Ivan «Johnta» Shevtsov, who formerly served as Akuma's coach, has published several posts on his Twitter account, in which he talked about how the current roster of the team has turned out. Specifically, he mentioned that he initially picked the players with the expectation that they would perform together for a long time. His benchmark was FURIA and Gambit Youngsters, and he hoped to replicate their success.
Initially Johnta formed a core team of three players – Psycho, Sergiz and rAge. Subsequently, two more Belarusian cybersportsmen joined them, and after rAge moved to Hard Legion, he was replaced by SENSEi. As a result, the coach managed to form a squad that began to achieve its first successes, playing for the Croatian cybersport organization CR4ZY.
This was followed by several other replacements, in particular Johnta brought in several young players who had shown good results at the amateur level. By the summer of 2020, the team was able to climb to No. 44 in the HLTV rankings, but they faced new challenges due to the pandemic. CR4ZY shut down all of its lineups and players continued to perform without support for some time. Eventually Johnta decided to move to Valorant, and another cyber athlete became the coach of the team, which now plays under the Akuma tag.
Thus, a squad was formed that unexpectedly performed well in the EPIC League CIS 2021 playoffs, defeating NAVI and Virtus.pro. The next test for the team will be a meeting with Gambit on the evening of May 29.