Storied esports organization Cloud9 has announced the signings of Khalif “Khroen” Hashim and Juan “JSchritte” Freitas to its brand-new Teamfight Tactics roster. Both players were previously pros in the competitive Heroes of the Storm scene, until Blizzard announced late last year that it would be cancelling its support for HotS eSports altogether. Each has individually expressed excitement at returning to the professional gaming world.

Khroen was a member of HeroesHearth for the balance of last year, a team with whom he placed first in Heroes of the Storm Global Championship (HGC)’s North American playoffs, qualifying them for the HGC Finals tournament. Shortly after the announcement of his signing, Khroen went live on Twitch sporting his Cloud9 sponsorship for the first time. Khroen has already climbed into the top “Challenger” ranking on two different TFT accounts, and streamed his attempt to get a third account into the highest competitive placement possible.

In a Tweet commenting on Cloud9’s signing announcement, Khroen expressed that he had feared failing to secure a spot in a professional eSports scene again, and thanked the organization for giving him a chance to compete professionally less than a year after his retirement from Heroes of the Storm.

Jscrhitte began his eSports career as a member of Brave Ozone, winning the regional Latin American Copa América tournament in 2015 and qualifying for that year’s America championships, at which his team was unable to compete due to visa issues. He played for a number of different teams thereafter, including in 2018, No Tomorrow, as the only non-American member of the USA-based team.

In his own Tweet, JSchritte expressed in both English and Portuguese that he has always loved the Cloud9 organization, and feels that they’re now his family.

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While Teamfight Tactics is immensely popular on Twitch, having at one point overtaken Fortnite as the most-viewed game on the entire site, there is yet to be any major sort of TFT eSports scene. Thus far, the only large-scale TFT esports event has been a tournament between 64 popular Twitch streamers with a $125,000 prize pool, in which neither Khroen or JSchritte participated.

Earlier this week, TSM also announced the signing of two Teamfight Tactics players, so expect other eSports organizations to follow suit as the viability of competitive TFT continues to develop along with the game itself.

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