Both 100 Thieves and Evil Geniuses have made important changes to their roster. All of these changes come just before the Valorant Champions, the Grand Final of this year’s long esports league. Just how much will these changes affect their chances at reaching the upcoming international event? Could they win it all, or are they spitting in the wind?
Evil Geniuses
The Evil Geniuses Valorant roster have not been having a good year. While Evil Geniuses are one of the largest and longest running esports organisations in North America, they haven’t been performing to the best of their ability.
They entered the Valorant scene at the end of January 2021. They signed Nolan "Temperature" Pepper, Aleksandar "aleksandar" Hinojosa, Ronan "Osias" Jeremiah Javelona, Claudia "Clawdia" Che, and Christine "potter" Chi. Later, they replaced aleksandar, Osias, and Clawdia with Mike "pho" Panza, Brandon "BRANTED" Ballard, and Daniel "roca" Gustaferri. Their most recent change to the roster came earlier this week when they picked up Kelden “Boostio” Pupello as a Jett player for their starting roster.
While Boostio may be a decent addition to their team, he has some decent talent and a good history in his previous esport, Overwatch, this won’t make up for the poor performance of the team this year. Their most recent win was $1500 at the Nerd Street Gamers: Summer Championship. They are so far from an international level of play; we can’t even see them bringing it back in 2022.
Their last chance to qualify for the Champions was at the open qualifier at the Stage 3 Challengers 2 of the North American tour. They didn’t even make it past their first map. They fell to Complexity without winning a single map. If they are able to secure their roster and stop switching it up every few months, they might just be able to claw their way back up.
100 Thieves
100 Thieves are looking a little better than Evil Geniuses. There were rumours late last week that they would be dropping Joshua "steel" Nissan. Well, this week, those rumours were proven to be half right. They are benching him, although he still remains on their roster as their primary substitute.
In his place, they promoted Aaron "b0i" Thao. He was previously the substitute for the team and has now taken a more active place on the roster. These changes come before they head to the North American Last Chance Qualifiers for Valorant Champions.
100 Thieves played well at the most recent Masters, but they just failed to qualify for the Champions. It looks like they are trying a new strategy to see if they can make it to the finals. The real question for the team is how long steel will stick around as substitute. Despite being benched, steel is a very good player, and we would bet that there are plenty of teams eager to snatch him up when the chance comes. Hopefully the new squad will manage to qualify at the next event, or we could see even more changes coming in the future.
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