Shine: Typhoons and Tomfoolery

Shine is in the bottom left in white and Flash is in the bottom right in orange. Contrary to what you might imagine, the game starts very normally with a 1 Rax CC against a 12 Hatch.



Shine decides to stop a few steps shy of cheese and just go for a standard but aggressive 2 hatch Lair of some sort.



Shine pretty quickly takes a third hatch at his backdoor mineral only. We see that Shine will be going for 2 Hatch Muta rather than the less standard (but just as Shiny) 2 Hatch lurker.



Meanwhile, Shine has brought two Drones to the back of Flash’s base to try to glitch them past the neutral building.



Shine is having trouble getting the Drone through and has failed twice. Unfortunately, his efforts are rudely interrupted by Flash’s Vulture killing all his things.



Finally Shine manages to squeeze the Drone up the ramp and soon after kills the Vulture, but not before it gets 7 kills.



Shine starts to harass with his Mutalisks but can’t accomplish a ton because there are Turrets and Goliaths ready to pewpew. Not to be discouraged, Shine has a pretty quick Queens Nest ready to go.



Flash’s Goliaths start to move out onto the map and Shine’s Mutalisks do remarkably little to stop them. Flash has also been building a bio army that will soon be joining up with the Goliaths.



Flash’s giant army makes it over to Shine’s natural. Seeing there are a ton of Sunken Colonies, he decided to just take his army up to the north to kill Shine’s bases up there.



The Terran army sees there’s nothing in the top left and an SCV sees there’s nothing at the top right. In short, Flash sees that there’s absolutely nothing anywhere.



Finally, Flash gets a very subtle hint of what’s going on. But can he figure it out on time? This is the hint that something might be amiss:



Flash runs his army back as soon as he sees it but its too late, the Swarms and Lurkers are already set up beautifully and eating his production. He valiantly tries to hold it back and even tries to just turtle up in his natural with tanks and mines but it isn’t enough. Eventually he gets ran over and has to concede the game.



And with that, Shine wins his only ever game against Flash, rounding up his 1-6 record nicely. And in the process, he proved that if you cheese enough times, one will prevail eventually and somebody will write about you.

bad -> mediocre -> pretty freaking good -> mediocre -> bad -> good

Bisu will be rocking the red pieces in bottom right while Shine will be yellow in bottom left. It starts with a conventional Forge FE against an Overpool because Shine doesn’t want to try to kill Bisu just yet.



Bisu makes a second cannon because he sees 6 lings and you can never be sure how many hundred more lings are behind them. In this case, its none. Shine has gone for a perfectly normal 3 Hatch Spire with 3 base. Still, after a little while and with no scouting information yet, Bisu throws down a third cannon blindly.



Bisu’s first Corsair gets out and sees everything there is to see before coming home. Near his natural, Shine some more Scourge hoping to come in for the sandwich. It turns out Bisu is pretty good so he manages to dodge and get to the safety of his cannons.



Bisu has made about 6 Corsairs at this point. Knowing this, Shine makes the only logical decision and begins producing Mutalisks. He attacks Bisu’s third that is starting to come up but there are a bunch of Corsairs, an Archon, and soon to be three Cannons.



Not a complete failure, some Scourge come in and manage to take out a couple of Corsairs after all. In the tradition of great surprises, Shine is working up to 7 hatches on his three base. He places an 8th hatch at his fourth base, presumably so he can support 10 hatch Hydralisk. Bisu finds it, kills the small ling defense there with some Zealots and a Dark Templar, and begins to work on the Hatch.



Shine has to cancel his fourth base but his march begins!



Shine first goes for the third base. He kills a lot of units and intercepts some incoming reinforcements but when Bisu retreats up his ramp, Shine sets his sights on the natural.



Ultimately Shine manages to smash down the front of the natural. But Bisu is still making a lot of units out of his Gateways and manages to stay pretty even with the Blob for a pretty long time. Meanwhile, his Corsairs are still alive and they have ran over to Shine’s base to kill every Overlord ever.



Now that Overlords are, at best, an endangered species, a lone Dark Templar runs into the third.



Meanwhile, Shine has done a rather large drop with Hydras and Underground Super Hydras into Bisu’s main - pretty much stopping production.



More units swing in through the front and Bisu’s looking increasingly dead. While he’s dying, Captain DT has moved onto Shine’s natural because it ran out of things to kill at the third.



Despite the DT’s tremendous efforts, Bisu is forced to type out.

Shine in red at the top left, Reality in yellow at the bottom right. A nice 1 Rax FE from Reality but not as baller as Shine’s 3 Hatch (3 base) before Pool.



Barring that weirdness, the game continued normally with Shine getting his gas and teching to Lair. Instead of the traditional Mutalisks, he’ll be opening with a Hydra Den.



Reality will be going for 4 Barracks before Factory with a quick +1 on his infantry, looking to bring some pain against the Mutalisks that won’t exist. Shine gets a really fast Queens Nest. It’s not long before Reality has a giant army out on the map and is looking pretty frightening as Shine doesn’t really have any units.



It’s not long before we see Shine’s plan become clear.

[cemter]
A really old rotting nasty tree! I mean, not that!

Meanwhile, realizing that Lurkers on a ramp are invincible, Reality notices he has only two choices: Start making mech units or quit the game and switch to Tetris.



Shine’s Greater Spire finishes but he actually doesn’t morph to Guardians right away. He noticed a distinct lack of Shootalisk Towers by the mineral lines so he goes in and kills a bunch of SCVs first.



Eventually Shine backs away and morphs the Guardians in a safe position. Unfortunately, his safety doesn’t last very long.



But now its time for the fun! One of the stupidest looking armies known to Brood War very slowly blobs itself towards Reality.



Reality manages to put up a bit resistance but not much. Before long, the death cloud is in his natural.



Finally, Reality is forced to call GG.

Shine is in white in the bottom right and Hydra in orange in the top left. Shine starts with a 12 Hatch in his natural while Hydra opens 9 Pool straight into Ling Speed.



The Lings manage to avoid being scouted until they get to Shine’s base. Shine has to cancel his very quick Lair to get ling speed ASAP, then pulls out of gas to get as many lings out as he can. Still, his position looks a bit rough.



Shine takes a lot of damage on his natural Hatchery but his greater production ultimately allows him to push back Hydra’s lings, with the help of a couple drones. The first problem is now dealt with, but Shine now faces a second problem - Hydra’s Spire is about to finish and Shine hasn’t started his Lair.



Shine resorts to the usual tactics when trying to avoid death my Mutalisks - Spore Colonies and sneaky Ling run-arounds.



Finally Shine starts working towards Mutalisks of his own and Hydra takes his second base. Hydra of course has the giant head start but Shine will have the quicker second gas to try to catch up with. Also, he has a few more drones because of some Ling runbys and having two Hatcheries for so long. Finally, going into the air wars, he’ll have the advantage of already having Spore Colonies at his bases. At long last, Shine is rocking flying units!



Shine has a whopping 5 drones mining in his natural (no sarcasm, this is a ZvZ!) so he buys a third Hatchery for his natural expansion.



Shine, being some sort of batman, has 4 lings out on the map doing a little patrol. Together, they have vision of a giant line straight through the map. It will be difficult to sneak anything by them!



For a long time, not too much happens. Lings casually wander around the map looking for things to sleep with, and Mutalisks slowly rock back and forth. Both players have +1 carapace on their air units. Shine decided to get brave and go for the legendary third base in ZvZ which is scouted before too long. Figuring the new base would be the likely target of aggression, Shine idles his units there and even builds a Spore there. After what seemed like forever, it looks like things are going to happen!



I suspect Hydra forgot to check on Shine’s upgrades right before he engages as I doubt he would have taken that fight had he known +2 finished for Shine. Whether he knew or not, the battle commences.



It turns out Hydra got absolutely mauled in the fight and Shine leaves with what looks to be about 20 Mutalisks. While that battle was happening, some lings slipped into Hydra’s main and did some respectable drone damage.



Hydra continued to play the game for at least another minute. Eventually he realized there was no amount of micro that would allow his 3 Mutas to kill the 24~ of Shine and conceded the match.

If you speak Korean, or even if you don’t and just want to support Shine in some minor way, go ahead and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/lyh6988