astralis have been the dominant force in CS:GO for over a year now, during which time they’ve won twelve offline events, including back-to-back Major victories, and never gone more than one event without a title. The squad are now widely considered the greatest team in the history of CS:GO.

While there are obviously a lot of factors that go into such an insane run of success, one has been the team’s absolute dominion over Nuke. Following a victory over the ex-3DMAX team at the ESL Pro League Season 9 group stage, Astralis has now won 30 offline games on Nuke since their last defeat on the map.

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To put Astralis’ streak into perspective, another classic map win streak was that of the Brazilian SK Gaming on Train when they were the number one team in 2016. That streak – which was broken by Astralis themselves, incidentally – ended at 17 maps.

Astralis’ second streak

While Astralis’ Nuke streak is their longest and therefore gets the most attention, it’s not the only map on which they’ve wracked up an incredible run of victories. The team has also won their last 18 offline games on Inferno.

While the number might not be quite as incredible as their Nuke streak, Astralis’ unbeaten Inferno run is an enormous achievement in itself and arguably speaks to their dominance even more so than the Nuke stat. Nuke is much less popular as a home map for most top teams, whereas almost every elite hopeful is comfortable playing Inferno.

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That Astralis can maintain such an incredible record on their second-best map, despite routinely playing it against other top-5 teams, is indicative of just how far above the rest of the competition Astralis are right now.

The addition of Vertigo to the map pool over Cache could make Astralis even stronger.

Astralis’ map pool buffed by Valve?

If Astralis’ map pool wasn’t formidable enough over the last year of competition, it’s possible that it could be set to become even more so.

Valve recently announced a change to the active competitive pool that introduced Vertigo, a map never before seen in professional play, removing Cache to do so.

While it remains to be seen whether Astralis will integrate Vertigo into their own map pool – and how strong they might be on it if they do so – the removal of Cache can certainly do them no harm, as it has long been their default ban.

So far the Astralis era has shown little sign of coming to an end, and at the very least it seems challengers cannot rely on a map pool change taking away one of Astralis’ strengths.