The founding Majors, 2013–2015: Fnatic, NiP and the first dynasties

The Swedish core

Fnatic's 2015 five is the roster most worth memorising from this era, because four of those names — olofmeister, KRIMZ, flusha, JW — stayed connected for years afterwards. When pronax left and Dennis arrived, the team kept winning; when the core finally broke, its members turned up on FaZe Clan, GODSENT and elsewhere, seeding a generation of rosters.

Ninjas in Pyjamas are the counterweight. They reached four of the first five Major finals and only converted one, which is the reason their 2014 Cologne line-up is a common quiz answer: it is the only NiP five with a Major to its name.

Virtus.pro and the Polish five

No roster in Counter-Strike history stayed intact longer than Virtus.pro's. NEO, TaZ, pashaBiceps, Snax and byali played together from 2014 to 2018 with no substitutions, winning Katowice in 2014 and reaching another final in 2016. That stability makes them the friendliest possible line-up round: any Virtus.pro question between 2014 and 2017 has the same five names.

The French carousel

France provides the era's counter-example. The same pool of players — Happy, NBK-, kennyS, apEX, SmithZz, kioShiMa, ScreaM, shox — rotated between LDLC, EnVyUs, Titan, Team Envy and G2 with such frequency that identifying which organisation held which five in a given month is genuinely difficult. Two Majors came out of that pool in twelve months under two different banners, with three shared players.

If a hard-tier French line-up appears in a round, the year is the clue that matters more than the logo.

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