VALORANT Challengers South Asia - What we know so far | Issue #9
The big roster shuffle? In this issue of Esports Extract Weekly we discuss the Valorant Challengers South Asian League and roster changes in MEDAL Esports & Gods Reign.
Valorant Challengers SA - What we know so far…
According to various reports, NODWIN Gaming is set to host the Challengers League in South Asia. The Split 1(regular split) will take place offline in Delhi where 12 teams will compete, out of which 6 will be invited, and the other 6 will qualify via open qualifiers. According to a tweet by Sushant “Ominous” Jha, the league will feed into APAC Ascension, and the buy-ins for the league slots are up to $150K USD.
Below is the schedule for VALORANT Challengers South Asia,
Open qualifiers will take place from January 17 to January 26. And Regular Split 1 & Contender’s League will take place from February 20 to March 27.
According to a report on blix.gg by Sushant “Ominous” Jha, there will be promotions for teams that finish at the top and relegations for the teams that finish at the bottom. Some of the relegated teams will move to the Contender’s League at the end of the split where they’ll meet some of the teams that have failed to reach the main stage via the open qualifiers. The Contender’s League will run alongside the main league and act as a proving ground for talents.
If it isn’t quite apparent, if Split 1 is to take place offline in Delhi, it will become near impossible for players/teams from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other South Asian countries to participate.
TLDR, big things are happening in South Asian Indian Valorant, for both the organizations & the players. No wonder many talents in APAC are willing to leave their subregion to come to compete in India.
Rostermania
Orangutan signs new players for GC roster
This past week, the Orangutan Esports fans received a big Valorant announcement, it wasn’t what many expected it to be, but still a quite big announcement.
Orangutan has signed zini & capriciouS to their VALORANT Game Changers roster. The addition of these 2 Filipino players now makes Orangutan X a majority PH team.
On the other hand, Swayambika “Sway” Sachar is stepping down from the roster to take some time off to focus on her studies. She will still be creating some content and streaming for Orangutan as a content creator, she mentioned in her tweet.
Although not yet officially announced, it seems likely that Neha “CaspeR” Sottany will be making a comeback to round out the roster.
An announcement for the OG and his apes
The other VALORANT roster for Orangutan which is rumored to be consisting of antidote, rawfiul, RvK, tesseract, and perhaps azys, still isn’t announced. The shoot for the roster announcement video was supposed to take place sometime early this month, so it is likely the announcement will be out by the end of this month. Poised to become a top team in the region this team will be a force to be reckoned with, in South Asia.
MEDAL Esports roster changes?
Both BadmaN and godvexy have now parted ways with MEDAL Esports, and now are unrestricted free agents.
From hearsay, we can confirm that this isn’t the end for MEDAL Esports, as they’re apparently trialing multiple players for the available spots.
Changes in Gods Reign Valorant roster?
Something is changing over at Gods Reign. Earlier we saw Gods Reign loan young prodigy Prish “Tricky” Valvani from MEDAL Esports to sub in, in the place of KnightRider as a duelist for the Esportz LAN. It somehow didn’t work out, and to everyone’s shock, we saw them getting blown out of the water in their first-ever LAN appearance. Now we see both Simar “Psy” Sethi & Abhay “KnightRider” Mulchandani post their restricted F/A tweets.
But we haven’t seen any LFT/LFO tweets from the other members of the organization just yet, so clearly, this is a roster change.