Just hours before the Valve-mandated roster lock took effect, Swedish Dota 2 legend Joakim “Akke” Akterhall announced the formation of Team Crescendo, which will compete in the qualifiers for The International 7.
Comprised of both aging legends and younger players, Team Crescendo gathers five top European pros who found themselves teamless at the end of the post-Kiev shuffle, each having been dropped from their previous team. Jerry “EGM” Lundqvist was released from Alliance last week after a string of poor results, while Niels “SyndereN” Nielsen most recently played for Ninjas in Pyjamas but was let go after the team failed to qualify for the Kiev Major.
Danish mainstay Jon “BabyKnight” Andersen will play hard carry, Steven “Xcalibur” Ye will take mid, and SyndereN will handle the offlane, according to a follow up post on Twitter by Akke. EGM and Akke will play their traditional positions of semi-support and hard support, respectively. It is unknown who will captain the team at this time.
Though Team Crescendo’s lineup is ostensibly a “new” roster, many of its players have competed with one another at some point. Most famously, support duo EGM and Akke were on Alliance together during the organization’s legendary victory at The International 3. Xcalibur and EGM played on a short-lived iteration of Team Tinker in 2014, while Akke and Xcalibur recently competed together for Alliance’s unofficial sister team, Horde.
Whether or not that familiarity can be converted into good results is, of course, an open question—and one we might not see answered for some time. When, exactly, Team Crescendo will make its professional debut in Dota 2 is unknown, given that most of the qualifiers for major summer LANs have now ended. Unless new online tournaments are announced within the next two weeks, it’s likely that we won’t get to see Team Crescendo in a competitive game until the qualifiers for The International 7, which are expected to take place next month.
