Last Saturday, we saw an epic showdown between players from four titan esport franchises. In the end though, despite high expectations coming from the tactical FPS lineup of Team Striker, Timothy "TimTheTatman" Betar’s Call of Duty squad took home the trophy, dominating the Face-Off in an undefeated win streak.

Team Delta’s win wasn’t off the back of Tim alone but of the Operator superstar Matthew
WARDELL" Yu, the current Jett main for Team SoloMid. TSM is currently rated as the #2 team in North America with a contentious rivalry against Sentinels, who are often rated as #1 in the region.

While the Sentinels vs. Team SoloMid rivalry has come to a simmer during the downtime between the Ignition Series and First Strike, we can say with certainty that WARDELL has proven himself to be the most impactful Operator Jett in North America. And for that, he is our Most Valuable Player in the LG UltraGear Face-Off VALORANT tournament.

During his opening match against Team Striker, despite the seemingly close 13-11 scoreline, it wasn’t even close in the stats department. During the 24-round match, WARDELL dropped an incredible 38 frags on Jett, with an astounding 408 ACS score to back it up.  Comparatively, Sentinels’ Operator main of Shahzeb "ShahZaM" Khan was only able to accrue 24 kills on Sova, the same kill count as Mohamad "m0E" Assad, who was backing up WARDELL as Reyna.

During Team Delta’s 13-1 roll against Team Survival, WARDELL farmed an incredible 517 ACS scoreline with only five deaths among the 14 rounds of play.

In the grand finals, a rematch against the highly competitive Team Striker, WARDELL didn’t let up against ShahZaM. Despite the Sentinels’ Jett finding a slightly higher ACS in the first map -- 362 to 360 -- he couldn’t keep up with WARDELL’s kill count or Econ score.

In the second map, WARDELL played a pivotal role alongside mOE to secure the 14-12 scoreline, once again top-fragging amongst his peers and rivals.

With a strong consistent performance and an incredible streak of all-star plays, WARDELL’s impact could be seen in every game. With the initial stages of First Strike set to be announced later this month, it won’t be long until we see how much his impact and improvement will test up against the monoliths of Sentinels.

Text by: Blerghface