Team Heretics is clearing out more room on its starting VALORANT roster for the VCT EMEA 2023 season after moving its longest-standing member, Christian “lowel” Antoran, to the bench effective today.
The Spanish CS:GO veteran has been a part of the Heretics VALORANT roster for just over two years and was the only remaining player from the team that won First Strike Europe at the end of 2020 and finished second at the VCT Europe Stage One Masters tournament in 2021.
This benching means that lowel and Heretics’ newest superstar signing in Óscar “mixwell” Colocho from G2 will not get the same roster reunion many Spanish FPS fans were hoping for. The two were both signed to the Movistar Riders CS:GO roster in July 2018, competing together for nearly a year before lowel left for a brief stint with the HellRaisers international roster.
In a TwitLonger post, lowel thanked the organization and his teammates for the time spent on Heretics, and even took the time to “apologize if [he] might have fallen short of expectations.” Assuming he is still under contract, he will now enter restricted free agency but is open to any proposals from interested teams.
The move raises further questions about what the starting lineup for Heretics is going to look like when the 2023 VCT season begins. Just a day prior to lowel’s benching, the team’s in-game leader Melih “pAura” Karaduran announced his impending free agency. Currently, the team fields just mixwell and Wassim “keloqz” Cista, but G2 fans know all too well that these two players play similar roles and agents, and in fact, they were even benched for each other twice early in the 2022 season.
The initial roster submission deadline has passed but most EMEA teams competing in the top league next year like Vitality, Karmine Corp, Giants, and others have not officially announced 2023 rosters either.
