Choosing the Player of the Month was as difficult as it has ever been. The entire VCT Challengers – Season was full of incredible players. However, there is one young man who stole our hearts, and he will clearly be an exception in the future of competitive Valorant.

FunPlus Phoenix has always been a pretty unique (and underrated) EMEA team. While it seems to be a team made up of veterans of the Esports scene, such as ANGE1, it’s also full of young players who are just starting their adventure in Esports. And as luck would have it, one of them is our current Player of the Month!

Here is our latest Player of the Month: Valorant Player of the Month, February 2022: penny

Zyppan in Valorant

Pontus “Zyppan” Eek is a 19-year-old Swedish player who has already had a professional career in Fortnite. He was playing for Epsilon eSports at the time, an organization that has almost legendary status (big names like Adil “ScreaM” Benrlitom also played there at some point). However, when Valorant came out, he immediately fell in love with the game. Just like Aleksander “zeek” Zygmunt, Zyppan started playing in tournaments almost immediately and decided to give up his successful Fortnite career to give Valorant a chance.

He started his Valorant career as a player in Ninjas in Pyjamas (that’s a good start), but then played for some time in a small Swedish mix, with little success. Still, anyone who followed his games back then knew it would only be a matter of time before he took off in VCT tournaments. And so it happened! Today, he plays for FunPlus Phoenix, one of the three EMEA teams to earn a spot in the upcoming VCT Masters tournament, one of the three most important Valorant Esports events of the year.

Why is Zyppan our Player of the Month?

It was obvious that our Player of the Month would be the person we personally consider the MVP of the VCT Challengers tournament. And honestly, upon closer inspection, there is no better choice than Zyppan. Not only was he instrumental in helping his team win the entire tournament, but there is another factor that we appreciate. Due to the current situation in Ukraine, he had to play with substitutes, which can be quite a challenge, and yet he was able to adapt his style of play perfectly.

His total KDA during the tournament was 1.6 and he played three different agents – that’s insane. And in the Grand Final against G2 Esports, he was the player with the best performance in the entire match with 79 frags. We recommend watching his matches on Icebox and Breeze, where he presented a perfect KAY/O gameplay.

Unfortunately, we won’t be able to see him in Reykjavik because the rest of his team can’t travel to the venue. That’s another reason why we’ve chosen him as our player of the month – to honor what he’s done and how much joy he’s brought us in recent weeks, even if he can’t fully benefit from it himself.

Valorant: How to put together the optimal team

Which roles do you need to fill? How do you divide up the positions? And who is the in-game leader? We have the answers!

Many roles for five positions in the team

You can roughly divide the roles and responsibilities in a team. There is the solo defender, who can hold a point alone. The Support, who makes room with skills that need to be respected. The In-Game Lead makes the calls and works with the information of his teammates. The Entry Fragger and the Secondary are the players who go together on a point and are not afraid of enemy contact. The Sniper, who preferably holds certain angles with an Operator and can get a big advantage for the round with a First Blood, can also be beneficial to the team. Last but not least, there is the Lurker, who preferably keeps opponents busy at the other end of the map and comes from an unexpected side after enemy rotations.

The individual roles can also partially overlap or can be left out entirely or can change from round to round. An in-game leader can also be a solo defender and can also focus on minimap and communication due to defensive play. A balanced team with the assignment of such roles has the advantage that the team members know what their tasks are in the current round and can thus also build on the strengths of their agents.

The Spearhead: Entry Fragger & Secondary

The Entry Fragger is optimally the first player to make contact with the opponents around the Objective being targeted by the team. This can also be an important place on a map as a defender, e.g. to gain some control over the center in Ascent. By his push he makes room for the other mates, passes on the positions of the opponents and has the chance to get the point alone by nimble kills. The best agents for this role are Phoenix and Reyna.

As a secondary, you try to build on the moves, information and kills from the entry fragger. At a certain point, it pays to take a different position, hold different angles, or get behind enemy lines very quickly to take opponents who are rotating out of the action. Jett, Raze, Omen and Breach are particularly suitable for this role.

The Solo Defender

Since most maps have 3 main lanes, only two of them can be defended with a duo, the third “lane” then belongs to the solo defender. On Attack the role is obsolete, but an agent made for this role can here protect the team from flanks or focus on making sure the spike is well placed and defend them additionally with appropriate skills. Those who like this style of play might be satisfied with Cypher, Sage and Sova.

The Support

The main task of the support player is the optimal use of his abilities to make it easier for his own team to attack a point. This includes for example optimal placement of Smokes and the use of Flashes. As supports, many agents are suitable for this role: The solo defender agents can support well in the offense to get information or to cover some angles. Other agents are suitable as supports thanks to their sight-blocking abilities, like Brimstone and Viper, which can make it very easy to access a point. But Sova or Skye are also welcome in the role, as they can scout ahead with their Recon abilities.

The In-Game Leader

No team can function without an IGL. The game starts with the operator choice: Who plays which agent? How should the team split up on the map by default? Which agents do the opponents have? What do we have to pay attention to? How do we time the round? All this information and more have to be communicated to the team. If you want to take the role of the IGL, you should look for an agent who supports this role additionally like all agents who can get additional information by ability like Cypher, Sova and Raze.

The Sniper

Do you have an operator god in your team? Then let him take the role of the Sniper. Defensively, the Sniper can hold many angles where he can stand faster than the enemy team and get free kills especially against slow peeks. If it goes a bit offensive, he tries to move out after the spearhead, gradually covering positions where opponents can come. Good agents to support the sniper’s playstyle are for example Jett to play more offensive angles without risk or Cypher who rotates to other points after building up camera and tripwires to stay unpredictable.

The Lurker

Last but not least, there are the Lone Wolfs, who don’t like to hang out with the team, also called Lurker. This role is also useful in a team to avoid giving half the map to the opponents or to get impatient opponents when they don’t expect it because they rotate through their own spawn. Omen, Reyna and Jett are especially useful for playing off the enemy team, as their abilities make them less likely to fall victim to refrags or to escape from a bad position after a successful kill.

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