Free Agent Season Pt. 1

TSM/Vision

As the new season gets closer, announcements about official teams for the Vainglory Premiere League should be released within the month of March. Some teams have made noise in the scene about where they stand heading into 2018. Obviously, not all of them have been positive. Cloud9 dropped their whole roster and will not be participating in Vainglory esports for now. On the EU side, we just received the announcement of FNATIC dropping their roster and stepping back from Vainglory. Other teams still need to make decisions about whether they will be filling a roster heading into 2018. We could also see new teams enter the scene. There have been a lot of large companies such as Forbes, VentureBeat, Red Bull, and FastCompany who have released articles about the new 5v5 game coming out of Super Evil Megacorp. The publicity is huge, but will it be enough for large organizations to enter the scene? Or will teams be able to afford a full 5–7 player roster that still makes money in the end?

There has been a lot of speculation about what will change with Vainglory this year. I really do believe that Vainglory will go through a building year in order to solidify the esports scene. We see this be reaffirmed in an interview by Forbes with the CEO of SEMC, Kristian Segerstrale.

Taken from Forbes article written by Mike Stubbs

As he says in the portion I took from the article, this will be a “transitional year”. It is starting to look like a major transitional year with another major organization backing away from Vainglory. I have faith that we will see orgs rejoining after they see what 5v5 will have to offer. As many of you may know, I love doing some speculation. I want to take a few write ups and look at where we may see players end up. I have some pretty solid assumptions, with some being a little bit of a stretch. But hey, it is all for fun!

Let’s start with TSM. They are the biggest organization still left in Vainglory(NA). It is starting to feel like they will fill a 5v5 roster. While nothing has been officially confirmed, we have been seeing content coming out of YouTubers with new players representing the TSM tag. Let me break down what has happened up to this point.

We first saw VONC, former jungler of TSM, announce he was a free agent for 2018. This was interesting considering we saw all three players of Cloud9 tweet this out not long before VONC’s announcement. I waited for the rest of TSM to say the same, but those never came. FlashX, captain of TSM, changed his Twitter bio to state that he is now a team manager for TSM’s organization. From what I have gathered through some discord conversations and tweets, it seems he is the manager for TSM’s Fortnite team and possibly Vainglory? I am still waiting for confirmation from FlashX for his official announcements. Since TSM has not decided on staying in Vainglory yet, we do not know if Flash will be back for another year as a player. What we do know is that Flash is heading out to the LA area, which we found out via Twitter.

So it seems that TSM will not continue the team house if they do stick with Vainglory in 2018. They may not have the room for the extra members or the funds to house 5–7 players. Could we see one of the legends retire from Vainglory?

Let’s change our focus over to a new team that was set to enter Vainglory8. Vision gaming was a really strong team coming through VIS challengers and other tournaments like North American Champions League. They fought through and entered the top tier of Vainglory competition. During this long offseason, the three players from Vision tweeted out that they were free agents. With the scene changing so much, this could be an attempt from the players to just feel out other offers before rejoining Vision. TSM now has a large pool of really strong players to go after to help fill a roster that consists of only BestChuckNa. If I want to build a new team, I would like to do it around BestChuck. Of course, fans across the Vainglory community were tweeting about Cloud9 and TSM joining together to form a new super team. That would cost TSM a pretty penny having that many veterans on the same team. With the recent Battle For the Rise tournament that took place to showcase teams on 5v5, we saw what looks like the new TSM roster.

As you can see the whole team is representing the TSM tag. This does not give us to much insight since other players have the TSM tag. FlashX isn’t even repping the TSM tag! Earlier in the tournament we did see Tiv0 subbing in as well for the TSM team. While I would not call this supposedly new TSM team an all-star roster, they do have the upcoming talent. I like these pick ups almost more than picking up members from Cloud9 just for the reason of TSM picking newer members to grow with. Hami and BestChuck are going to be the veterans leading the rest of the team in the VPL. While BestChuck and Hami have the experience, CozZ is going to fill VONC’s shoes just fine. Even though it is early, CozZ and Daniel (Bigpaws) have been a terrifying duo on the Rise.

So is TSM finalized? We will have to wait and see if TSM feels confident enough to run with this roster. I hope they do, because as of now, they would be my early favorites. I am still waiting for a true all-star roster to form for the new season in NA. In my next articles throughout the coming weeks, I will cover a major EU roster coming out of SK Gaming. Also, we get a first tease coming from one of the ex-Cloud9 members.

Hopefully I will get more information about where we could see arguably the best captain end up. This was my first installment of covering the chaotic free agency pool. Things are starting to heat up!

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-Endless