eMIL, former flex player for Red Reserve, was removed from the team earlier this week and is now a free agent. eMIL was removed from the roster after a fourth place finish in the ESL Go4Overwatch Weekly #44, which saw Red Reserve lose to Vivi’s Adventure in the semifinals. The team stated that this was due to a lack of ability to flex their team into a range of currently powerful compositions.

eMIL is now a free agent, available for European or North American teams. Red Reserve have been playing recently with Mendokusaii, brother of Red Reserve support player Luddee, since Mendo is currently in Sweden rather than in the US with Cloud9. Mendokusaii will play with Red Reserve for their upcoming LAN at the Copenhagen Games.

Mendokusaii will reportedly not be playing with the team as a permanent replacement though, despite rumours of Cloud9 roster shuffles. “He's helping the team out while he have the time and his hero pool matches what we need right now short-term,” klanton of Red Reserve said, adding: “We're still looking for potential tryouts and we're limited to Swedish players only.”

Swedish team b0nkers took in klanton, formerly of LDLC, and took on the name of Red Reserve in early March; the move into a new organisation quickly followed their second place finish in the StriveWire Monthly Brawl, but Red Reserve found their next competitive tournament runs stopped by Vivi’s Adventure, Laser Kittenz, and x6tence prematurely.

According to klanton, the team has been performing well in scrims but has failed to transfer that into matches. “Once we go into officials we are struggling by doing things we haven’t practiced,” he said, saying they were “trying new things or just not playing like we do in scrims”. While Red Reserve continue to play in small, regular tournaments before their appearance at Copenhagen Games, their main focus is on being able to replicate their scrim performance in matches.

klanton spoke more on the reasons for the recent roster change:

We had issues playing certain comps that would fit us and the meta. We felt that we weren't able to flex as much as we'd like to. So by doing this change we can move Casper to a flex role, who's able to flex to almost any hero that we need. We need to expand our hero pool. This is important for us since we have a LAN coming up.

Since Casper can play all tanks and almost all DPS heroes we are able to play tank setups but also able to play triple DPS setups on a solid level. There has never been an overlap but this makes us more flexible and we're able to change heroes mid-game easier.

Speaking to eMIL, he said:

We were doing really good in scrims at the time, we were also very good friends as well. I loved every single one of the guys in the team, as a friend and as a player. We had some problems during tournaments. I think the problem was a team problem, not so much single individuals. So it wasn't expected for me at least.

Personally I don’t think I was underperforming, but that is subjective and that is my opinion. But I do know that our newest edition klanton and me had problems synergising ingame.

They released me right away and I'm currently looking for a new team both in NA and EU. I'm still going to be a fulltime Overwatch player.

I also want to mention that Red Reserve has been nothing but helpful in this situation aswell, making this as smooth as possible.

The current temporary roster for Red Reserve is:

  • Lucas "Mendokusaii" Håkansson (DPS stand-in)
  • Rikard "klanton" Lundberg (DPS)
  • Casper "Caspere" Elvelid (Flex)
  • Oliwer "lateks" Fahlander (Tank)
  • Ludvig "Luddee" Håkansson (Support)
  • Andreas "Epzz" Wallvingskog (Support)