Flex player Hunni has been removed from the full Danish team Grand Danois. This follows two promising runs in recent tournaments for the tier-two European team.

The last time we reported on Grand Danois, they had decided to leave their organisation fragsters after four months playing under the banner. This was due to a lack of LAN support for the team, who had qualified for and were intent on competing in the XTRA Cup in Paris.

The players, aged between 15 and 21, paid for themselves to travel to the event with aid from their families. Due to qualifying without a series loss Grand Danois were seeded into the upper bracket of the four-team LAN playoffs, but lost to The Chavs and then Dignitas to be eliminated in 3rd.

The team also competed in the StriveWire Monthly Brawl before Hunni was removed; they beat LDLC’s new roster and nerdRage, losing to GamersOrigin to come 2nd in their group. Seeded into the playoff quarterfinals against Dignitas, they were again unable to win and finished in 5th-8th.

Hunni previously played flex for Grand Danois, playing offtank in the previous meta but flexing onto DPS heroes such as Genji most recently.

Hunni told over.gg that the reason for his dismissal was a rash decision made in frustration that got out of hand. His team failed to show up for planned weekly Razer Arena tournaments and Hunni angrily left the team discord in an “over-reaction”.

He claims he apologised the day afterward but was ignored by the team for four days until the manager was back to deal with the issue. The manager reportedly let Hunni back into the team discord but Hunni upon rejoining was immediately told his attitude was unacceptable.

“They’ve told me countless time it was my own decision to leave the discord and thereby the team,” he said when explaining the situation, “so they don't want to take responsibility even though it feels to me that it was just a reason for getting me out.”

Whatever the root cause, the end result of this situation is a tier-two European team now one player short and a flex with a deep hero pool on the market. When asked what the next move would be for himself and the team, Hunni replied:

I don't know to be honest. The European scene is still dead and now eUnited will be moving as well, so I hope that a North American org will find me interesting for a trial as it's not really worth even trying to compete in EU.

Potential replacements for Grand Danois include former player Lelouch; it’s unknown whether GDK will look further afield to players outside Denmark.

Update: Grand Danois gave a statement on this topic, saying:

Before the situation developed and became more serious, we had already realised something didn't feel right about playing together. Sometimes we had days where we would just play really good and sometimes really bad. The days before the drama happened we lost a lot and it was hard to see what was wrong.

On the day that we were supposed to play the tournament people didnt feel like it, and a part of it was that we had to play with a stand-in because Kellex was out celebrating his birthday with his family and because of the recent days bad performance, so the motivation was non-existent. Then Hunni asked us if we were ready and the rest of the team didnt answer in time, which led to the time the drama began.

5 of the players didnt want to play the tournament because of the bad atmosphere, and take a day off and think about whats going to happen, however Hunni wanted to play anyways. He told us that the "bad atmosphere" was bullshit and said that if the team didnt want to play the tournament, he didnt want use his time on "this". And by "this" we thought that he meant that he didnt want to play on the team anymore. A few minutes later into the discussion he wrote "cya" and left the discord.

We thought he was serious about this, since there was a situation months ago where he gave the team an ultimatum to choose between him and Lelouch, and also because of the LFT (Looking for team) post he had written on several discord servers

Some days later he was invited by our manager to our Discord server again, so we could talk about the things that had happened. Ofcourse it was very immature by the players to not respond to Hunni when he tried to message them, but the team felt that they wanted Hunni to calm down before responding because of the teams past discussions with him.

The discussion was back and forth and we didnt really get anywhere so we ended it and kicked him afterwards. The reasoning for dropping Hunni was because we felt he underperformed in scrims and we wanted to tryout Lelouch and see how it would go. Hunni is not a bad player at all, but since the meta changed a lot and is more DPS reliant, we thought our decision was the way to go.

So in the end, we think that we have made the right choice.

This statement is not about getting him into trouble or to just talk shit about him. But we felt like that we had to write a statement about our perspective of this drama.

The roster for Grand Danois is now:

  • Mikkel "MandeTrodser" Hestbek (DPS)
  • Gustav "Nerfdd" Guldager (DPS)
  • Daniel "Danii" Lindblad (Tank)
  • Kristian "Kellex" Keller (Support)
  • Andreas "Lind" Lindblad (Support)
  • David "DrunKin" Pella (Manager)