The post-Atlanta shuffle continues to unfold with the news that ANOX have decided to replace two of their most well known players, Alexei "Cypher" Yanushevsky and Anton "Cooller" Singov. The Quake legends remain with the team as reserves, but make way for new recruits Nesh and Arty as announced today on the teams VK page.
ANOX finished joint 16th-13th at the Overwatch Open main event in Atlanta, coming dead last in Europe’s Group B without winning a single map against Misfits, Rogue or Luminosity Gaming. Although most people would not have expect them to make it out of the group, they clearly felt it was time for a change.
Team captain, Anak, and Google were kind enough to aid in the translation of their announcement which reads something like this:
"The last two months were not successful enough for our team. The team was lacking synergy and we never managed to reach our full potential. So together we came to the decision to change the line up. Cypher and Cooller have transferred to the reserve, and in their place come two talented and ambitious players: German 'Nesh' Kobrin and Arthur 'Arty' Tishchenko."
The new roster competed together last night in the DreamHack Winter qualifiers where they beat Faceless Esports 2-0 and Redskin 2-1 before being knocked to the lower bracket by Luminosity 0-2. They would go on to knock melty out of the tournament 2-0 before being knocked out themselves 2-3 by Europe’s new darlings, Ninjas with Attitude.
The roster shakeup means Anak switch from his traditional flex role to fill Cooller’s position on Lucio and maincall for the team. Arty steps in as flex and Nesh replaces Cypher in the sword swinging DPS slot.
In the period after launch Nesh and Arty both played for Ukrainian outfit Kabina ot Kamaza - a team made mostly of TF2 players - so there is definitely a little history there. I caught up with Nesh, curious as to what exactly he had been doing since I last saw him play with Evoks back in July and how he had gotten the chance to play with ANOX. Here’s what he had to say:
"After Evoks I was a free agent pretty much and used the time to look for offers.
Well, since I used to play with half of the ANOX team in TF2, I was already an option for them since I put a lot of time into Overwatch and play ranked with them a lot. So about 1-2 weeks before ELEAGUE started they wanted to trial me, which happened yesterday where we played for the first time together in the dreamhack qualifiers.
So this offer was the one I prefered over anything else, since I played with them before and I still enjoy playing the game with them.
I play a lot of heroes - mainly Genji, Reaper, Mei , Widowmaker , McCree and Tracer. I’m very flexible, could play Ana for example as well, but that is not needed for now."
The team wants to compete at DreamHack Winter’s $50,000 Overwatch Championship but have missed out on the EU online qualification spots and will have travel to Sweden if they want to win a spot in the main event.
The ANOX roster is now:
- Normunds "sharyk" Faterins (Tank)
- Ruben "Rubikon" Zurabyan (Support)
- Kiryl "Anak" Nikalayenka (Support)
- Artem "kensi" Budiak (DPS)
- German "Nesh" Kobrin (DPS)
- Arthur "Arty" Tishchenko (Flex)
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