On the first day of the 2023 VALORANT Game Changers Championship, APAC’s Team SMG broke out a surprising team composition that took the competitive scene by storm. Today, the team admitted it wasn’t even planned out in the first place.
In their second game against Evil Geniuses GC, Team SMG locked four duelists and a Cypher, much to the shock of the fans and analysts watching in the arena and at home. It was far from the meta picks people had gotten accustomed to over the course of the year, but in classic APAC fashion, the squad found comfort in the chaos.
When asked about the four-duelist composition, however, Odella “enerii” Abraham said it wasn’t a planned strategy, but actually a mistake made during agent select. The 19-year-old said the team actually thought they were running a ping check, instead of actually locking in VALORANT agents for the game. When they realized their mistake, they decided to roll with the punches and play the match through anyway.
Surprisingly enough, SMG dominated EG’s GC roster, running away with the game with a lopsided 13-3 scoreline. Enerii is usually SMG’s main duelist, but she was the only player stuck on a non-duelist agent, Cypher. It didn’t even matter by the final round, since she ended up leading the way with a server-leading 21 kills and 221 average damage per round.
In fact, when SMG were able to draft a normal meta composition, the match was a bit closer—even though they were still able to put away their comp with a 13-7 scoreline. During this match on Haven, Alexandria “Alexy” Francisco dropped 20 kills with an impressive 208 ADR, but each member racked up double-digit kills by the final round.
From the looks of it, Team SMG has quickly garnered a whole new platoon of VALORANT fans from around the world after taking down North America’s best team with a ping-check composition. They will, however, have to lock in once more when they take on the defending VCT Game Changers champs, G2 Gozen.
