David “ DXN ” Nguyen and Danny “ cutefatboy ” Nguyen could not have had more different mindsets when they began playing Valorant.
DXN had been around the top 10 of Riot's strategy autochess game, Teamfight Tactics and before that played Counter-Strike at the ESEA MDL level.
“I approach every game trying to be the best,” he said. “And the game to me felt really easy to play at first.”
His success in Valorant, therefore, came as no surprise to him. He said the first step in becoming the best is to first envision it. DXN had pro aspirations from the start and has since been working to make those aspirations reality.
His teammate's path to pro, on the other hand, wasn't so clear cut.
“I didn't really play any games at a high level before Valorant came out,” cutefatboy said. “Valorant's kind of the first game I took really seriously.”
cutefatboy said he had played other esports games such as League of Legends, CS:GO, and Starcraft casually. He realized soon after beginning to play Valorant that he was good in matchmaking. So he decided to join a team with his friend, DXN.
“I thought it was gonna be really, really easy until I joined a team with DXN and I had a lot to learn,” cutefatboy said. “[There are] things you can't really learn in, like, just casual play and matchmaking. There's a lot of communication, a lot of prep work that goes into the game. And even the way you aim is completely different, you don't actually move your crosshair that much against really, really good players because you kind of have to predict where they're going to go beforehand. You can't just randomly react and stuff like that.”
“So yeah, there's definitely a lot of challenges and I would say I struggled a lot initially.”
The two banded together early in the game's timeline and entered tournaments with a team of friends. “The first tournaments that I started doing, we actually got manhandled,” cutefatboy said. But the team was committed to seriously competing and began taking a lot of time to practice. “And I was like, ‘Hey, this is kind of way more fun than just like, being a solo-queue god or whatever,'” cutefatboy continued. The team had gone from a collection of matchmaking titans to actual tournament title contenders. They even beat TSM in one tournament. Things were looking promising.
But then that team came apart. Players began to go their separate ways. And it looked like DXN and cutefatboy, too, would drift apart.
“Originally, it wasn't actually planned for the team to be kept alive, actually,” cutefatboy said. “After the team dissolved, we kind of just went our own ways for a few weeks.”
“I played with other teams and I found some good players, but not all of them were who I wanted to play with,” DXN said. “I wanted to play with cutefatboy because, to me, I think he's a sick Cypher. And we just went from there.”
They ended up building an entirely new roster around each other. Two of the players to join this new five were Jake “ Paincakes ” Hass and Carlos “ Dcop ” Delsos, who are still members of the team today.
The team didn't scrim much at first, but then they won the first tournament they entered — a small weekly tournament in mid-July. Two days later they won another. Less than a week later they won again. They had won the first three tournaments they entered as a new team.
Got MVP and earned a free hyperx cloud headset too hehe GGS all teams :) <3
#ChinaNguyenONTOP
“We were like, ‘Wow, we actually have potential' and that's where we started scrimming a lot afterwards,” DXN said.
The new roster got their first taste of Tier 1 competition a couple of weeks later at the FaZe Clan Invitational. They quickly proved their early success weren't flukes. Their team, then China Nguyen, beat FaZe Clan themselves in the tournament's opening round. They later lost to them and were eliminated in the decider match, but not before China Nguyen took another map off of them.
The squad felt hyped by their performance in the tournament. Even though they lost to FaZe Clan later, they felt they further proved their potential as a team. While they had won tournaments before, cutefatboy said they felt it was the first team they had really played against they thought was good. And they beat them.
Around that time, several teams around their level were signed to organizations. Sure, the team hadn't been around for long at that point, but they had proven their ability quickly. They won the first several tournaments they entered in and even beat a Tier 1 organization in their own tournament. They were good.
“I know me and cutefatboy didn't think we deserve to be signed yet, but the other three thought we should,” DXN said. “But I thought we had to prove ourselves — like actually win maybe a top of B-tier tournament or like, actually win some good amount of money together, which didn't happen yet. So that's why I thought we didn't deserve it yet.”
“I don't think you should always judge how your team is — like judge how you get signed by other teams getting signed because we don't know their contract, either. They could just be signed to a big name and not get paid much, you never know,” cutefatboy added. “So yeah, me and David decided, ‘Hey, you know, let's not focus on getting signed, let's actually focus on winning,'” at this point, DXN cut in to say “focus on winning” at the same time as cutefatboy. “And then we'll get signed. You know, we have to actually win something notable and consistently. We can't just be like one-hit wonders,” cutefatboy finished.
And sure enough, that's what the team did. They participated in a number of Tier 2 tournaments, many of which had other big names or played for organizations, and began to win tournament after tournament. The pair felt like this mentality helped their performance. They were still playing like they had something to prove. There was still a hunger to win. They weren't complacent and didn't feel like they deserved anything. And so they kept proving their ability.
China Nguyen went 25-4 in VLR.gg-covered matches from late August to early October, winning three of the four tracked tournaments they entered and winning 14-straight matches at one point.
But, despite the success, it wasn't smooth sailing the whole way through. Even after winning their first tournament, the team sensed trouble with their roster and made a change. They trialed several players and ultimately settled on Kevin “ mina ” Nguyen, a friend of theirs who actually had been asking to join the team for a while, after they thought he fit like a glove with the rest of the team.
“We actually knew him before we knew any of our current teammates,” cutefatboy said. The three had played ranked together quite a bit before he joined the team. DXN added, “we knew him since the early beta because he was like one of the Valorant grinders (he clarified Radiant, the game's top rank, was called Valorant early on), so we knew him a long time ago.”
The team's success quickly began garnering the attention of organizations and before long, they were getting offers. But first, they were getting offers as individual players rather than as a team.
“The risk versus reward wasn't there for any of us to actually join a different team,” cutefatboy said. “Because we felt that as five we were actually better than most of the teams we were getting poached by anyways.”
Regardless, the players on the team were still open to the possibility of taking offers to go elsewhere. But then China Nguyen began to dominate the Tier 2 scene. The pair described the offers coming in for the team as first trickling, then flooding.
China Nguyen had a number of offers they were looking over and choosing between, but the one from
Equinox Esports
Equinox Esports
Inactive
stood out to them. The CEO of the new organization got to know all of the players individually before they signed, they felt that they would have as much of an opportunity to build the team's brand as the team had to build the players' brands, and they felt it was obvious the organization was solely focused on them, the Valorant team.
They were sold. China Nguyen signed with Equinox Esports, a brand new organization who had never fielded an esports team before. There was no legacy they would have to fight to escape the shadow of, no pressure to live up to the dreams of a rabid fanbase. They felt there were no expectations, they could only go up from here.
And now they finally had the opportunity to focus all of their energy on going up. Signing with an organization gave them the financial security necessary to practice and compete as a full-time job, of course, but it also gave them another sense of security: stability. They were signed together. They can stay as five. They don't have to worry about one player being poached from the rest to compete for another team in another organization.
This boost in security is necessary for the team to achieve their dreams. They have aspirations of becoming one of the best teams in North America, if not the world. They would like to join a Valorant franchised league as a team if Riot decides to replicate the model they've built in League of Legends' esport scene. Doing all of this is a monumental task that will take a fair bit of time and focus.
DXN already has a few different things he thinks he and the rest of the team need to work on to improve. They need to become more methodical and approach the maps with greater depth. They have to make sure everyone is on the same page always. “I think when everyone's on the same page, the game becomes very easy,” he said.
For now, however, all of their focus is on First Strike, the first Valorant tournament Riot has hosted themselves. While their short stay in the recent tournament hosted by Renegades' didn't last too long, they're still coming off a heap of success. They won three of their last four tournaments before that and had won 14-straight matches. Such glory would be a boost to any team's confidence.
Except, for Equinox Esports, it's not the biggest contributing factor to their confidence. “I think the thing that has been boosting our confidence the most is actually our scrims against Tier 1 teams,” DXN said before contemplating their worth. “We've been doing pretty well in them, but maybe they're not really trying their best in the scrims. So it's still an unknown factor to me: like how we're actually going to do against a Tier 1 team in a tournament.”
That response came before the team played in the Renegades' tournament, where they had a taste of official matchups with Tier 1 teams.
Now they have a better barometer for where they stand compared to those teams, even with few reps. They remain hungry as ever — cutefatboy noted that they didn't fall into complacency even with all of their success because they noticed Tier 2 teams are good enough to upset Tier 1 teams from time to time — and still have something to prove. They've had the opportunity to focus their practices even more than before now that they have the stability to dedicate their time to zeroing in on improving their flaws and exploiting potential weakness in their opponents.
So their goals of becoming one of the world's top Valorant teams is closer in reach than ever. And despite coming from so many different backgrounds — TFT, CSGO, Overwatch, even a background of just casual gaming — everyone on the team can strive to achieve that dream.
And while some members of the team, including DXN, had the imagination to believe they could come so close to those goals because of the work they put in and the mindset they developed to get there, at least one player on the team still can't believe how far he has come.
“I definitely didn't expect this. I was just kind of like messing around at first, and just kind of like having fun,” cutefatboy said. That was when he described getting manhandled in tournaments and his realization that playing tournaments were far more fun than being a “solo-queue god.”
“And yeah, I was pretty surprised whenever I personally started winning with the team and stuff, so it was a huge shock. Especially [since] this is my first real competitive game that I took seriously.”
Regardless if it was expected or shocking, they made it this far. The final few hurdles to becoming the best Valorant players in the world are now much closer than they were half a year ago.
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