The entire Sentinels campaign during the 2023 VALORANT season has been one filled with gambles, from role changes to coach swaps to in-game leader changes. Fittingly, it appears that are at least considering another major gamble heading into their final opportunity this year at the Americas Last Chance Qualifier.
Sentinels seem to be considering putting TenZ on Reyna, which would be a massive shock to the meta and highlight the first time any team from the Americas region has picked her all year. Just a day after TenZ asked “When will Reyna be meta in pro play again?” on Twitter, coach Kaplan seemingly responded by simply tweeting “Reyna.”
He provided a little more context when responding to Kyedae, streamer for 100 Thieves and TenZ’s partner, saying, “if Paper Rex can do it why can’t we?” During Paper Rex’s playoff run in VCT Pacific, the team elected to bring Reyna onto their Bind composition, winning all three times played, including twice against DRX. Paper Rex also added Reyna to their Ascent composition, only narrowly losing to DRX 14-12.
Sentinels’ superstar TenZ has been getting plenty of practice in with the prolific duelist in recent days. In the 22 matches he’s played during the new Episode Seven’s first act, he’s played Reyna in 12 of them including 10 of his last 14. He’s won 66 percent of his Reyna games, posting a very impressive 1.65 K/D while doing so.
Playing Reyna is ranked is by no means unpopular; across multiple recent acts, Reyna is one of the most popular agent selections across the entire ranked distribution. Yet she is hardly if at all picked in VCT competition. At both LOCK//IN and Masters Tokyo she was picked just twice, and aside from Paper Rex, was picked only twice across all three VCT Americas, EMEA, and Pacific seasons.
There are numerous shortcomings to Reyna’s kit at the pro level, but the biggest overall factor is that none of her abilities help her or her teammates get kills, they only help Reyna after she gets kills. Leer is the only piece of offensive ability she has, and it can be easily destroyed, and if placed behind an enemy that’s holding an up close angle, it’s rendered useless.
But Paper Rex managed to find a way to use her, especially on Bind. They used her Leer as a secondary flash after sending a Skye flash in first, and something was able to punish passive defensive setups from teams like DRX to get favorable duels. Something also excelled at using Dismiss to gather information on enemy executes or site defenses.
The Americas LCQ starts in less than two weeks on July 15. We’ll see then whether Sentinels are for real about putting TenZ on Reyna.
