The turn of the new year marks a milestone for everyone to set their new goals with and presents a great chance for change. It seems that Armani has taken advantage of that chance for change and finally rejoined a professional team. At the turn of the New Year, Armani is officially playing with Afreeca for the foreseeable future.
Park “Armani” Jin Hyuk, AKA NirMomG, is a South Korean professional Starcraft veteran that has been playing for the majority of the last decade. In 2019 alone, he’s won nine minor tournaments from daily, weekly, or qualifier competition matches. Over his career, he’s done well in a myriad of competitions, with first place finishes in the ZOTAC Monthly Final of December 2013, as well as the OlimoLeague Monthly Finals both in July and March of 2015 and 2016 respectively.
https://twitter.com/SC2Armani/status/1212032796794880000?s=20
Back in 2017, Armani announced his departure and immediate retirement from StarCraft and the esports scene. In July of that year, his retirement brought him to join the army, in a masterwork tweet on the 14th of July that simply read “go army 27th.” Needless to say, this has ended up with a considerable silence from him, as he hasn’t been active in the scene until the last few months.
https://twitter.com/SC2Armani/status/874913849161469955?s=20
Armani’s Twitter remained silent, but his return in March of this year saw him posting his streams again. Since then, he’s been picking up where he left off, climbing ladders and reasserting dominance as a Zerg main.
Armani is currently Afreeca S2’s third active player, returning to the team that he had played with from 2014 until his departure to the army. On the roster along with him are Terran-main Han “aLive” Lee-seok and fellow Zerg player Park “DongRaeGu” So-ho. Formerly, Hwang “KeeN” Kyu-seok was a member of Afreeca S2 as well before also leaving for military service in September of this year. It’s currently unknown if he will follow Armani’s example of rejoining the team when he returns from military duty.
As a team, the players haven’t had an incredible amount of luck. The best result in 2019 was KeeN finishing 5-8th in season 3 of the GSL, with others finishing 25-32nd through the other seasons. Apart from that, aLive and KeeN both finished 25-28th place in Season XIII of the Intel Extreme Masters.
Though results as a team haven’t been coming in, we might see that change with the return of Armani. The move is finalized as of January 1st, so it’ll be great to see if Armani can pick up where he left off.
