Team Falcons TI 2025 team profile: A solid pick

They have Dota 2 hardwired to their brains, and they are the most experienced team at The International 2025.

Two of the Team Falcons players have the most TI appearances, while their coach is the only person to have lifted the Aegis from both a player and a coach position in his career. Coach Kurtis "Aui_2000" Ling is regarded as the brightest mind in the professional scene and the one with perhaps the deepest understanding of the game. His role was crucial in Falcons’ utter domination in the previous season.

At the same time, Falcons have on their side the only player to have attended nine consecutive TIs before this one. TI 2025 will represent the 10th attempt at the Aegis of Champions for Andreas "Cr1t-" Nielsen, while Jingjun "Sneyking" Wu has eight TIs under his belt.

Falcons was formed at the end of 2023, and no roster changes have taken place since then. They managed to build a team that worked flawlessly right from the get-go, and in their first year together, Falcons were heading to TI 2024 as one of the main favourites for the title, but came back home with a 4th place finish.

Team Falcons roster

• Oliver "skiter" Lepko
• Stanislav "Malr1ne" Potorak
• Ammar "ATF" Al-Assaf
• Andreas "Cr1t-" Nielsen
• Jingjun "Sneyking" Wu
• Coach: Kurtis "Aui_2000" Ling

This year, Falcons are once again regarded as one of the favourites, but the season leading up to TI 2025 was far from matching their first year together. The lack of trophies this year is, however, related to things out of their control.

A hand injury that forced Skiter to undergo a second surgery limited their practice time by a lot, as Sneyking said in an interview with BLAST a couple of months ago. Besides that, Falcons have also dealt with visa problems, and they had to play with a stand-in at one of the most important LAN tournaments of the season, ESL One Raleigh 2025. But even so, they stayed in the middle of the pack and secured a direct invite to The International 2025.

As we got closer to TI 2025, Falcons started to show their true colours and made it to the grand finals of Esports World Cup. They got swept 0-3 by Team Spirit at EWC, but a few weeks later, they played another grand final against Spirit at FISSURE Universe: Episode 6 and landed their first tournament victory. More importantly, it was their turn to sweep Team Spirit and take a clean 3-0 victory, just as they headed into the pre-TI 2025 bootcamp.

Comfort above meta

From all teams at TI 2025, Falcons are rather unique in their stubbornness in playing comfort heroes and building strategies around them. They also have in ATF one of the biggest hero specialists in the scene. Since his debut in 2021 with Creepwave, ATF- made a name for himself with Mars, Razor, Timbersaw or Bristleback. He is not shy to declare himself the best player on these heroes, and to the present day, he is picking them with no fear of being countered.
This year alone, he played 38 official matches on Bristleback, 23 on Mars, 10 on Timbersaw and 9 on Razor. More recently, Falcons went all in on the concept of tankiness and indestructible team fight formations. They found powerful Strength cores that benefit from Armor value and paired them with an intense healing support played by Sneyking.

While Crystal Maiden is Sneyking’s most played hero this year with 34 picks, at the last two aforementioned tournaments, he almost exclusively played Chen, Pugna, Enchantress or Warlock, which not only shine in the team fights, but also ensure a strong laning phase and push power.

Falcons excel at playing an objective-based Dota from start to finish, and for that they need to work together every step of the way. In many aspects, they are rather similar toTeam Spirit, which is why there is a strong chance that the TI 2025 grand finals will feature the same teams as the Esports World Cup and FISSURE Universe: Episode 6 final act.

The International 2025 will kick off on the 4th of September, with 16 teams aligned in a Swiss group stage. The top three teams will head to the playoffs, the bottom three will be eliminated. The teams in the middle of the pack will duke it out in an elimination round. The playoffs will unfold September 11-14 in the Barclays Arena with eight teams fighting for a shot at the Aegis of Champions. Until then, rdy.gg will bring you all the information that you need about the pinnacle event of the year and the teams competing for the most wanted trophy in the Dota 2 scene, so stay tuned!

More TI 2025 team profiles

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• HEROIC: Consistently unpredictable
• NAVI: The rite of passage
• Nemesis: Filipino passion meets TI pressure
• Aurora: Eclipsed by titans
• Wildcard: Swing for the fences