Who is Sentinels' new IGL?
Let me walk you through how I found out. To start off, I laid out a few assumptions to single out potential suspects.
Obviously, now that they have an entire off-season to rebuild, Sentinels is going to stop with the role swaps; therefore, we can assume 3 criteria for the potential suspects:
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Since Marved hasn't been scrimming with them, then that means pANcada is now back on controller. This means that the new IGL must be someone comfortable with playing the Sentinel role/Viper.
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Since the person scrimming with them is on an alt to hide their identity, they can't be some rando from Tier 2 like Runi, they're someone with a high profile.
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They must be capable of IGLing, since nobody else on Sentinels, besides the guy who they're not scrimming with, wanted to do that.
Here is the initial list I came up with of players who fit these criteria:
-FNS
-Johnqt
-Flyuh
-Valyn
-Runi
-nitr0
-neT
I've been following james_ff's attempts to track down the 5th player, so by using the information he's collected (which you can look for yourself in his own threads), I could already cross off a few of these names without having to do much work.
So the list became:
-Flyuh
-nitr0
-neT
The first place I went to was all of the Sentinels' players trackers, hoping I could find some clue as to who they all are duoing with in ranked; I was hoping to find a common player that they all happen to duo with as of 2 weeks ago. Sadly, this was unsuccessful. I guess the guy really only does play with them on his alt.
So the next place I went to were the trackers of the players on the trimmed list above.
At first, I had my eyes set on neT; while not officially an IGL, I know he has experience doing so and even IGL'd for the Guard on certain maps way back when Breeze was still in the map pool, and, of course, he plays almost exclusively the Sentinel role. What ticked me off, however, was the fact that he and Zekken were on the same premiere team. I believe this to be a red herring, however, as for one I don't believe The Guard players are planning on splitting up after everything they've gone through together and after they resisted attempts to be poached individually last year. Secondly, Zekken is a little gremlin that does whatever he wants without rhyme or reason (and bless him for that) so I don't think there's any meaning to the people he chooses to play premiere with, especially when I looked at the trackers of the other Sentinels players and found nothing in terms of neT
Flyuh was tempting, but he doesn't necessarily main the Sentinel role; he flexes onto viper a lot but while I've found that he fills killjoy once in a while in ranked, he doesn't really match the roles that Sentinels are looking for.
So at last I ended up on nitr0. I was sketchy at first, but as I scrolled through his tracker, it all came to me when I saw one little thing: Yay.
What does Yay have to do with Sentinels' roster changes you ask? Everything, surprisingly enough.
Many of you may remember from james_ff's scrimbux posts that Yay and nitr0 were previously on a PUG team around 3 weeks ago, and they were scrimming VCT teams, and at times beating them (such as a notable scrim victory over LOUD)
If I look through nitr0's tracker, nitr0 has duoed with a lot of older CS players, like Stewie2k and Brax, but for some reason the person he has the most amount of games duoing with was Yay. If I look through his games from ~2+ weeks ago, he used to duo with Yay a lot. But then, all of a sudden, <2 weeks ago he stops duoing with Yay entirely. What's more, Yay's PUG team stopped surfacing in scrimbux. Why is that?
The answer is easy, the PUG team accomplished its namesake, one or multiple of its members, or at the very least the core that kept it together got picked up or started trialing over the course of multiple scrims with someone else, and not just in a one-off scrim either.
If it's nitr0, it would entirely make sense why he'd be scrimming on an alt, he's a well-known name both in Valorant and CS:GO, and he flexes between cypher, killjoy, and sova.
It would also explain why Yay's team disappeared so quickly. After nitr0 left their pug team then there was nobody left to IGL them and they just split up. usually pug teams dont just disintegrate when only one player leaves, but if it's the IGL then it makes sense.
So there's your answer. nitr0 is Sentinels' new IGL
EDIT: After teaming up with james_ff, he's discovered that nitr0 usually starts his first ranked game of the day right after SEN's scrims usually end. I would not have caught that if he didn't know SEN's scrim schedule for his scrimbux lol
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