Before the recap, let me first start off by saying, what a season! TaekBangLeeSsang (TBLS) all playing up to the quarterfinals with upsets to Bisu and Hero and both semifinal series went down to the last winner-takes all game. It felt every bit like a throwback to the heyday of professional gaming. It is a testament to the kind of support given by every fan (Koreans and foreigners alike) and the enduring joy Brood War provides to both players and spectators. And now on to the recap.

[NeOx]FlaSh, the man (or robot? Which is it really?) they call God, was the center of attention. Although his past needs no introduction (just look up his glorious Liquipedia page FlaSh), his recent past may need one. After a disappointing exit last season, his fans were keen on seeing a redemption run with no less than a Finals appearance and another trophy to add to his collection. Over the course of the break between Season 1 and 2, he kept feeding his input with a steady stream of games, stamped out bugs in the system, and refined his mindgames all the while having fun with his NeOx clanmates. So this time, there are no more excuses; returned only recently? Is around a year still recent?. Doing bad on stream games and sponsored matches? Over 80% winrate... I don't know, maybe a bit.

On the other hand is [NeOx]Sea. Ex-MBCGame Heroes, ex-Team 8 and ex-Team Liquid player. Proleague monster. King of Afreeca Terran before Mind took over. Over the past two years, people began to think him as more of an entertainer than a competitive player. He doesn't practice as much as he used to but he somehow keeps posting strong online tournament performances. On the other hand, his offline performance (or lack of) became the butt of many jokes (I'm guilty of this). What was months turned into years and it became apparent that Sea's last hurrah may very well be the Sea- Killer rivalry earlier in the Sonic Era. However, last season, we saw a turnaround. He handed FlaSh a 'L' and slipped into the Round of 4 before bowing out to Sharp's hot TvT.

Game 1: Demian
Colors: FlaSh=White, Sea=Purple

FlaSh spawned at the right while Sea spawned at the bottom left. Both players went factory with FlaSh adding a natural expansion while Sea added a machine-shop. This put Sea behind in the economics game unless he can deal some damage with faster tech. This didn't happen because FlaSh was saved by wraiths. Sea went in and poked with mines-loaded. Against a force of similar size, he could have traded but with a single wraith in the air, it wasn't going to happen. The wraiths went on to do more damage with cloak until goliaths and scan became available to chase them away. But FlaSh wasn't about to let up. He then got a couple of dropships and snuck them through the bottom. To his surprise, goliaths and turrets were waiting at all the wrong places for him and the drop play came down crashing. This gave Sea some breathing room.

Despite that, FlaSh felt secure enough to start clearing the path to the upper parts of the map to take expansions there. He went for an almost double-expand and concentrated his tank lines in the adjacent open areas and left a meager population of two tanks protecting the bridge, the most direct path to his natural. Sea spotted the weakness and took advantage. He parked his tanks right within range of the entrance, starting a battle of attrition which was advantageous to FlaSh who had the defender's advantage of reinforcements. The invasion force was gradually wiped out but that only led to Sea getting the numbers advantage at the middle so he proceeded to claim it. FlaSh made him pay by sneaking vultures through an unguarded corridor to clear the mining operation at the bottom expansion.

In the midst of all this maneuvering was a strange setup where Sea had strong map control and maintained the split at two-thirds to his favor even though FlaSh was ahead five bases to three. FlaSh had been hording a vast load of resources while being cramped into a small space and that was the genius of this game. He figured out that he did not need to contest the middle. In fact it would be very advantageous to let it remain static. The weakness to Sea's position was that he didn't have enough resources to cover all the corridors decently or to transition to a more mobile force. So FlaSh opened things up with frequent vulture raids on the other side of the map. Then he prepared a huge dropship fleet to abuse the empty spaces at the edges of the map and ferry his sizeable tank army.

The first major expedition to the ten o'clock expansion led to a chain reaction. The drop was too big to be taken care off quickly so Sea took some of his troops stationed at the middle and invaded FlaSh's five o'clock base. FlaSh responded by diverting and reinforcing. The first wave got crushed severely and it took a second wave to clean up. After that was done, it was back to the game-breaker dropship plan. Sea was prepared this time and directed his armies towards the ten o'clock base. But, his anticipation was way too early. The units he sent returned to their original positions and that was when the bomb dropped. Knowing that it was a lost cause to retake that base, Sea hastily a-moved his forces to well, FlaSh's heaviest concentration of tanks. Everything owned by Bo-Sung detonated and he declared it was a good game.



Game 2: Benzene
Colors: FlaSh=Red, Sea=Yellow

Every once in a while, one of the love-it-or-hate-it matchups (I mean mirror matchups) produces a game that even the most profound haters will find entertaining. This is one of those games. We haven't had one of these since the semifinal meeting of Last and Mong on Sin Peaks of Baekdu, at SSL 10 (If you know an epic TvT in the time period in-between, do share!)

Sea opened with a barracks expand build at the top right which forced a scouting FlaSh to halt gas production to take his own natural. Contrasting game 1, this time it was Sea who had the slight economic advantage. Off of the earlier second base, he tried to play 3-factory mass vultures to which FlaSh sternly refused to partake in. Instead, he went ahead with his 2-factory starport game to do the popular thing to do on Benzene; a drop play on the narrow ridge at the natural expansion. The drop was expected and vultures were speedy enough to race back to defend.

After he took care of that, Sea comfortably took his third at the 12 o'clock spot while FlaSh pushed out to take the bottom-side plateau. From there, FlaSh led his units towards the bottom right, probably to make a swing towards the ridge or to cut behind the tanks positioned at the opposing ridge. I said "probably" because neither action manifested. His move was read ahead of time (again?) and a mech line appeared at the bridges. He contested and took a bit of a beating before pulling back. But instead of a full retreat, he sneakily detoured and made his way to Sea's third at the right 12 o'clock spot. This time, Sea didn't anticipate it as FlaSh moved his mass of metal away from Sea's sight. And that's when things took a turn for the worst.

FlaSh made the tactical decision to take control of Sea's weakened plateau and pull some tanks to dispatch the third base. However, it didn't work because Sea captured FlaSh's own plateau then swung his forces back and together with units coming from the main base, he sandwiched the tank line, completely obliterating it.


This completely tactical breakdown allowed Sea to take all the plateaus and fortify them at the bridges and take two bases; the mineral-only and the bottom right. On FlaSh's side, it called for an abrupt change to the plan. The only way he can outmaneuver Sea is through the use of a wraith transition or a dropship transition. He elected to do the latter to make way to get the critical-to-endgame-scenario left 6 o'clock expo. The decision worked amazingly well. It allowed FlaSh to emulate a split map scenario without controlling the plateau leading to the base at all.

Sea first responded naturally by bringing tanks in but he found the high ground advantage and the cramped pathway to be too problematic so he transitioned to wraiths and they worked wonderfully. He cut off the FlaSh ferry service and started picking apart the veritable fortress' population. Gradually, the expo became no man's land with FlaSh's units at the far left and Sea's units at the far right. And it stayed like that until FlaSh unveiled the 'solution' -- battlecruisers. Tanks, goliaths, dropships and the BCs came out and flushed out the would-be invaders from the expo.

The success however was short-lived because Sea had battlecruisers of his own. He started building them earlier than FlaSh but kept them away until FlaSh unveiled his own. The fleets converged at the highly contested expo. Well-placed Yamato shots and numbers gave the expo to Sea.


There was a lull in the action as both players sized each others' fleets. FlaSh was running low on resources and had resorted to some sporadic vulture attacks. Sea on the other hand diverted some production to goliaths. This current standoff ended when FlaSh got off a well-placed EMP in a sort of Wild West quick-draw of EMPs and Yamatos. And once again, the expo was under new management. After this, FlaSh brought his fleet between his mineral-only and natural to shut down the noise Sea was making and then a full exchange took place.


During the heat of the game, spectators where astounded by the fact FlaSh won that battle and it seemed like he had done it again. The lack of anything but goliaths on Sea's side made the impression even more profound. (Even I was raging "Sea, why go back to goliaths??!?") But it was all an illusion to Sea whose bank was very large.

We should have taken the hint from Sea's maniacal laughter as his fleet got destroyed. He remacro'd all the lost battlecruisers and brought them to six where it overwhelmed everything.



Game 3: Circuit Breaker
Colors: FlaSh=Blue, Sea=Brown

What followed one very epic game was a very scrappy game. Attribute that to FlaSh's choice of opening -- 7-barracks. FlaSh was vicious to start. He trained up three marines and got a bunker building beside Sea's barracks before even the first marine got out. And almost as soon as the marine exited the barracks, the poor guy turned into moosh. This forced Sea to pull the remaining workforce to try to chase away the three marines, plus one more. Two got surrounded and got cut into pieces then another marine appeared. The chaos bought Sea some time to get a marine out but it was still 1-on-3. Then this happened:


And that was enough for Sea to stabilize.

After that nerve-wracking start, both players started adding their natural expansions. The game might be showing signs of progressing into something more standard and less risky. Well, that didn't happen. Soon enough, both players started a series of scrappy skirmishes. It was like a schoolyard fight but with cannons, grenades and mines. In the midst of the chaos, FlaSh came out the winner because Sea couldn't prevent his tanks from clumping together. In large-scale pushes, these are forgivable but in high level early games, every single unit counts and that tipped the game to FlaSh who remained composed (he did start this whole thing after all). 2-1 was the score.

Game 4: Eye of the Storm
Colors: FlaSh=Purple, Sea=Teal

To be honest, there isn't much to say about this game. It was FlaSh's barracks-expand against Sea's 1-factory machine shop. After scouting Sea's base, FlaSh suspected something was up and sent an SCV to sniff it out. I said before that Sea didn't hide his well uhh, hidden starport very well as it was sitting near the most natural path where a scout can go but you have to give it up to FlaSh's starsense. He knew something was up, scouted it and prepared very well.


The wraiths didn't do much and then FlaSh totally made Sea's followup push look very noobish. Of course, the questionable execution didn't help. Ironically, FlaSh proceeded to get wraiths of his own to smash Sea's squadron with the help of cloak. And then after that, a nice little push and that was the series!

FlaSh is your Afreeca Starleague Season 2 Champion!