Most fans expected a quiet start to this month’s VALORANT Champions Tour Game Changers event, the female counterpart to the VCT. Despite Cloud9 White being the dominant team in Game Changers up to this point, several strong teams were expected to breeze through qualifying rounds this week, including Shopify Rebellion, Dignitas, and CLG Red.
After being knocked to the lower bracket, CLG Red has fallen short and will not be moving on to the Game Changers main event. They lost 2-0 in an elimination match to Team Opulence Black, a relatively new team in the female scene that just started competing under the organization in April of this year. This is their first Game Changers event.
Many of the female teams in the VALORANT scene have been making roster changes leading up to this month’s edition of Game Changers, and CLG Red was one of the teams with the most drastically different structures. CLG’s roster coming into this week consisted of rise, itnothan, kellysama, and two new additions: amnesia and ciao. The team has parted ways with players bENITA, bungee, and clawdia so far in 2022, and these transitions have meant that other players have shifted on to new roles. Most notably, rise has stepped up to become the squad’s new in-game-leader.
CLG and Opulence both came out of the Swiss Open Qualifier with a 3-2 record, barely sneaking into the Closed Qualifier. In the first round of the Closed Qualifier, CLG Red had a close game against Solaire that went into overtime, but ended with CLG Red taking the victory 14-12. Opulence had a rough first match, going down 13-3 to Complexity GX3 and moving to the lower bracket. CLG went on to face Dignitas, and were also knocked down to the lower bracket.
The best-of-three elimination match between CLG and Opulence started on Bind, where CLG handily took the first pistol round and snowballed into the round after. CLG wasn’t able to convert their bonus round, and Opulence came back to take four rounds in a row. Things continued to go back and forth, and the half ended with Opulence up 7-5.
The second half of Bind was a disaster for CLG. They weren’t able to take a single round, and so the first map went the way of Opulence with a final score of 13-5. Rise was notably absent from the scoreboard in this first map, with the most first deaths out of all the players in the lobby.
Facing elimination, this time CLG converted their bonus round on the next map, Ascent, and started the map up 3-0. Despite this, Opulence was still came back to take a 7-5 lead at the half, and CLG was again not able to capitalize on many opportunities in the second half. With a score of 13-7 on Ascent, CLG Red were officially knocked out of Game Changers.
All of the current players on CLG have proven their expertise in competitive VALORANT and are undoubtedly very skilled players, which leaves fans wondering if the new roster just didn’t have time to click. Amnesia and ciao only officially joined the team on June 28, two days before the start of Game Changers.
Opulence’s star player is undoubtedly Lex, who had a +8 and +17 rating on Bind and Ascent respectively in today’s match against CLG, and had average combat score across both maps over 300. Team Opulence Black exit the match keeping their hopes of going to the main event alive, and play Team Mystic Venus tomorrow, July 3 at 3pm CDT.
