Ninja Has A New Duos Partner

There's a new Fortnite Duos partnership in town. Tyler "Ninja" Blevins and Ali "SypherPK" Hassan have joined forces to make the battle royale game theirs.

In a new video posted by SypherPK, he announced to his fans that Ninja will be his new Duos partner heading into the Fortnite Champion Series. This is exciting for a number of reasons, especially for fans of the two streamers.

Though it's been a while since the two have played together in a competitive sense, SypherPK seemed to be plenty confident in both players' abilities. In a statement shared by Dexerto, SypherPK reassured his fans: "We're gonna try it out and see what goes down. We're both much better players, and we've both played a lot more since then, and hopefully this time we can pull out a few things and come out with some good performances and results."

Both players will likely be happy to shake things up a little bit. As explained by Epic Games, the Fortnite Champion Series will be more competitive than ever this year. "This season of FNCS will be split into two separate tracks," read the announcement for Fortnite Champion Series: Chapter 2 – Season 2. "All PC Duos will compete against one another in one track, while all Console and Mobile Duos will compete against one another within the other track."

It's interesting to note that Ninja and SypherPK have been playing Fortnite together quite a bit in recent months. As explained by Fortnite Intel, the two have also expressed something of a disinterest in playing Fortnite competitively, citing a lack of recent updates to the game to make it worthwhile.

As SypherPK said of competitive play at the time, "It's foolish and it's borderline irresponsible to just focus on competing when you could be making content – and you don't even know what you're working towards in terms of competition because [Epic] haven't announced anything yet." 

Ninja seemed to agree with this assessment, adding, "Imagine being a content creator and forcing yourself, right, to deal with competitive when you don't have to."

While Ninja and SypherPK appeared to be on a similar train of thought in regards to competitive play, it has been noted by Fortnite Intel that the two seem to have run into many of the same issues Ninja has had with teammates in the past. Most notably, Ninja has been accused of being a bit of a "backseat gamer," ordering his teammates around in situations when he may not even be in the field of play.

This habit caused a bit of a blowup recently during a stream with Nadeshot. While Ninja joined Nade for an awkward stream of Call of Duty: Warzone. Ninja set Nadeshot off when he accused him of "doing nothing," even though Ninja himself wasn't even still in the match. 

Shortly before the stream came to an abrupt end, Nadeshot fired back at Ninja, "Tyler, luckily you're not playing, bro — I am ... Do I need to have you here [to] tell me that I'm not playing the way that you want me to play?"

It wasn't exactly a pretty sight, and it wasn't the only recent divide between Ninja and a streaming partner. Ninja's longtime Duos partner, Reverse2k, recently distanced himself publicly from the superstar streamer. This came shortly after a massive blowup between the two over comments Reverse2k made about Ninja's move from Twitch to Mixer.

One fan seemed very upset by the change from Reverse2k to SypherPK, tweeting, "Can't believe that ninja would drop reverse for cypher pk [sic]. Reverse literally wasted a year of his life playing with ninja." However, it was pointed out by the reply to this tweet that Reverse2k is the one who made the choice to move on without Ninja.

In the comments on SypherPK's announcement video, one fan expressed concern that this partnership would ruin Sypher's positive attitude. "I'm calling it here! Just remember how positive Sypher was before playing comp with Ninja," reads the comment. "We're going to see a new Sypher. Serious & more negative. We will see that he will be holding his true emotions inside."

Another fan pointed out that this competitive partnership doesn't necessarily mean that the two will be less fun to watch. "Imagine if they just wanted to play a game for fun and have a good time with their followers while streaming," they tweeted.

Hopefully this new team will break that cycle and flourish together. Only time will tell, but at least Ninja and SypherPK have an established history of working with one another. One thing's for certain: fans will have their eyes on this new alliance.