Dear fans of Acend Valorant,
Time moves quickly these days doesn’t it? It can be hard to remember the days of LANs with no crowds. Players isolated in small dark rooms. This is where the Valorant world was when we (formerly Raise Your Edge Gaming) qualified for Masters 1 in the newly formed VCT circuit by beating OG 2-0. Like many successful esports organizations in other games OG were taking their fame in Dota 2 and trying to expand it into the newly released Valorant. For Raise Your Edge, an organization sponsored and operated by a single professional poker player, this was a huge win for us.
Shortly after qualifying, Riot notified Raise Your Edge that any affiliation with any form of gambling was off limits and we would have to rebrand or lose our spot at the first Masters tournament ever. Five days later we lost our first ever best of three as Acend Esports Club to Ninjas in Pyjamas, an org with one of the most storied histories in tac-FPS games globally.
We got our revenge a week later, eliminating NiP from Group A and booking a matchup with FunPlusPhoenix and their deadly core of Ange1, Zyppan and Shao. cNed went +19 and we took the series 2-1. In the Grand Finals we faced Team Heretics and their high powered roster. In a back and forth best of five series cNed dropped a record 111 kills and we edged out Heretics 3-2 for the first ever European Masters trophy.
After that many of you know the rest of the story. We failed to make Masters Reykjavik and then fell prey to the “run away from cNed” strategy at Masters Berlin. We then capped the year off by overcoming coding bugs and some of the biggest names in esports by beating Envy, Team Secret, Team Liquid and Gambit to become the first ever World Champion of Valorant esports. It was an insane nine months.
After a tough run in 2022 where we missed all three international events Riot moved to the VCT Partnership model. Although we made it deep into the application process we were denied a spot in the VCT despite our status as one of only two owners of the Champions Trophy. This was obviously a huge blow since our players were highly coveted as former champions and we would have to rebuild from scratch. We had been knocked down before though so we got back to work and built one of the best teams in Europe’s Challengers League ecosystem.
Coming up just short of Ascending to the VCT in 2023 was another massive blow as this meant missing out on the first year of VCT Team Bundles and another year of having to compete with VCT teams to sign the best players. 2024 was another tumultuous year for our Valorant team and midway through the year Riot announced that starting in 2025 Ascended teams would have to earn their spot in the league every year.
Though we failed to reach the Ascension tournament this season we have continued on business as usual, scouting for 2025 and planning to keep on grinding. However, the tier-2 ecosystem has been showing alarming signs of decay this year with tournament organizers going out of business, not paying out prize money and canceling tournaments. It has been increasingly difficult to justify fielding a team with an extended offseason, tiny prize pools and the pressure of VCT level salary expectations.
With truly heavy hearts we must announce today that Acend Club will not be participating in Valorant esports in 2025. The increasingly hostile ecosystem has simply made it untenable to responsibly run a team.
We are proud to have been Champions and to have fostered some of Europe’s best talent. We want to thank all of the fans of Acend Valorant past and present for your support. We hope to see you all on stage again some day. #RiseUp
