Team Vitality blitz FaZe to lift back-to-back Major trophies

Team Vitality are once more the Major champions, this time in Budapest, after a performance that showed every facet of their brilliance to defeat FaZe Clan.

FaZe can leave with their heads held high after pushing one of the true great Counter-Strike teams to prove it, but once Vitality got their noses in front they were clinical and lethal, and looked once more like the unbeatable behemoth of earlier in the year.

Quite simply, Vitality are comfortably the best team of the year, and perhaps the best of all time. Their ability to win games from seemingly any position with any player being capable of being the head of the spear or the tail of the scorpion at any given moment is unrivalled, and we'd be hard pressed to find a better team throughout history than them.

It all started so well for FaZe Clan, too.

They came flying out of the blocks to win the first four rounds of the series - their only four round streak of the whole final - and hit back with three more once Vitality pulled one back. That 7-1 lead proved insurmountable, with karrigan topping the scoreboard and feeling pretty invincible.

ropz failed to kill him with his back turned at one point, leading launders to suggest he had 'plot armour', which at the time seemed pertinent. His 3k backstab broke Vitality's backs near the back end of Nuke, and looked for all the world like he might just be going on to do the unthinkable.

Vitality, though, didn't become the great team they are without resilience and ability to fight back from a deficit.

They obliterated FaZe straight back on map two (Dust 2), with ZywOo and mezii dovetailing nicely to put Vitality 9-3 up at the half after winning seven in a row to kick it off. FaZe had no answer for Vitality's dynamism, and only really broky and frozen had any say in stopping it. jcobbb struggled, karrigan completely flipped his map one performance, and Twistzz couldn't hold the fort together as it collapsed around him.

What made it worse is that FaZe got a whole bunch of opening kills on the CT side (they went 9-3 in opening duels!) but could not capitalise on their aggressive moves to convert into rounds at all.

And then came the mezii show.

mezii was imperious on Inferno, grabbing his teammates by the collar and dragging them to a win by any means necessary. This was his highest Big Event rating ever, and he did it in perhaps the most important map of his career too. He ended up 23-8 with two big clutches, seven multikills and a 2.00 rating.

Not bad for a role player.

He consistently pulled Vitality out of sticky situations and turned a potential loss into a comfortable 13-9 win, typified by a quite ridiculous sequence from atop the boost in CT.

FaZe huffed and puffed, but the star power of Vitality was simply too much to handle, and FaZe seemed to run out of energy - or mana - in the fourth as they got rolled over by the domineering champions.

If you thought mezii was good in map three (and he was), check out ropz' showing in the final map. One last twist of the knife for FaZe, as their former teammate ripped out their hearts and printed a big fat Vitality logo on them. A 2.89 rating doesn't even flatter him - he was 5-0 in opening duels with a 22-7 K/D and 144.1 ADR.

That was, quite simply, a victory lap for the best team in the world, and perhaps, the best team to ever do it.

Team Vitality, back-to-back champions.