by While retaining a majority of their League of Legends roster after a strong 2022 season, Cloud9 have brought in Dimitri “Diplex” Ponomarev to replace Nicolaj “Jensen” Jensen in the mid lane.
The founder and CEO of Cloud9, Jack Etienne, gave a breakdown of the team’s LoL Championship Series (LCS) roster in a YouTube video. He noted that the team’s players were willing to extend their stay with the team after the 2022 run, which culminated in an LCS Summer title.
“We had a situation where pretty much every player was happy with the performance of their teammates. Of course, there were things that we could improve on, but they really wanted to run it back again. The one change that we ended up doing was just mid lane,” Etienne said.
Diplex hails from the Team Liquid academy team, and he will have big shoes to fill in taking over from Jensen. However, Etienne feels the rookie is up to the task.
“The reason our team got excited about Diplex is because he is a highly mechanical player with a ton of potential. So in my negotiations with Diplex, one of the main reasons he wanted to come here is, this is his chance to get on a big stage and be surrounded by really smart players with fantastic coaching line vigor. These are the things that will take him from an Academy player to an LCS pro and hopefully a champion,” he said.
C9 have also been revamping their coaching staff. Tristan “Zeyzal” Stidam has moved his assistant role with the LCS team to take over as head coach of the Cloud9 Academy team, while Max Waldo has switched from head coach to a positional role.
Diplex will be joining Australian mid-lane player Ibrahim “Fudge” Allami, jungler Robert “Blaber” Huang, bot laner Kim “Berserker” Min-cheol, and support Jesper “Zven” Svenningsen on the Cloud9 roster.
Etienne also went further to give a briefing on his projection for the 2023 LCS roster, predicting the team will enjoy another strong campaign.
“Why I’m really confident about the LCS roster is that we have four players that really work well together and when you change out like one player in a smoothly like operating roster the chances of it still succeeding and keeping its identity is pretty high. Any more than that you really actually risk like the core players,” he said.
“We have a high expectation that it’s going to be a performance.”
