Was not paying attention to VCK since there are no Liquipedia nor VLR page for it, but from what I've looked up, it seems at least two teams (maybe +1 to make it three teams) out of eight are going to be good enough to contend for the Ascensions title this year.
For starters, among the 3 Academy teams, T1 has a roster consisting of GangPin, DH, Moothie, exa and TenTen. The other two are either internally grown rookies who I don't know much about (DRX) or hasn't revealed the roster yet (Gen.G)
If you watch VCJ or used to watch, you'll know how good GangPin, DH, Moothie and TenTen could be, especially DH. He was shortly at CGZ alongside Hyunmin and was able to show that he could be just as good as Hyunmin. TenTen was also in CGZ until he had a beef with flipzjder and got himself in trouble. He had some issues with consistency, but when CGZ won, quite a lot of times he was the, or was one of the carries. GangPin played alongside Akame in Reject and had a pretty good showing. Since Akame's performance, who was Reject's best player at the time, wasn't really inspiring/standing out during the DFM v. RRQ match, I might consider GangPin a step below the former CGZ players, but imo he's quite good nonetheless. Don't know much about exa so I can't say much.
DRX Prospects had a quite a few promising talents before, so I'm looking forward to see how they'll perform in T2 environment. No info about Gen.G so no idea.
Apart from T1A, BNK FEARX also looks very promising. They are basically the ex-NS players that have won 2024 S3 bar Xross, + Hermes from fOu Clan that was runner up in 2024 S3. NS was also a all-around very good team during 2024, and Cloy and SID were already part of the roster that was just one map away from beating Sin Prisa during 2024 S2. PKM and Yoman from their runner-up squad went to IAM and Gen.G respectively, and were replace by Kally and Banger. Both are not bad replacements.
DK is a bit of a question mark. They had a let-down in 2024 S3 and haven't qualified for 2025 S1, so they acquired 3 of the fOu Clan players, which as I've mentioned above, were runner ups during 2024 S3. They are going to play alongside kAyle and Bangnan, who used to play for Varrel before they disbanded. To be exact, Bangan left and kAyle joined as his replacement for VCJ 2024 S2. Bangnan then played in VEC Daejon, but anyways, Varrel and VEC Daejon weren't particularly strong teams, and Bangnan and kAyle were not much of a standouts even in those lower-mid teams. kAyle used to be hyped by a few as the next big thing, the next Korean ranked demon, but he unfortunately wasn't. Should see how DK performs with former fOu members and if ex-Varrel players could show that they've improved. (btw, Empty, the last fOu Clan member not mentioned is still LFT so I think he'll be picked up by one of the VCK teams)
Haven't got much to note about the rest of the entrants. IAM dropped out, as reported on front page, so there'll be one more team that would qualify but no clue how they'll pick that team. Could have been Sherpa, but they've disbanded. Open qualifiers could be possible, since 2024 S1 also started quite late. SLT and CRG were 3rd and 4th place during 2024 S3, so my expectations are that they're probably not the teams who'd win VCK this year.
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