EPTThe Terrans who have been quickest to adopt the new style have been, unsurprisingly, Terrans who were very strongly oriented towards macro play to begin with: MBC's twin titans Light and Sea, Estro's Really, KT's fOrGG, and Wemade's Baby have all proven in their recent games that Flash's style can be successfully adopted by any Terran with the requisite mechanics, will, and presence of mind to execute it. Their numbers speak for themselves, but it's more than just numbers. It's a matter of morale. Morale is intangible and hard to define precisely, but the easiest way to describe what's happening now is to compare it to what happened after Bisu slew Savior in 2007. The heart of every Protoss player began to beat faster. All the pessimism ingrained by years of Zerg dominance in ZvP evaporated, and the Protoss began playing against the Zerg with an intelligence and confidence they'd never known before. It was around this time that I started watching progaming, and the impression that I got from the PvZs I watched was so dominant that I literally couldn't imagine that Protoss had ever been on the bottom in the matchup, much less that they'd been on the bottom since the beginning of progaming.
Similarly, anyone who picks up progaming right now will have a ridiculous deal of trouble understanding that Terrans have ever been anything but the master race in professional SC. Right now, the best Terrans' game sense, management, timing, and unit control seem not just a cut, but two or even three cuts above that of the other races. Economic growth is the highest priority, but they're still able to utilize small armies in the early/mid-game to pressure the enemy and stifle their economy. With excellent unit control a Terran can gain a lead in the race towards victory even if he loses that particular army.
For the Zerg, for whom every larva wasted on combat units puts their economy permanently behind, this approach to the game has been completely devastating. At every stage of the game past the seventh minute, an S-class Terran can challenge the Zerg with an offensive that will either stunt their economy to the point that it can barely function in the late game or kill them outright in the present. This has always been theoretically possible, but only now that anti-muta timings and micro have been perfected and an extra little trick to boost the early game economy has been found does it become a reality. The anti-muta stuff is obvious: anyone can see how the time and map control that mutas buy for a Zerg to macro up have decreased almost to the point where mutas aren't even worth getting to begin with. The little trick is also obvious, but it might be too obvious to notice: it's the use of a supply depot instead of a bunker at the natural choke to defend against early mass zerglings.
Assuming that the Zerg survives to reach defiler tech, the modern Terran doesn't have to expend effort trying to break Zerg's bases. He can, but it's no longer necessary. He can simply add more barracks and patrol the center of the map with his superior army, killing any new expansions while snuffing out any potential swarm pushes with an ever-thickening cloud of vessels while he expands as much as the map and circumstances permit and then augments his armies with masses of factory units. The modern Terran no longer has any fear of hive tech. He knows that so long as he does what he's supposed to do, he will always have the upper hand.
My PC completely died, so I don't have internet access most of the time. This is actually good, since the more time one spends online the less he/she has anything meaningful to express. We'll talk more about how Zerg can rise up and overcome in a later post. It's definitely possible.
2010 so far:
Flash: 32-7 (82%) vs Z+P, 7-3 (70%) vs T
Light: 19-11 (63%) vs Z+P, 11-5 (69%) vs T
later!
