An unlucky draw for Paper Rex.

Heading into VALORANT Champions 2022, Benedict “Benkai” Tan and the rest of Paper Rex took a good look at the potential teams coming out of Last Chance Qualifiers and put China’s first international team EDward Gaming at the top of the list of teams they didn’t want to run into at Champions.

Unfortunately for the Masters Copenhagen grand finalists, Paper Rex and EDG have been drawn into the same group and will meet each other in the opening match of VALORANT Champions 2022.

On an appearance on the Plat Chat podcast, Paper Rex’s charismatic and fun-loving leader explained that the players had a lot of “trauma” from playing Chinese CS:GO teams such as TYLOO. He said they would “get demolished over and over again,” and since switching to VALORANT have been dreading the day Chinese teams started competing internationally.

Additionally, Benkai relayed that their scheduled scrim against EDG was immediately canceled after learning that the two teams had been drawn to face each other in the first match at Champions. But it’s a common practice for any team to cancel their scrim against an opponent they’re scheduled to face.

In CS:GO, while TYLOO as a competitive organization struggled to compete at the highest tier of international events, the team has been consistently regarded as one of if not the best team in Asia, and would typically represent the region at Majors and the like. China as a region is making its international debut in VALORANT through EDG, a team that is exceptionally young but also coming off an incredible flawless run at the East Asia Last Chance Qualifier.

Benkai promised that the opening match between Paper Rex and EDG would be close and “a banger.” The two dynamic teams out of Asia will face off on Wednesday, Aug. 31 at 9am CT to kick off VALORANT Champions 2022.