Shroud Comes Out Of Retirement for Sentinels’ NA LCQ Run

Time Stamp: July 9, 2022 6:08 AM
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In a move that no one expected, Sentinel’s announced the addition of Shroud to their NA LCQ roster.

After Hunter ‘SicK’ Mims revealed that he would be taking a break and not finish the season due to some personal issues, it was apparent that Sentinels would need a replacement for the North American Last Chance Qualifiers. But no one thought this replacement would involve Michael ‘shroud’ Grzesiek.

Shroud was a professional player in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, especially known for his time at Cloud9. The dubbed ‘King of Reddit’ was considered one of the better mechanical players hailing from NA, but despite some successful runs he never showed the peak performance most fans expected out of him.

After his retirement from C9 and CS:GO, shroud committed to streaming full time and became one of the top streamers on Twitch, and a brief but lucrative time on Mixer. Even though he was starting to stream more variety lately, he tends to play shooters to an average audience of 20k.

While there are many upsides to bringing on shroud like the publicity and eyes around the team and the content opportunities for a team like Sentinels, there are also some things fans need to be aware of. The first one is that Sentinels is really in need of a win, and shroud may not be the missing piece for it.

The Valorant circuit is a long gauntlet with teams scrimming and practicing for months now and it has been a while since shroud was part of any competitive environment. Of course, there is no denying his talent, but it will be hard to adjust back to pro play, especially in such a short time window.

Still, if there is one team in the scene that would take a risk like this, it had to be Sentinels. The American organization has always been bold when it came to roster moves, e.g. the seven-figure signing of Tyson ‘TenZ’ Ngo, and they’ve always been good about the content around the team, which shroud is guaranteed to provide. Plus, it looks like shroud is taking this opportunity more seriously than some might think, as the Valorant reporter George Geddes tweeted this roster move might become permanent if Sentinels wins the LCQ.

But a win might be hard. Despite Sentinel’s success in 2020 and 2021, they won the first NA Challengers and the first Masters in Reykjavik, they have been struggling for most of 2022. They barely scraped by the door of the LCQ in the tenth place just above Ghost Gaming, and they are far from being the favorites to win it all. 

Ever since the announcement, Valorant Twitter has been going crazy. Currently, the announcement video has over 5M views with both shroud and Sentinels spending some time on the trending list. So it is obvious which way this signing goes, this upcoming NA LCQ is about to rival the ongoing Masters in Copenhagen. The NA Last Chance Qualifiers will be held in August.

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