Vision Strikers opened VALORANT Champions with a two game shutout of FULL SENSE, rolling through the Thai squad with coordinated team play and a few clutch pop-offs. Gu-taek “stax” Kim put on a clinic of how to play Breach on Haven, ultimately finishing the first half of the map with four ultimates.
“God tier fault lines, flashes, postplant aftershocks, ults, etc. VS have done such a good job feeding stax orbs AND plants,” said VALORANT commentator Sean Gares. “He’s going to end the first half with [four] ults on Breach. Unreal.”
Stax stood in front of the camera on the Champions broadcast with confidence after the match. His team hadn’t played an official match since getting knocked out of Master Berlin in September, but you wouldn’t know that based off of their performance at Champions. Stax was asked about what Breach means for Vision Strikers.
No one matches Stax on Breach
“Korea has a play style that’s really team comp. We bounce plays off one another,” stax said through a translator in the post-match interview. “From the very beginning, I was forced to play Breach a lot. So you could say I am Breach himself.”
Stax said that his team practices with other players on Breach, although his instincts still pop up whenever he feels the team needs to use a Flashpoint or Fault Line. He told Upcomer that he hasn’t found another player or team that utilizes the agent as well as Vision Strikers in the hundreds of matches he’s played.
“We’ve played a lot of teams during our time in Asia and our Scrims here in Europe,” he said. “I’ve yet to find someone as good as me [at Breach].”
Stax finished the series with a 26/25 K/D ratio with wonderful support for the rest of his squad.
“Hands down,” said VALORANT Champions Tour caster Clinton “Paperthin” Bader about stax being the best Breach.
Looking ahead for Vision Strikers at Champions
The entire Vision Strikers squad took a month-long break after losing during their last trip to Berlin. The team held a bootcamp in Osnabrück, Germany, in the lead up to Champions, where they trained against other tournament-bound teams. They live together in a facility in South Korea, so they replicated that living situation in Germany to make themselves comfortable.
“Overall, it was a great experience,” stax said. “The place we stayed at kind of felt like our practice facility back in Korea. What hit me the most was the fresh air in that city.”
Absolute BEAST! 💪
A quick performance recap of @VisionStrikers’ @staxVLRT leading up to the #VALORANTChampions! pic.twitter.com/prS2Nbgf1R
— VCT Pacific (@vctpacific) November 29, 2021
Vision Strikers are the only South Korean team to make it to Champions after their countrymen, DWG KIA and NUTURN Gaming, fell in the APAC Last Chance Qualifier. FULL SENSE were the only team to emerge from that tournament. Stax and company believe they got some revenge for their friends back home.
“We made sure we [avenged] our other Korean teams. We want to prove that, in Asia, Vision Strikers are the No. 1 team,” stax said. “I want to tell our teams back in Korea ‘best of luck in your rebuilding and I hope you can join us at future tournaments so we can perform as a region.'”
Catch Vision Strikers’ upcoming match against the winner of Fnatic vs. Cloud9 on the official VALORANT Twitch channel at 3 p.m. EST on Dec. 3.
