After some early experimentation and early losses, and with only a few weeks remaining during the all-important sole VCT Americas split of 2023, NRG aren’t messing around anymore.
The highly regarded team heading into the first season of partnership was willing to try some new things over the first few weeks, debuting lots of new comps while the players themselves took on a plethora of different agents. Following their big win over 100T, crashies said in the post-match broadcast interview that they have gone back to playing “what works” for them.
NRG’s major offseason acquisition in Ardis “ardiis” Svarenieks added to that when speaking to Dot Esports, effectively confirming that one agent is out of his individual agent pool for good.
“I don’t think I was brought in to play Killjoy,” ardiis told Dot when asked about NRG’s early-season struggles. “I just don’t think I’m a good Killjoy to be honest. I won’t say I’m terrible but I think my performance on Ascent attack against C9 was probably one of the worst I’ve ever had individually, and I just didn’t feel comfortable. I’m happy we’ve changed back to normal, and it looks like it’s working so far.”
“I don’t think you’ll see me on Killjoy anymore for the rest of the season, at least.”
Ardiis described the Killjoy experiment as a “slow change,” saying it started after he played the agent well on one map, then turning into two maps before NRG started testing it across different compositions. The former Masters Copenhagen winner says he feels much more comfortable on Jett, but he’s still willing to take on sentinel duties via Sage, and one of his best performances of the year so far was with Sage on map one against 100T.
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Killjoy will still be a reliable part of NRG compositions going forward; both FNS and Victor played Killjoy during NRG’s most recent dominant victories. After a tough 1-3 start, NRG are back to 3-3 with a positive map record of 8-6 and a +23 round differential. They play FURIA, LOUD, and then Evil Geniuses to close out the regular season.
