Ladies and gentlemen welcome to the start of the next season of MSL. I am personally excited for this Survivor Torunament as it has been flooded with Zerg players from the MBC offline qualifiers. Zerg have triumphed in the preliminaries with 14 of the 24 advancing players being Zergs, compared to a mere 5 for Protoss and Terran. This victory is a small ray of sunshine gleaming onto the Swarm that has been surrounded by the darkness of it's recent shortcomings. However, with a PvZ imbalanced Byzantium 2 and an unfriendly Destination now in their path, we must wonder if this will be a repeat of last season's Survivor where Zergs were completely slaughtered going 5-14 (26.3 %) in ZvP and 5-13 (27.8 %) in ZvT. Only 4 of 17 Zergs managed to make the MSL. Atrocious stats! In that tournament Zergs were 0-7 ZvP on Byzantium. Hopefully Byzantium 2 will be more meciful toward Zergs. The terran faction, as always, has the most representatives at 20 compared to Zerg's 18. Protoss have only 10 players in this Survivor but given how badly they steamrolled this autumn season, it's only fair. They were probably so hungover from partying that they couldn't play properly in the prelims. As was the case with last season, there are NO MIRROR MATCHUPS in the first and second sets. This tournament has a good mix of TvZ, ZvP, and PvT matchups along with several returning legends.
THE FORMAT
The returning 24 players from the Club Day Online MSL, seeds 9-32, will join the 24 players that advanced through the MBC offline qualifiers. These 48 players will be put into 12 groups that will be played out in ODT format. The advancing 24 players will be joined with seeds 1-8 of Club Day Online MSL and will form the next MSL's Ro 32.
Looks like fOrGG and FireFist are in the booths now warming up. My stream freezes and buffers every 10 seconds, so a live report's pretty unfeasible for me. If anyone else has a good stream and wants to take the LR, it'd be appreciated.
watch GGPlay, Saint, Luxury, Savior, Calm, Kwanro, tybe-b, Gorush, Jaedong, by.great are all gonna make it and zerg's will dominate again I CAN FEEL IT
I'm really hoping for at least three more zergs to advance out of these last four groups. Preferably Jaedong, Kwanro, and GoRush, but I'll take whatever I can get. These groups should be especially interesting because only Leta and Jaedong seem to be locks to get out of their groups.
Now we have 13 Terrans, 7 Zergs, and 8 Protoss in the Ro36 so far through Group 10. There's still some really notable Terrans out there in sKyHigh, Canata, Light, and Lomo, and I'd be willing to bet at least two of those four will advance.
Anyways Group 11 is going to be really interesting, with one superstar, one creaky veteran, and two young up-and-comers. I want JD to advance, but beyond that I don't know whether to root for sKyHigh or Jaehoon, I just like them both a lot.