Team continuity is always a wonderful thing to see in ESEA Invite. Going into their 2nd season in their young career, Black Swan is back for Season 27. They have shuffled their roster with some new faces in preparation for another go. Returning players from their Season 26 campaign are ether, jynx, and mirrorman. jynx and mirrorman will be reprising their scout and pocket roles, respectively. Meanwhile ether will switch to the demoman position, filling the vacancy left by exile, who had to step down due to real life commitments.

The offseason acquisitions of Black Swan will all be making their Invite debuts this season. These players are scout ninjax, roamer Jaaay, and medic charis. Both Jaaay and charis were teammates last season on Open team Mad Luxurious, and each have some experience at the Intermediate and playoff-Open level. In fact, Jaaay spent portions of Seasons 22 & 23 with The Baddies and Dexter's Lab, reuniting with teammates ether and jynx. Argentinian scout ninjax has very little ESEA history: only half a season of Intermediate with Champagne and Cocaine in Season 18. Understandably, he is much more active in the South American scene, and is currently part of SVIFT's ever-growing empire on SVIFT SA. It'll be intriguing to see how his ping is dealt with by his teammates and opponents. Fun trivia fact: Invite has not seen a South American player in its ranks since powah's brief appearance with Classic Mixup way back in 2014.

Team captain ether had this to say regarding the team's new players and expectations:

charis has been a good friend of all of us for a while and we also think he's a solid medic player that will improve a lot this season. Jaaay actually played for us in Season 23 and told us that he has time this season to play. He's always been a very underrated player that finally started to build a rep for himself last season and we think that he'll (also) improve a lot this season. We had actually never intended on picking another scout up; however, midas realized that he couldn't play this season and ninjax has been very impressive in scrims against us, so after a tryout we picked him up. We're hoping to do better than we did last season and get better as a team.

We also reached out to medic charis for thoughts on his Invite debut:

I am super excited for my debut Invite season, and it's super cool that I get to play it with my best pals. After scrimming together as our new roster for about a month now, I think we show high promise and I think we can make a really good dent this season in our record. I'm bad at predicting exact numbers for records and stuff, but we are all eager to try hard this season and do really well. Despite the roster changes I think we can go really far in the future if we keep at it.

Black Swan's new roster ready for Season 27 is:

• Scout: jynx
• Scout: ninjax
• Roamer: Jaaay
• Pocket: mirrorman
• Demoman: ether
• Medic: charis