Last season, SVIFT NA had a successful postseason run, with the team's highlight of the entire season being their 2-0 series win over Ascent to punch their ticket to the grand finals. Unfortunately, their triumphs was briskly made sour in their grand finals series against froyotech, who ended up taking the series and first place title after two maps.
But last season is behind us now, and you want to know what's happening this season. And this next iteration of the team is starkly different from the team that competed last season. To begin, all members except for scout highfive have chosen to temporarily discontinue playing, leaving four team slots to be filled, sans slemnish. Prior to this announcement, he had already chosen to join Ascent for the upcoming season.
His previous teammates may have had their fill, but highfive isn't done competing just yet. (picture by Ness "uberchain" Delacroix and Jasmine "Jasbutts" Ho)
One of the first vacant slots that the team needed to fill was the demoman role, where the team chose to have former woodpig quantum scout yight temporarily put away the scattergun and pistol that he has been known to sport for many seasons and will fill in the spot previously occupied by delpo. Joining yight from woodpig quantum will be laz and aim, who will be filling the roaming soldier and pocket soldier spots that garbuglio and marmadukeGRYLLS held in the season prior.
Closing out the roster will be zilly and botmode, who both are not strangers by any means to the tough challenges that come with competing against North America's best. With both of them having made appearances on distinguished teams such as the Season 22 and (temporarily) Season 23 iterations of EVL Gaming for zilly and the Season 25 iteration of froyotech for botmode before choosing to step away from TF2 to compete in Quake Champions. Both of them will be filling in spots left by phorofor and the aforementioned slemnish.
To close out, highfive gave his thoughts on the new roster, saying:
botmode's quake venture didn't really work out but I'm glad he's back. I've been friends with him since our open days and I'm excited to play with him again. yight's got some stuff to work on for demo but he's eager to learn and I think he'll fit in the role just fine after a few weeks.
With their sights set on reaching peaks similar to the previous season, SVIFT NA is:
- Scout: highfive
- Scout: botmode
- Roamer: laz
- Pocket: aim
- Demoman: yight
- Medic: zilly