It came down to the wire, but when the dust settled, Han "Peanut" Wang-ho decided to stay in his home of South Korea instead of moving abroad, signing with former world champion Gen.G Esports for the 2019 season last month.
After publicly announcing on social media his choice had come down to Gen.G and an unnamed organization from North America, the star jungler a few days later inked a deal to keep his talents in South Korea for the foreseeable future.
"This year, it was a very agonizing decision where I wanted to go," said the 20-year-old Peanut. "I put a lot of thought into it, but I also had a strong desire to put up really good results. Korea, as a region across the whole year, didn't have the best results, so I wanted to join a Korean team and put up good results [next year]."
Ever since he broke out as a must-see player on the 2016 ROX Tigers, before the team broke up later that year, Peanut has been on a journey to find a home. It felt like SK Telecom T1 would be it, but his style never meshed with the core already on SKT and his stay lasted only a year. Last year, he won another domestic title, this time with KING-ZONE DragonX, but the ending felt all too familiar with Peanut failing to coordinate with his team down the stretch and having to watch the world championship from home.
Unlike his past two stops, though, where SKT and KING-ZONE were among the elite in South Korea when he joined, his new home in Gen.G is in limbo. Although the team made it to worlds, the team went an embarrassing 1-5 in the group stages in front of its hometown fans. The team's paint-by-numbers approach to the game that served them so well in the past was torn apart in a faster-paced meta, and Gen.G went into the offseason needing someone to change the organization's monotone tempo.
Enter Peanut.
On the surface, a marriage between Gen.G and Peanut seems like an oxymoron. Everything Peanut does is in stark contrast of what Gen.G, formerly Samsung, has built. Peanut is a Ferrari and Gen.G is the old, reliable family minivan, which won't turn heads when going down the street but always gets you where you need to be. Unfortunately, that family minivan has finally broken down for good, and in a world where fast cars and explosive speed are the keys to a championship, Peanut is the perfect jungler to change the color of a once-great but fading dynasty.
And although Peanut expects good things to come to Gen.G throughout the year, as his style meshes with the core of the remaining starters from last year, he wants to make sure fans don't judge too quickly on how the team does at the KeSPA Cup.
"For KeSPA Cup, I don't think Gen.G will win it," he said. "I think mostly DAMWON and Griffin are the teams to beat in that specific tournament because they haven't had any [major] roster changes."
What proved to be the most agonizing decision of his career has produced a motivated mindset for 2019. When asked if he still thought about joining a foreign team in the future, Peanut smiled, answering that yes, while one day he'd like to go abroad and test his skills, he isn't interested if he's washed up by then. If Peanut goes to North America or another non-South Korean region, he wants to be at his very best for his international fans.
"In the future, I do want to go to a different region, but I don't want to go when I'm about to retire," he said. "I want to go at my peak. I want to go to another region, do well, and win in that specific region. Because when you go at your low point, it's not very cool. It's also like you're a burden to your team. So I'd rather go when I'm at my peak, and if I'm not doing very well, instead of retiring in a different region, I'd rather just retire straight up."