The rate at which big eSports organisations are flocking to Overwatch is showing no signs of abating. Enter Misfits, a relatively young European outfit currently riding high in League of Legends and now making big moves into competitive Overwatch with their recently announced acquisition of Graviton Surge.
Graviton Surge was a team born out of Kryw's desire to flex his diverse hero repertoire. He broke free of the shackles of playing dedicated Lucio for #FlatEarth with plans to establish another all French roster. Those plans did not come to fruition when Rogue lured half of his roster away and he instead decided to rebuild with three time Shootmania world champion, SoOn - another player whose savage DPS talents were seemingly being wasted on a support role at the time.
The team was to solidify just in time to take a 3rd place finish over Kryw's former teammates Melty at the TaKeOver offline event. Whilst these early results were encouraging, the team struggled to find consistency against the European elite. Until fairly recently they actually only had five players on their official roster with Tarek "kr4tosdigga" Ekmekci constantly in a state of limbo as their stand-in support, but recent events have rendered him surplus to requirements.
Something had been missing in the team chemistry and in the last few weeks their Swedish DPS supremo Zebbosai, decided to move to main Lucio and call the shots for Graviton Surge. This was to tee up them up for a fifteen match win streak which included their first big tournament win over top tier opponents – taking out SG-1 and Creation Esports on the way to issuing a Grand Finals beatdown to REUNITED in the of GosuGamers Overwatch Weekly EU #13 last weekend. The successful support switch up left some big DPS boots to fill and it was a 17 year old Danish rookie by the name of Zaprey who would finally slip in to them.
I talked with Zebbosai at length to understand the backstory behind these recent roster adjustments. Here are a few nuggets:
"In tournaments and such we usually got top4 etc. but we could never beat the top3 teams so after one tournament I suggested I go Lucio so that I could call more, because everyone agreed that was the biggest issue we lacked like someone calling the shots.
So we kinda removed kr4tos from the line-up then and put Nevix on mercy that's what he used to play for this team when we had Vonethil it's just that when Vone left we swapped Nevix to Lucio because we thought he could take over the calling part, but didn't work out so now he is back to Mercy."
Did they ever consider picking up kr4tosdigga full time?
"Yeah for sure like we played on and off with him for quite some time and he was good for us, but it wouldn't have worked out since we needed someone that could really call and yeah he can't really play DPS so when I went support we had no other choice then to remove him."
Where the hell did this Zaprey kid come from?!
"Nevix had played on a pub with him and thought he aimed pretty good. So after we swapped me to support we needed a DPS and there wasn't really a lot of people available so we gave Zaprey a chance and he has been good for us."
Whilst I had him there I couldn't resist asking if hated his life now as a Lucio main:
"Nah like playing Lucio is a lot of fun especially when you call at the same time because you can impact the game in a lot of ways. As long as I'm not playing Mercy or Reinhardt I'm fine :D "
The players themselves clearly have a plan in motion to compete with the world's best teams, but I was curious as to what exactly the Misfits organisation are planning for Overwatch. We reached out to Ali "Alicus" Saba, Misfits General Manager:
"Our plans are to dominate the competitive scene in Overwatch, and stay at the top. We will do everything we can to support these players. What we bring to the scene is a professional organization with high profile investors and experienced esports staff at the helm. That will be a contributing factor in setting up & maintaining a stable competitive platform for Overwatch teams."
Since I spoke with Zebbosai and Alicus this afternoon the fairy-tale run has continued! The newly monikered Misfits winning streak has been extended to 17 straight victories. Earlier in the week they had beat out OWKings to qualify for the €10,000 Amazon Gaming Series Playoffs. Today they dominated the competition demolishing REUNITED and then Creation Esports without losing a single map to claim 1st place and €5,000. These two results have catapulted Misfits up the GosuGamers rankings to be the #1 team in Europe (and #3 in the world) as of right now – a truly meteoric rise!
The Misfits roster is:
- Jonathan "Kryw" Nobre (Flex)
- Sebastian "Zebbosai" Olsson (Support)
- Nicholas "skipjack" Rosada (Tank)
- Terence "SoOn" Tarlier (DPS)
- Andreas "Nevix" Karlsson (Support)
- Nikolaj "Zaprey" Ian Moyes (DPS)
- Cyril "WindZ" Michel (Manager)
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