Former Dignitas in-game leader Rory “dephh” Jackson has joined XSET’s VALORANT lineup as their new captain, the North American organization announced today.

This roster change comes just ahead of VCT Stage Three. Dephh will be taking the place of Matthew “Wedid” Suchan, who was benched in May. The rest of the roster features Jordan “AYRIN” He, Bryce “PureR” Lovell, Brendan “BcJ” Jensen, and Zander “thwifo” Kim, who will be passing the in-game leader duties to dephh.

“XSET was a team I’ve been keeping my eye on for a while now,” the 29-year-old said in an interview with Upcomer. “I love how they play, especially in the older metas they played fearlessly. XSET has been in contention for almost every VCT event. It seems like they are at the final hurdle and just need a little bit of experience to push them over the edge.”

Dephh, who spent over six years playing CS:GO professionally, most of it under the Complexity Gaming banner, retired in 2020 to pursue a career in VALORANT, initially playing on a non-sponsored team called Homeless that was picked up by Dignitas in August. The team, however, was unable to replicate their results from when they were playing without the support of an organization and struggled at the VCT qualifiers, which led Dignitas to release the entire roster in March.

XSET, on the other hand, had some good results in 2021, most notably a runners-up finish to 100 Thieves at the VCT Stage Two Challengers One in April. But they finished at the bottom of the Challengers finals, which saw Sentinels and Version1 qualify for the VCT Masters Two Reykjavik.

“Our first plan as a team is to expand our agent pool as deep as possible,” dephh said. “Seems to me from my trial and scrim period these guys have a bunch of agents they can play between all maps. They value the leadership role and what it brings, maybe it was lacking slightly before. We have a bunch of different backgrounds and games in the current roster, so I’m being very careful in the way I show my system.”

Dephh will have some time to implement his tactical system into XSET since VCT Stage Three will begin either later this month or in July. He’s by far the most experienced player on the roster, but it’s unclear if this change will be enough to take XSET to a level close to Sentinels and V1, the best North American teams at the moment.

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