Characters I feel are more likely to be cut:
Characters that *could* be cut:
So, most of my reasoning here is based on the fact that Cloud is with SE, and if there are going to be cuts, it seems the most obvious place to go first. Other than that, Lucina, out of the 3 “swaps turned clones” seems the most expendable.
For Pac, it’s just the matter of Namdai not seeming to be working on this, with HAL on it instead. Of course, Namdai and Nintendo are preeeeetty friendly these days so if Sakurai doesn’t want to cut Pac, he probably won’t.
For the “maybes”, Roy is an additional “Marth” moveset, and if, and only if, Sakurai wanted to cut the FE numbers back because even he thought they were a lot in Smash 4, he might look there first. He could also look at Corrin, but given how popular and prominent Awakening and Fates are, it seems prudent to keep the most original character they have on the roster, being Robin and Corrin respectively.
Greninja just seems expendable. I don’t *want* it to go, but like Lucas in Smash 4, he may just not make the initial cut, in this case because of how many Pokémon there are. I may be entirely wrong on any of this.
For Mega Man and Ryu, I think they’ll either both be there or neither will. It doesn’t make sense to cut one and keep the other when they come from the same company and Capcom is REALLY easy about crossovers anyway.
Them being cut honestly depends 100% on how Sakurai wants to do the roster, rather than any 3rd party difficulties, IMO.
Jr. feels low priority, but at the same time, he’s a high profile Mario character. My point about the roster above applies to him too.
I suppose Lucas is an option, but I’m sort of hoping not. Sort of thinking that on Mewtwo and Bayo as well, but I think given the hype and importance of both of them being in Smash 4, we wouldn’t just remove them. Especially with Bayo 3 coming and her basically being a Nintendo character at this point.