“I just know we didn’t push ourselves and just expected to win. It was something big for us that we worked on a lot in the end, just giving energy no matter the opponent.” Vitality started 2024 as the top-ranked team in the world, riding the wave of their Fall and World Final trophy lifts into the new year, but would soon find themselves washed ashore in a deflating start to their season. By the time 2023 rolled around, flameZ was on the wishlist of many organizations and his contract with OG was running out. He played at one last Major with them, finishing 12-14th at the Challengers Stage of the BLAST.tv Paris Major, and after IEM Dallas the newly-crowned Paris Major champions Vitality came knocking for his services. “I had to become more professional. With Endpoint it was the COVID era, we just played online, and I wasn’t professional many times but joining OG and going to bootcamps I had to change for good.”
Why was flameZ the 7th best player of 2024?
“At the start, it was tough because he was way older than me and sometimes things got personal in the game with common team issues,” he says. “I wouldn’t know how to separate it, and maybe both of us didn’t know, so it might have been a bit awkward. Shahar “flameZ” Shushan (born June 22, 2003) is an Israeli CS2 rifler/entry fragger for Team Vitality. Known for his aggressive play, pinpoint aim, and sharp utility usage, he helped Vitality win IEM Cologne 2024 and multiple BLAST events.
Teammates
“I feel like there were many moments or people that changed something for me or my mindset toward going pro,” flameZ says. “The first one would be the qualification to FPL/FPL-C. This made me grind and sort of push, maybe not with the sole intent of going pro, but enjoying the circuit and improving. “On the other hand, it got better with time, we always had good chemistry in the game, shared similar ideas, and also he has always been very creative so playing next to him was easy to adapt to as rifler.”
Flamez mini filter tips
Some would say it makes sense that the team that is so stable and the firepower is always on point to go through and beat Falcons. A lot of people were looking at Falcons and whether they can take it further, but it didn’t go their way. “I talked to the coach and heard his plans, but told him that there are some offers that if they are going to come, I will go play for them. I told them beforehand in Dallas that if these offers come I will explore them deeper than usual.” Despite a year with only one trophy, albeit at the prestigious IEM Cologne, flameZ says there isn’t a specific moment or memory that he would rather forget. “The Major obviously is a hard tournament, but the challenge of being together for a month with a not-so-optimal relationship was tough on many. In the end, we gave our best, and if you do that you can’t judge yourself.” Losses to ENCE and HEROIC, the series against the latter featuring a win and two defeats, gave a brutal reality check to a Vitality that arrived in Poland hoping to coast off their late 2023 success.
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- They will always be competitive – we saw donk yesterday, this guy alone can beat any team in the world, so I think it’s just a matter of, if they grind and he’s the right fit outside of the game, I think it might look very good.
- Vitality played BLAST World Final with Audric “JACKZ” Jug as a stand-in for mezii, who took time away after becoming a father, and the event in Singapore started in predictably poor fashion.
- They started their campaign with an imperious 13-0 over OG, but their path through the event wasn’t without trouble, including a lost series to Astralis in the upper bracket semi-final and a pair of tight, three-map series against Falcons and in a rematch against Astralis in the group final to qualify.
- Focus in Israel soon turned to international competition and on making a name for yourself in FPL, but flameZ was still under 16 and ineligible to compete in qualifiers for most big events.
- I think we find a rhythm that we can stick to so that we can go off it and start playing very good CS.”
Vitality played BLAST World Final with Audric “JACKZ” Jug as a stand-in for mezii, who took time away after becoming a father, and the event in Singapore started in predictably poor fashion. FlameZ recorded a 0.78 rating in a 0-2 loss to Spirit, but even with a stand-in Vitality recovered by defeating Liquid and MOUZ to reach the semi-final before toppling to G2. “During my time with apEX, he has always told me that it is never guaranteed you will be on the winning side and even reaching playoffs and being able to compete on big stages is something we should be thankful for,” flameZ says when asked how he reflects on Vitality’s only title victory of the year.
- His worst event of the year followed at IEM Rio, where Vitality lost to HEROIC in the group stage upper bracket final and were eliminated in the quarter-finals by MOUZ.
- “To be honest I’m not so sure what went wrong, it feels like so long ago,” flameZ says of the result.
- “They come in with like 500 or 200 officials in a year and come up against a team that has like 40 so, of course, they are going to be prepared. That’s the best practice you can wish for, to play officials at this amount.”
- ZywOo put up mind-boggling 2.97 and 2.68 ratings to get his side past GamerLegion and HEROIC in the best-of-one openers, and the team recovered from a loss to Cloud9 in the 2-0 pool by exacting revenge for Katowice over ENCE in two maps (where flameZ averaged a 1.51 rating) to advance to the Major.
- I think the key thing is that we get better game by game, but we’re also coming from a good bootcamp very confident in these games.
- “The Major obviously is a hard tournament, but the challenge of being together for a month with a not-so-optimal relationship was tough on many. In the end, we gave our best, and if you do that you can’t judge yourself.”
Vitality extend flameZ contract through 2027
Days after being crowned the 2023 Team of the Year at the HLTV Awards Show, Dan “apEX” Madesclaire’s troops made their way to Copenhagen for BLAST Spring Groups and locked in a spot at the Spring Final. They started their campaign with an imperious 13-0 over OG, but their path through the event wasn’t without trouble, including a lost series to Astralis in the upper bracket semi-final and a pair of tight, three-map series against Falcons and in a rematch against Astralis in the group final to qualify. The young Israeli also played his first international LAN when offline play returned at the Play-in stage for IEM Cologne, where he averaged a 1.01 rating in five maps after a poor series against BIG dragged his numbers down. “The coach, the players, the CEO, everybody in this project made me feel like I could be myself and just grind with them, finish practice and stay in TeamSpeak until late at night playing FACEIT every day. In terms of fitting within the existing team structure, flameZ seemed confident about his ability to fill the roles left by Peter “dupreeh” Rasmussen. “On T side I fit because Vitality need a guy that runs and doesn’t give a single fuck and sacrifices, and I think I fit that background pretty well,” he said.
flameZ on joining Vitality: “The motivation was to succeed with another Israeli guy”
Seeing Lotan “Spinx” Giladi and Guy “anarkez” Trachtman compete in cups featured on HLTV and having the chance to qualify for FPL-C — where Israeli players could break out internationally — offered an extra level of motivation. It became too hard for flameZ to juggle school, team practice, and pick-up games, and five months in, he stepped back from Finest to focus entirely on qualifying for FPL-C. It started with the Israeli spacetaker tallying his highest-rated map of 2024, a 2.47 rating in a 13-0 over Astralis, and was followed by five maps with a 1.23 rating or better (three above 1.40). His only negative map (0.90 rating) came in the decider against G2 in the semi-final, which Vitality lost in overtime to bow out of the Spring Final in 3-4th place. He put in another strong shift against FaZe (1.20 rating) and started well against Astralis in the semi-final, but deflated showings on three maps — two coming against MOUZ in the final — stopped him short of another EVP as he ended the event with a 1.06 rating overall (0.98 in playoffs). Vitality’s campaign in Germany started with utter domination over FURIA and a 1.87-rated map from flameZ, followed by a hard-fought 2-1 win over FaZe and 2-0 over MOUZ to lock in a spot in the playoffs.
“You get the chance to play with a guy that looks like one of the best teammates there is on the planet, the best player in the world statistics-wise, and he’s so good man.” And although the kills flameZ got were more impactful than most, leading to round wins 70.5% of the time (2nd) and multi-kills 83% of the time (6th), he had the lowest fragging output of players in the top 20 (0.68 KPR). He was also not very impressive in round wins overall with a 0.92 KPRW and a kill in only 57.8% of round wins, again the lowest of all players in the top 20. FlameZ secures seventh place in his debut appearance on the Top 20 players of the year list thanks to an impressive stat sheet in the toughest competitions and against the best teams. Winning Cologne could have marked a new period of success for Vitality after a difficult start to the year, but any momentum they hoped to ride off of the victory was brought to a grinding halt after they were cast out in the quarter-finals of ESL Pro League Season 20 by Eternal Fire. FlameZ added that the experience in Cologne was his favorite moment of the year, emphasizing his appreciation of the team environment and how hard Vitality fought for the title.
The duo have been on NAVI’s academy roster since October 2023 and put up impressive numbers in 2024, with makazze averaging a 1.19 rating (1.34 impact) over 189 maps and Krabeni averaging a 1.10 rating (1.17 impact) over 203 maps. FlameZ named NAVI Junior rifler Drin “makazze” Shaqiri as his Bold Prediction, becoming the second player to do so after Helvijs “broky” Saukants, and also gave a nod to makazze’s teammate, Aulon “Krabeni” Fazlija. His 1.13 rating in arena matches is once again even better than his average and even on par with the next group of players above. FlameZ recovered to a 1.08 average (1.14 playoffs), which was good enough for another VP mention before the team traveled to Shanghai for the Europe RMR. FlameZ missed out on a VP or EVP mention for the second time this year with a 0.99 rating, but wasted no time in entering a renaissance at BLAST Fall Final where he had his best event of the year. “The Dallas one, well we obviously had this game against G2 and lost to a comeback, but this did not make me lose any belief in the team,” flameZ says.
It really shows how competitive CS is, that skill is not enough, it’s about a lot of things. For them there is gonna be a lot of time to practice and this kind of stuff that will help them show their potential. From his first event, you can see how good he is, how sharp he is, and it’s a good sign for Falcons, but obviously on the other side, they will feel bad.
Local LANs offered flameZ and other youngsters the opportunity to prove themselves, but the Israeli scene remained isolated, focused mostly on forming the best teams to win the few local LANs held each year. That changed when Flamez Uniquestars, Israel’s best team, lost to MVP PK at IeSF World Championship — to the surprise of players in Israel who did not know any of the other teams at the event – and after Noah “buue” Nethanel Türnpu became the first Israeli player to qualify for FPL in December 2017. I talked to apEX yesterday and he was pretty happy about how you guys handled coming back from the break and not looking rusty. “Then 2023 we started out with Katowice and BLAST. It was very close to getting playoffs at Katowice and with BLAST we were very close to qualifying for Washington,” he began. “With Katowice I was sick, so it was the tournament we just throw out the window, we don’t really care about it. It could have been better.