Ahead of the North American VALORANT Champions Tour Challengers Two open qualifiers, NRG Esports has signed Ethan Arnold to their roster, marking his return to the organization after two and a half years.
Ethan, who hit the NA VALORANT transfer market after the most recent 100 Thieves rebuild, joins the roster of Daniel “eeiu” Vucenovic, Sam “s0m” Oh, Ian “tex” Botsch, and James “hazed” Cobb ahead of the second stage. With the signing, Bradley “ANDROID” Fodor has been moved to the bench.
Both Ethan and NRG reached the main event of NA Challengers Stage One while Ethan was competing with 100T, but both teams fell far short of reaching playoffs with 1–4 records each. Afterwards, 100T hit the reset button, rebuilding their roster around duelist (now flex) Peter “Asuna” Mazuryk.
Prior to switching to VALORANT, Ethan had a lengthy career in CS:GO and played for NRG from the beginning of 2018 until the end of 2019 when the roster was acquired by Evil Geniuses. With NRG, Ethan hoisted a handful of trophies and reached the semifinals of the StarLadder Berlin Major in the team’s last event.
ANDROID said on Twitter he was “pretty devastated” about being benched, but will be using the time to reset his mental and return to the scene soon.
Due to their 1–4 record in Stage One, NRG will have to play through open qualifiers to reach Stage Two. The first qualifier is set to begin April 28, and will decide the first four teams to join OpTic, The Guard, Cloud9, and XSET in the Stage Two main event.
