Evil Geniuses’ biggest Valorant stars join NRG after escaping contract jail
Colin Young-Wolff/Riot GamesNRG have announced their official Valorant roster for VCT Americas 2024, and they’ve managed to grab the players who were arguably Evil Geniuses’ biggest stars in 2023.
It’s safe to say Evil Geniuses’ 2023 run through the VCT changed the face of competitive Valorant forever. Though esports are traditionally dominated by Eastern teams (or European teams in the case of Counter-Strike), EG came out of nowhere to prove that they were the best and that NA could win an esports international.
However, with Evil Geniuses pulling out of almost every esports venture and failing to keep things afloat despite strong teams in multiple esports, the EG roster we saw was most likely going to be split up.
It’s been revealed that Ethan and Demon1, arguably the two strongest players from that roster, have been picked up by NRG.
NRG stacks a Valorant super team with Evil Geniuses’ prodigies
Though NRG had a lot of hype behind them for the duration of their VCT 2023 run, they ultimately fell short of expectations as they dropped out of Valorant Champions 2023 pretty early on.
It was clear that the team had a ton of potential with how strong they were domestically and at other tournaments through the year, but they needed to make some changes if they wanted to truly content for 2024’s title.
As a result, NRG’s Valorant team have signed both Demon1 and Ethan along with Marved, opting only to hold on to Victor and crashies from 2023.
NRG are calling this Valorant roster their “Revenge Tour” team, going with the villain era narrative from EG and hoping that this new roster will bring them the success they were looking for in 2023.
This news comes hot off of Demon1 claiming that he was “free” with a vague contract signing Tweet just hours before the announcement, indicating that the off-season negotiations for a deal like this weren’t easy.
It remains to be seen if Ethan and Demon1 can recapture the magic that put them on top of the Valorant world.
The destination of EG’s remaining Valorant players is still up in the air, though C0M and Jawgemo both congratulated Ethan on the move and said they’ll miss playing with him.
This is technically Ethan’s third time on NRG between his tenure in CS and Valorant, and he’s hoping thjat the “3rd time’s the charm.”
