Last year, Astralis reached the semifinals of IEM Cologne in Victor "Staehr" Staehr's first real tournament with the team. A year later, much has changed, but the young player has become a key figure in the unit's system.

After a solid 2-0 win to open the scoring at IEM Cologne 2024, we spoke to Staehr about the changes over the past year, Astralis' goals for the season, and fears of burnout ahead of the Shanghai Major.

Interview was taken and written by Sam "AN1MO" McKenzie

A confident win in the end, how are you feeling?

Pretty good, we had a few shaky rounds at the start, especially myself, but I think we showed we can play a good Dust2 with some very strong rounds. We outplayed them in the rounds we won. 

Inferno was basically cruise control, so I think our performance was very strong.

After SAW beat G2, roman told HLTV that G2 seemed shaky, maybe because they hadn't played yet, did you feel anything like that?

Not at all, but we have also just played BLAST where we played five BO3s, so I can't really say we're shaky. 

We could be because of the new set-up, ESL and BLAST have different tables and chairs, but we've played so much that it didn't really matter.

About BLAST, you qualified for Fall Final in the end, what does it mean to get the extra LAN especially considering it's in Denmark?

It's amazing, we just want to reach the arena and that's one of our big goals. It's really important for us, but Cologne is too, it's the biggest tournament there has ever been, the most important, the most talked about tournament. We'll give it our all.

You had a run of playoff appearances towards the end of last season, maybe a small dip afterwards, what are the goals for this season?

I don't know exactly, the Major is obviously important and so is Fall Final, playing in front of a Danish crowd will be amazing, especially because I have never done it.

I think we want to try and win tournaments, not just make semi-finals like we did last season. We ended the season on very low energy, we really needed the break, and I can feel in everyone now that we have the energy back and we're ready to win.

In terms of needing breaks and feeling tired towards the end of a season, is there a concern that the second Major of the year will suffer because of the time of year it will be played?

Both yes and no, it's the last tournament of the year so everyone will have played the whole year. However, when it's the Major, everyone will give it their all no matter what.

Whereas, when you play a small tournament at the end of the season, it's not that it doesn't matter, but you can't give it your all. The Major is so important for everyone that even if they're burnt out, they'll still give it their all.

device has IGLed the team for a while now, do you think other teams have now adapted to the new system?

When we started in Chengdu, no teams had any info and we just cruised through everything. When people don't know anything you can do whatever you want and there's no tells.

When we've played this long though with this many matches, you have to mix things up and not send the same signals or do the same strategies.

Of course, people have gotten used to it, but we change our stratbook so much and because of how they're built, I think it's not easy to play against us even if people got used to it.

Last year's Cologne was your first true tournament on Astralis, how do you think you've grown as a person and as a player in the year since?

It was a completely different team back then, I had different roles, we went to the semi-finals, and since then I've become a little more calm and I play less active positions on certain maps now.

This means that I have to be more calm, more reliable, the anchor for the team. I think I've become that a little bit, but still need to become better at it at times, I need to play for myself and focus on my aim.

Did you expect the team would be as different as it is a year on?

Not at all, we went to the semi-finals las year and everything was good, right? You'd never expect that in the next year there would be three people out.

I didn't expect it, but it's hard to expect things like that when you do good at the start. It was the start of the team and we instantly did that, so you would just never expect it.

That being said, I'm very happy it happened because we brought some world class players in.

You now need one more win to make playoffs, what will be the key to get that?

We need to just do the same as today. Prep for the game, and then when we play it, play with confidence and with our style, avoid stress because if we stress we'll just make mistakes and lose.