The deadline is past. Here are the surprise eleventh-hour SSCAIT entrants this year:

Aman Zargarpur - terran

auxanic - zerg

BeeBot - terran

Tommy Fang - terran

XelnagaII - protoss

Of these, XelnagaII is the only name I recognize. It finished in the middle of the pack in AIIDE 2016. As LetaBot says, BeeBot had a bug in its first upload which was fixed before the deadline, explaining its inconsistent results. It may be a dangerous mech bot. Auxanic has been around long enough for me to get an impression of its style: It is a single-minded macro zerg which doesn’t believe in making units for early defense. Auxanic can recover and win after having its main and tech destroyed, so at least it’s robust. Aman Zargarpur has played 1 game so far and Tommy Fang none yet.

I think we’re in for some variety, and that is good.

As LetaBot notes in the comments, they have returned to calling this the 2016 tournament, so that the sequence of numbers is unbroken. They called it 2017 until lately.