Against a star-studded team, the equally dangerous BreakThru VALORANT roster beat The Nation tonight to claim the first open qualifier spot for the NA VALORANT League.
The BreakThru roster may not have the massive star power of The Nation, which features a trio of some of the biggest competitive FPS names in Jacky “Stewie2K” Yip, Matthew “Wardell” Yu, and Braxton “brax” Pierce, but they do have the distinction of the being the first team to make it out of open quals.
BreakThru features a few players who have participated in VCT over the past couple years for the likes FaZe, Luminosity and TSM Academy. The roster stars Brady “thief” Dever, Alex “aproto” Protopapas, Brock “brawk” Somerhalder, Xavier “flyuh” Carlson, and Tyler “sym” Porter.
The team didn’t lose a single series throughout the 256-team qualifier, which switched to a double-elimination format after single-elimination play reduced the number of teams from 256 to 32.
In the double-elimination portion of the bracket, the team didn’t lose a single map until facing The Nation, but looked to be in trouble after losing decisively on map one on Fracture, 13-1.
But BreakThru did not break, and it was brawk who rallied the team with two straight top-of-the-scoreboard performances with Sova on both Haven (13-9) and Ascent (13-10). BreakThru’s players can look forward at the NA VALORANT Challengers League beginning on February 1.
They are down, but not out, according to The Nation. They move down to the lower bracket, and if they don’t win their next game, they’ll be out of this qualifier completely and will need to regroup in time for the final last-chance qualifier next week.