StarLadder Major Berlin 2019: Astralis' third in a row, the first Souvenir tokens and Vertigo

The StarLadder Major Berlin 2019 ended on September 8 with Astralis beating AVANGAR 2-0 at the Mercedes-Benz Arena. HLTV reported that it made Astralis the first team to win four Majors and the first to win three in a row. Berlin was also the first Major played on Vertigo, the first with Souvenir tokens you could buy, and the last before a gap of more than two years: the next Major, planned for Rio de Janeiro in 2020, was cancelled.

Format and venues

The event ran from August 23 to September 8, 2019, with 24 teams:

• New Challengers Stage, August 23–26, at the Verti Music Hall.
• New Legends Stage, August 28 to September 1, also at the Verti Music Hall, which HLTV said would hold up to 1,000 fans a day.
• New Champions Stage, September 5–8, at the Mercedes-Benz Arena.

Both Swiss stages used best-of-three for every advancement and elimination match and best-of-one for the rest. The playoffs were a best-of-three bracket. HLTV noted it was the fourth CS:GO Major in Germany and the first since 2016.

The map pool was Dust II, Inferno, Mirage, Nuke, Overpass, Train and Vertigo. Valve had moved Vertigo into the Active Duty pool and Cache out of it on March 28, 2019, a few weeks after the Katowice Major. The prize pool was $1,000,000: Astralis won $500,000 and AVANGAR $150,000.

Astralis' run

As Katowice champions, Astralis started in the New Legends Stage. They beat DreamEaters 16-9 and G2 Esports 16-7, then lost 0-2 to NRG, a series that included a 28-31 loss on Train after five overtimes. The next day they beat CR4ZY 2-1, but lost the second map, Dust II, 29-31, again after five overtimes. Win.gg reported those 60 rounds as the longest map in Major history at the time, and Valve's post-event blog mentioned the "record-breaking 60-round matches". Astralis won the decider on Vertigo 16-5 and reached the playoffs at 3-1.

The playoffs looked nothing like that. Astralis beat Team Liquid, HLTV's No. 1 team going in, 2-0 (16-8 on Vertigo, 16-13 on Overpass), then NRG 2-0 (16-10 on Train, 16-9 on Overpass), then AVANGAR. As in London and Katowice, they won the playoffs without dropping a map.

With this title, HLTV wrote, dev1ce, dupreeh, gla1ve and Xyp9x became the most successful players in Major history with four each, and Magisk reached three.

The final

AVANGAR, the Kazakhstani team, had finished in Katowice's 9th–11th group, so they started in the first stage. Their lineup was Dzhami "Jame" Ali, Timur "buster" Tulepov, Aleksei "qikert" Golubev, Sanjar "SANJI" Kuliev and Dauren "AdreN" Kystaubayev, coached by Dastan "dastan" Aqbaev. AdreN had won the Kraków 2017 Major with Gambit. On the way to the final they beat Vitality 2-1 and Renegades 2-0, including a 22-19 double-overtime win on Mirage.

• Inferno: Astralis 16-6, after a 12-3 first half on the Terrorist side.
• Dust II: Astralis 16-5, after leading 11-4 at half-time on the CT side.

HLTV said the final took little more than two hours. Its MVP award, with betway, went to dev1ce, who had a 1.71 rating in the final and 1.47 across the playoffs, ahead of Jame. It was dev1ce's second Major MVP after London, and HLTV noted that only Marcelo "coldzera" David had also won more than one.

The stickers

Valve released the Berlin items on August 14, 2019, together with the Viewer Pass. Team stickers could be bought individually, holo and foil versions came from three team capsules, and paper, foil and gold autographs from three matching autograph capsules:

The Returning Challengers capsule had only five teams. Liquipedia records that Cloud9 lost their place after entering the North American Minor qualifier, so a third team came through the play-in for Minor third-placed teams instead. The Returning Challengers and Minor Challengers capsules also held a StarLadder sticker, and AVANGAR's holo and foil came from the five-team capsule.

The sales were large. On September 18, 2019, Valve wrote that tournament items for Berlin "will pay out over $11 million for participating teams and players". Our capsules explainer compares that with later Majors.

Souvenir tokens

Katowice had introduced the Viewer Pass, with Souvenir packages earned only by upgrading its event coin. Berlin kept that and added tokens:

• Viewer Pass or Viewer Pass + 3 Souvenir Tokens. Valve sold both on August 14; the second started you with three tokens.
• Coin upgrades. Completing 8, 12 and 16 challenges upgraded the coin to Silver, Gold and Diamond, and each upgrade earned one token, so three at most.
• Missions. New for Berlin, each Active Duty map had a mission: win at least 10 rounds in a single competitive match.
• Buying more. Pass holders could buy "as many Souvenir Tokens as you'd like", in Valve's words.

Each token became a Souvenir package for any completed match, redeemable until September 30. Valve said the Souvenir would feature a player who was MVP of one of the rounds in that match, so each one carried a gold autograph alongside gold team stickers and a gold StarLadder sticker. Berlin was the last package-era Major to do this. At PGL Stockholm 2021, the next Major, the Counter-Strike Wiki records that gold map stickers replaced the autographs. The Souvenir packages guide covers what came next.

Vertigo and the other packages

There were seven packages: Dust II, Inferno, Mirage, Nuke, Overpass, Train and Vertigo. With Cache out of the pool, Berlin had no Cache package. The Berlin 2019 Vertigo Souvenir Package was the first ever for Vertigo, and the Counter-Strike Wiki lists it as drawing from The Vertigo Collection. Inferno and Nuke packages used the 2018 collections first seen in London.

Collecting Berlin 2019 items today

• Read the full name. Items end in "Berlin 2019". Steam writes AVANGAR as "Avangar", Team Vitality as "Vitality" and dev1ce as "device".
• Know what makes a Berlin Souvenir. The gold StarLadder sticker, the two gold team stickers and the gold autograph identify the match and the round MVP. A Souvenir from the 60-round map would carry gold Astralis and CR4ZY stickers and come from a Dust II package.
• Supply is not capped per account. Unlike Katowice, tokens could be bought in any number, so there is no three-per-player limit to lean on when judging rarity.
• Check the scrape on applied stickers, and use the sticker filter on Buy to find guns with a specific Berlin sticker.

The previous Major was IEM Katowice 2019. The next, ESL One Rio 2020, never took place.

Sources

• StarLadder Berlin Major 2019 — Liquipedia
• Astralis hammer AVANGAR to win StarLadder Major — HLTV.org
• Astralis make Major history with Berlin triumph — HLTV.org
• device wins StarLadder Major MVP award — HLTV.org
• Astralis advance to New Champions Stage over CR4ZY — HLTV.org
• Berlin 2019 Pick'Em and Viewer Pass FAQ — counter-strike.net (Valve)
• Keeping Things Competitive — Counter-Strike blog (Valve)
• StarLadder Berlin 2019 Souvenir Packages — Counter-Strike Wiki