ESL Pro League Season 18. Group C

Faze

After losing RobbaN as coach Faze dropped in form significantly, and in 2 tournaments with NEO they clearly failed, going 9-12th in Cologne and 9-16th in Gamers8. Now they had almost a month o prepare for EPL, and we can give them benefit of the doubt considering the caliber of the players.
Luckily for them, there are very few teams in this group who can put up a tough fight, struggling Navi and tier2 Apeks being the best at that. Unless something goes entirely wrong, Faze should have a locked in spot in playoffs

9z

9z don't have a lot of practice playing against good teams, as they are stuck in SA region for the most part. They did get some warm up against tier3 EU though and got 3/3 wins.
With the lack of experience and competitive firepower there isn't much hope for them to surprise, but they should be able to show up against lower level teams in the group. Going to playoffs seems almost impossible, unless they clutch it in Last Chance stage

Imperial

Similarly to 9z, Imperial are a lower division team who don't have enough to compete for playoffs, although they've shown some capability of having close games and even taking maps against good teams.
Nobody expects them to show up and go further this time either but we might see some interesting results as they make the favorites struggle

fnatic

Fnatic will be the dark horse of this group. They failed at Cologne and Gamers8 earlier this season, and even lost to Sprout and Attax, but they have a decent chance here.
Fnatic have an annoying playstyle that can become their advantage, but they rely too much on the individual skill from mezii, afro and roeJ. These are proven players despite never really getting success at tier1, and as long as they can turn on we might see Fnatic as a dangerous team

Apeks

It's no surprise that Apeks didn't keep up to their Paris performance after replacing jL but they still remain a solid tier1.5-2 team, although pretty unstable at times.
In this group they are pretty much guaranteed a spot in playoffs, the only worthy opponent on their side of the bracket is Navi and even they aren't an impossible team to beat in their current state. In the worst case scenario we should expect Apeks to climb back from the lower bracket

M80

A freshly formed NA squad had some interesting and impressive results until now, but it's all been against the same NA teams who are much lower level than EPL. It's hard to say right now what's the peak potential for M80, but they have promising future ahead even if this particular tournament won't be an immediate success.
Their fate for playoffs depends entirely on the other teams at this point, and if they get a lucky run through the weak ones we might even see a surprise

Natus Vincere

What seemed like a decent honeymoon period during BLAST ended up being a disaster for Navi, and in the following tournaments they just kept getting worse. After a month of preparing for EPL there is some hope that they got their issues fixed, but knowing s1mple's attitude and b1t's performance plummeting it's hard to believe.
While they are expected to go through this group with ease, it won't be unexpected at all to see them fail once again

5yclone

China once had a reasonably competitive region and they constantly participated in all the biggest LANs, but since their peak in 2018-19 it's clear that their time is over. Ever since Covid changed CS dynamic, they haven't been able to bounce back and playing in Asia against low teams didn't help either.
We might see a few maps from them throughout the matches but there is absolutely 0 expectation for them to actually win games and go anywhere near claiming the playoffs spot