With the VALORANT offseason still ongoing ahead of the 2023 VCT season and the new partnership era, fans are still eagerly waiting for the pieces to officially fall into place. In North America, teams like Sentinels, C9, and 100T are fully locked in, but both NRG and Evil Geniuses are taking their time.
One of the hottest commodities is the core of the OpTic Gaming roster that dominated 2022, and so far only Jaccob “yay” Whiteaker has officially signed with a new team. The majority of OpTic is reportedly heading to NRG, and in-game-leader Pujan “FNS” Mehta is already gelling with one of his potential new teammates.
In a stream with Sam “s0m” Oh, the last remaining member of this past year’s NRG team that’s still on the active roster, FNS showed that he can also lead by example. The two were queued for ranked together but found themselves down 8-10 on Haven. While they got a plant on A down successfully, FNS’ teammates were being picked off one by one in the retake. So he took care of things himself.
Thanks to his patience, FNS was able to swing out from the boxes by A short at the perfect time and used the optimal spray control of the Phantom to drop all five retaking defenders. The damage dealt by his Nanoswarm grenade helped make the process even easier as well.
FNS and s0m are set to play alongside each other a lot more under the NRG banner in 2023, sources told Dot Esports. Joining them will be FNS’ longtime teammates in Victor Wong, Austin “crashies” Roberts, and coach Chet Singh. Rounding out the supposed NRG group is as fine a replacement for a talent like yay as you could ask for: Ardis “ardiis” Svarenieks, formerly of FPX.
NRG has still yet to officially announce its 2023 VALORANT roster for VCT.
