Disguised Toast Explains How yay Ended Up on His Challengers Team
Many VALORANT fans thought it was a joke when streamer Jeremy “Disguised Toast” Wang announced that Jaccob "yay" Whiteaker was joining his Challengers team. Turns out, it’s the real deal.
Disguised Toast has been hard at work in the VALORANT esports scene, creating a Challengers team and then a failed Contenders team with popular female streamers. And now it looks like he may have finally caught his big break by signing yay to Disguised, his NA Challengers squad.
According to Disguised Toast, yay reached out to him on Twitter back in February after learning he had been cut from Cloud9. Toast claimed that yay felt “burnt” by traditional esports orgs at that time. The DM started with yay hoping that DSG is successful and Toast responding that he deserves better.
When the transfer window opened up, Toast reached out to yay in hopes that he could replace Drake “Exalt” Branly, who had left in March. Negotiations began between the top streamer and top VALORANT pro.
“I heard he’s free and maybe he likes us enough to give us a shot, [so] I messaged him, ‘Hey, do you wanna see if you like the guys and the guys like you, and if things work out we can take it from there?’ And he said yes, and that’s how all happened,” Toast explained to journalist George Geddes.
According to Geddes, he knew about the signing a while ago but didn’t want to leak it until Disguised Toast announced yay himself.
“Coming into the season we had a lot of high expectations but those expectations were not met,” Toast said on Twitter. “So we were thinking of making a move to our roster to try and fix our issues. We’ve been trialing a lot of players and talking to other teams for potential trades, talking to all the free agents, looking at suggestions on Reddit. I even went to solo queue games and begged people to try out for DSG. We got nothin.”
In the announcement video, Toast calls over Sentinels’ Tarik Celik. A mock announcement pops up on the video as if Tarik is joining, but Disguised Toast realizes that to buy out his contract from Sentinels requires “too many zeroes.” Luckily, Tarik said that he had someone in mind and called over yay.
Signing yay is a huge move for Disguised Toast. Having the top player on a Challengers-level team is sure to shake up the tournament. But Toast noted that he’s not going to let the signing get to his head.
In the interview with Geddes, Toast admitted that the team may not even win Ascension. While signing yay is a big deal, VALORANT is still a team game, Toast said, and it will depend on how everyone works together.
VALORANT Challengers North America league’s second split begins on April 18.
