The post-International 2025 (TI14) roster shuffle is coming hard and fast at us now, with Western European team AVULUS being the latest to announce their new lineup for the coming season. Although Aliaksei “Smiling Knight” Svirydau will be retained by the organization, the rest of the roster will be composed of new faces to the squad and one returning player.
Artem “lorenof” Melnyk, Jonáš “SabeRLight-” Volek, and Dmitry “JANTER” Nikulin will all play for AVULUS for the 2025-2026 campaign, with all three of these names being first time members of AVULUS. SabeRLight- in particular is notable here, as he is on loan to AVULUS after being benched by Team Liquid earlier today.
The one returning player I mentioned is Marcel “Ekki” Hołowienko, who played for AVULUS from the end of August last year until March 21st this year. After taking a short break, Ekki signed with MOUZ for the first iteration of their comeback roster in mid-2025, but spent only about a month and change there.
Try and try again
Personally, I’m actually surprised that AVULUS are still around, given that they had a pretty mediocre run through the 2024-2025 season — which included missing out entirely on qualifying for TI14. The lineup looked vastly different throughout different points of the previous season, so I wouldn’t exactly call roster stability one of AVULUS’ strengths.
And while this new look is probably better on paper than many of their other iterations, I still don’t think they’re going to be good enough to really turn the organization’s fortunes around. SabeRLight- is the most proven member here for fairly obvious reasons, but I’m not sure even he’ll be enough to make AVULUS a household name from here on out.
To lorenof’s credit, though, I thought he was pretty good during his time with Aurora Gaming and later Tundra Esports, so I can at least say people can bank on his development here. He’s still quite young at 22 years of age, so he’s got plenty of room to get better. The same goes for Ekki, who is only about a month younger than lorenof.
As for Smiling Knight and JANTER, the jury is still out on both of them. JANTER in particular is a complete unknown when it comes to tier 1 Dota, and he doesn’t even have a Liquipedia page of his own. Actually, apart from SabeRLight-, I’m fairly sure that this AVULUS roster is meant to be a player development kind of thing more than an actual contending squad, which falls in line with my every expectation for this team heading into the new season.
Fortunately for everyone on this squad, they won’t have to wait too long to start that development. They’ll be playing at the DreamLeague Season 27 Western Europe qualifiers in just under two days from now, going up against teams like Na’Vi, the new Virtus.pro, and presumably also the “trial” OG lineup. Honestly, I’d say they have a pretty good shot of making third place there at least, which would still qualify them for DreamLeague.
