Despite a dip in performance during ASL Season 2, herO was the strong favorite against Lazy. Lazy took complete control of the early game though with a clever zealot legs into double stargate corsair build, completely shutting down muta play and sniping almost a dozen overlords. While it wasn’t enough to break herO’s third base, it slowed down his macro considerably and gave Lazy some breathing room.

With the advantage in his favor, Lazy took a great engagement at his fourth and began marching across the map with a gigantic gateway army. Unfortunately, a major flub in control split his zealots away from the main army and exposed his dragoons to a swarm of cracklings, and just like that, Lazy’s advantage evaporated.


herO’s risky double expand earlier in the game paid off and allowed him to pump nonstop units from five bases and batter Lazy’s follow-up push. From there, it was all downhill for the Protoss player as he slowly dropped to herO’s superior macro.


sSak ended up being the biggest surprise of the night, going 2-0 in his group. Like herO, Rain was the heavy favorite with an impressive 71% win rate in PvT, but it was going to be a hard sell against the power of the mech army on Camelot.

The early game happened without much incident with the only surprise coming from Rain’s hidden third base in the bottom left corner, but the greed from Rain was real; after taking a fourth and fifth base, he began teching to carriers while trading off his zealots. When sSak came knocking on the front door, Rain had neither the critical mass of carriers to fend off the attack nor the gateway units to slow it down and came to a quick and anticlimactic ending.


This was not the matchup we were expecting to see, but it turned out to be an...interesting one.

sSak opened with a unique 1-1-1 build with an early wraith to harass overlords and force out hydras. Back at home, he teched up quickly to science vessels and siege tanks while getting his economy off the ground. Unfortunately for herO, he reacted poorly with an odd hydra push with overlord speed and delayed his third only to greeted by siege tanks and a bunker.

Way behind in tech and economy, herO began looking for some kind of opportunity to crush sSak’s push. In another rather anticlimactic ending, herO ran eight lurkers into sSak’s natural for a counterattack while leaving his natural exposed. Science vessels and tanks cleaned up the lurkers easily, and sSak’s bio force walked into herO’s main against a measly force of a few stray zerglings to take the series and advance out of the group 2-0.



In a macro game, Rain wins hand down, so Lazy went for the second option: proxy 2-gate. Rain’s unbelievable star sense allowed him to quickly scout out the middle map proxy and get two gateways and a shield battery up in time to deal with the push.


In a desperation attempt, Lazy built a shield battery of his own inside Rain’s main while microing his zealots. For a moment, it looked as if Lazy might actually overpower Rain after forcing his opponent’s zealots out of the main and away from the shield battery. However, at that point, the observer cut to Lazy’s main where one of Rain’s zealots had snuck out and was terrorizing the probe line! With a probe pull, Rain easily dispatched the remaining zealots in his base and moved on to the most highly anticipated match of the night against herO.


Where to even begin on this one? We finally got the match we wanted to see, but the map made things a bit more complicated. While macro games are common on Outsider, they are usually punctuated by air control, tons of drops, and abuses of the mineral line walls the line the edges of the map—and this game was no different.

Rain opened with a very strange 1-base corsair build with only two corsairs to gain air control but was easily deflected by herO. The zerg player quickly began to abuse the map with hydras behind Rain’s mineral line and lurker drops all over the map. Rain’s weak attempts at drops were shut down as herO began the switch into mutas to abuse Rain’s lack of air control.


Outgunned in the skies and on the ground, Rain quickly began dropping to the pressure of herO’s map-wide presence. Relegated to only two mining bases, he held on for as long as he could without storms or reavers, but the Zerg swarm eventually overran his pure gateway army to win the game.