With one epic hive tech game, one fail timing game, one hide-and-seek-into-mutascourge-bust game, and one BO win, viewed individually these four sets cannot possibly paint out a succinct picture of how this series went. Of course, that's why this is a series. Players adapt as the games go by, and later games are very much so indicative of not only their planning, but also their responses to their opponent's builds and ploys.

Set 1: great < Dante's Peak > Hydra
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Set 2: great < Circuit Breaker > Hydra
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Set 3: great < Benzene > Hydra
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Set 4: great < Triathlon > Hydra
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Set 5: great < Dante's Peak > Hydra
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As a Whole...
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Introduction

The Zerg vs Zerg matchup has always been cursed with nicknames like "boring matchup", "Rock-Paper-Scissors", and "zvzzzzzzzzz". There are some merits behind these nicknames, since an average Zerg vs Zerg lasts less than 10 minutes and is usually decided by a build order difference. The only units produced (besides drone and overlord) are usually zerglings, mutalisks, and scourges, and many times the games end after one zergling battle. It was extremely rare to see any unit besides those three used in this matchup.

The reason for this is that the zerg units are very fast, therefore attacks and counterattacks are done quickly, and if one player comes out even slightly ahead in a battle, that is enough to kill all of the other player's economy before they can rebuild their defenses. Therefore, investing the mineral, gas, and drone required for hive tech is usually suicide, not only in that you may die right away, but you lose map control, allowing your opponent to expand and prepare for your hive tech. There are certain requirements that must be met before one player can tech to hive.

• The player must have equal or greater economy than the opponent
  
• The player must be able to survive until hive tech kicks in
  
• The player must deny his opponent's extra gas expansions
  

In order for the second condition to be met, spore colonies are necessary. The gas committed to hive tech will surely cause the player to lose air superiority. (If you had more gas units than your opponent, why don't you just go kill him instead of going hive!) And in order for a player to be able to put down the spore colonies without falling far behind in economy, the player must have started with a build that has better economy than the enemy, but slower tech to lair.

Getting to hive

Although we have been seeing an increase in the number of games that go to hive tech, there still isn't a single build that can meet these three requirements without any chance or luck involved. There are a total of 6 core variations of openings in Zerg vs Zerg. They are:

• 4-5 pool
  
• 9 pool speedling/lair
  
• Overpool speedling/lair
  
• Overgas
  
• 12 pool/12.5 pool expand
  
• 12 hatchery expand/main twin hatchery
  

The hive tech transition can only happen when both players are relatively equal in army value, so neither player can just just kill each other during the mid-game. Three of these openings (4-5 pool and 9 pool speedling) aims to finish the game early with zerglings, and have basically zero chance in turning into hive tech. Overgas/Overpool is almost never used anymore due to a common build (12 hatch) being a hard counter. That leaves us with 9 pool lair, 12 pool, and 12 hatchery builds.


Eliminating mirror builds, since any other resource commitment would result in a loss in the major battle, hive tech is most feasible when one player goes either 9 pool lair, 12 pool, or 12 hatchery, while the other player goes a different one of those three builds. This happens because one player will get the earlier tech to mutalisk, but the other player will have a lot more zerglings because of the extra hatchery. So the player with the extra hatchery will often try to end the game with a lot of zerglings while defending with spore colonies. If the attack fails, the player with the extra hatchery will have to survive with his spore colonies until he can get two extractors and begin making mutalisks. This allows the player to meet all three requirements for hive tech.


Of course, just because a player gets into this situation doesn't mean he will go hive tech. Often the players will just have a major mutalisk battle which decides the game. The result of that battle will be decided by how well each player harassed each other before.

In the first set of Great vs Hydra, Great started with 12 hatchery main, pool, gas, then got his natural expansion, mining only 100 gas for zergling speed. Hydra started with 12 pool expand to lair, without zergling speed. This means that Great will have a lot of more zerglings, but Hydra's tech will be much faster than Great's, following the scenario I mentioned above.


After Great sees that the game won't end with zerglings, he is forced to get spores to defend. Hydra takes this chance where Great has put in resources to getting spore colonies to get extra zerglings and attack with his fast mutalisks. Great barely comes out on top with his zerglings, but Hydra still has air superiority. Knowing that Great has no chance in a head-on battle, Hydra expands to a 3rd gas expansion, since if he gets that gas, he will be able to finish off Great with a large number of mutalisks before Great's hive tech comes into effect.


Great responds by sending a few zerglings to the 3rd expansion while pressuring Hydra's main with his mutalisks. Hydra can't send his mutalisks to save his 3rd, because Great's mutalisks would destroy his main base in the meantime since Hydra has no spore colonies unlike great. Great does this two times, both effectively stopping Hydra's expansion. Now Great has met the three requirements to go into hive tech, and of course he does so.

Hive tech yay

After finally arriving at hive tech, the player must choose between multiple new units at his disposal. The units used in hive tech Zerg vs Zerg are:


* Queen - Although hive is not required to build a queen, it is often better to just go hive once getting the queen's nest. Also, used along with a devourer/mutalisk army, the ensnare ability stops the opponent from running away after getting hit by deadly acid spores. Broodlings could also be useful in killing lurkers under swarm and defilers, but it is very situational. Of course, parasite could help too.


* Defiler - With two deadly abilities, the defiler can change the game in the blink of an eye. In a hive tech vs lair tech game, even hydralisks under swarm could easily defend mutalisk attacks, and one plague in the middle of the mutalisk army renders the whole army useless in matter of seconds. However, getting the upgrades to make the defiler useful takes a lot of time, and it is usually not a good idea to go straight into double defiler den after hive without getting any other units. In hive tech vs hive tech, defilers and lurkers are a must in defending expansions from any ground force attacks.


* Lurker - Although lurker is also not a hive tech unit, it is completely useless in lair tech. However, once the player gets defilers, or air superiority through devourers, it becomes one of the best units in Zerg vs Zerg. It renders any attack that does not have ultralisk in the army useless.


* Guardians - Don't make these.


* Devourers - Another unit that can change the result of a battle really quickly along with the defiler. Although it's damage is pretty laughable for a hive tech unit, it's ability, acid spores, is one of the strongest in the game. With each acid spore, the unit's attacking speed as well as the defense of the unit drops, and it also has an AoE. That means a stack of mutalisk quickly gets acid spore 3+ in a battle. Every acid spore is like your mutalisks getting +3 attack upgrade (+1 to each cushion damage), and in mirror matchups, this changes everything. Even with acid spore 3 on each mutalisk, 20 mutalisks can beat 30 mutalisks! With 9 acid spores, 3 mutalisks can defeat a battlecruiser easily (even 2 is possible with micro). However, devourers have one weakness: their slow moving speed. This means scourges can pick them off easily during a battle. Even so, each devourer is usually able to spit off one or two acid spores to the enemy. Once you get devourers in your army, air superiority is as good as yours.


* Adrenal Glands - Makes your zerglings OP. If your opponent doesn't have lurkers, you can easily gain ground superiority.

In set 1 of Great vs Hydra, Great decides to get Queen as he is getting hive tech. Because Hydra also denied Great's 3rd very well, Great needed a way to stop Hydra from having too many mutalisks even for his devourers to handle. He did this by luring Hydra's mutalisks away from his main base, ensnaring them, then sniping the spire. It was a brilliant move that ensured that Great would secure air superiority the second his devourers morphed.


Then Great decides to add devourers and adrenal glands. This is another brilliant choice. Devourers would secure air superiority, and adrenal glands would secure ground superiority. Hydra underestimates the power of hive tech and moves out towards the center with his huge air army. He even kills all but one of Great's devourers at the beginning of the battle. However, even with only 2~3 acid spores, Great forces Hydra to retreat, taking heavy damage due to ensnare. Hydra tries to counter using zerglings, but Great's adrenal glands has already finished and Great's 6 zerglings are able to fight evenly with Hydra's 10 zerglings at 1 o'clock.


Now with complete map control, Great can get the other hive tech units, Lurker and Defiler, safely to remove any possibility of Hydra making a comeback in the game. Great expands all over the map, and then takes his lurkers to Hydra's natural, and burrows the under swarm. With no ultralisks, Hydra has no way of killing those Lurkers, and is forced to GG.


Great effectively used his hive tech units in the right order to bring him to victory. Use queen to survive until devourers -> use devourers to gain air superiority -> get adrenal glands to gain ground superiority -> safely tech to the ultimate weapon, lurker + swarm.

Conclusion

Great, along with few other players have been recently entertaining the viewers with their flashy hive tech play. However, it is doubtful that hive tech play will become the main focus of Zerg vs Zerg anytime soon, or ever for that matter. The micromanagement of players today is too good to let the opportunity slip when the opponent begins teching to hive. Now, and even in the future, hive tech will only happen when certain conditions are met, and only if the player chooses to tech to hive.

Of course, if someone was able to introduce a build, or mid-game strategy that would allow a player to tech to hive safely, it would revolutionize the matchup. There would be so many more possibilities and unit compositions that might not yet have been discovered. But until that day, players like Hydra and Jaedong will stand on top as the kings of Zerg vs Zerg.

                                                - Flash, MSL pre-group-selection video

Well, this was the MSL (almost) everyone was waiting for. We finally got to see Flash knocked out of the MSL early on, and immediately, it was all up in the air--Jaedong, Stork, and Bisu had their chances at glory! But when Taek-Bang proceeded to drop out in a somewhat miserable fashion (due in part to them being paired together in the round of 16), and when Jaedong was pushed to his limits against Snow, the fan favorites seemed ... mortal.

Thanks to Flash, individual league finals have, to many, been decidedly bland for the past year or so, since Flash was in every single one of them. Furthermore, only one (July's Golden Mouse) of the past nine OSLs and two (won by Luxury and Calm) of the past eleven MSLs had not featured one of Taek-Bang LeeSsang prior to this season. This was a rare chance to see life beyond the iron curtain, a rare chance to see a rising player take his first title. It was a chance at something new, something many Flash antifans claimed to want.

But did they really want something new? I doubt it. What they really wanted was for their favorite player, who had likely already won some sort of title, to add another gold medal to their burgeoning (except in the case of Stork!) collection. As it turns out, most fans got more than they bargained for: Bisu was soundly defeated by archrival Stork and Stork was humiliated by Zero. Suddenly, the TBL fanboys were silenced. More hopes were shattered when Great recollected himself against Kal, resulting in a 4-Zerg semifinal a la Avalon MSL.

Then Avalon happened all over again for Jaedong; the era of JvZ seemed long gone as he dropped only his 2nd fifth set ever to Hydra. Once Jaedong was out, the confused fanboys looked for someone to support. Hydra was looking incredibly strong ZvZ, having just beaten Jaedong of all people after a ridiculous 17-2 ZvZ record from December to February. Great, on the other hand, touted a revolutionary Hive tech ZvZ strategy that he mostly showed off against Woongjin Zergs Zero and Soulkey, going 3-1 against the pair in Hive tech games. Some rooted for neo-Effort; others hoped for a revolution. So here it was: hand against mind, raw talent against refined strategy, the status quo against the promise of something new.

Unfortunately, that "something new" was made public too early for Great, and despite his epic victory in game 1, Hydra was all too ready for more shenanigans in the following games. Superior mechanics and standard ZvZ skill pulled him through in the end. Previous revolutions all banked on that element of surprise: Bisu's sair/DT, Flash's fast armory, Fantasy's valkonic... Great had none of that on his side. He boldly proclaimed his new age of Hive tech ZvZ, and his opponent was good enough to adjust and stop him from getting there.

Great's supposed Hive tech superiority had already been challenged by his loss to Zero (though admittedly he was already quite behind)--and Hydra showed that instead of preparing to defeat Great at his strong point, it was sufficient to beat him before he could get there. Great was able to crush Zero repeatedly in the early/mid-game due to strong preparation and Zero's relative lack of skill in standard ZvZ, but the tables were reversed in the finals. There was no revolution.

But will there be one? Great, Zero, and Soulkey may very well continue delving into the deep unknown of Hive tech ZvZ, a matchup that could be dubbed the "last frontier" of Brood War in an era where new strategies are not revolution but innovation. This is not to say innovation is bad: small tweaks and new maps slowly steer the "standard" Brood War strategies in each matchup toward new shores. We can hope, however, that one day, we will discover the New World of Hive tech ZvZ.

And as for the next MSL... let's hope that the maps aren't out to screw Terran and Protoss over again. Here's to a new season, new blood, new strategies, and not an all-Zerg semifinals!

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This season's preliminaries were, well, upsetting. Sorry for the bad pun, but let's take a look at who advanced: 4 Air Force players; 9 players listed in their team's March 2011 Dream League roster, 3 of which have never won a game in Proleague; 9 players who have never qualified for Survivor before; and 7 slumping players who had won at most 1 out of 7 prior to preliminaries according to TLPD. On the flip side, strong up-and-coming players such as Brave, TurN, Bogus, BByong and BaBy were each knocked out by a Dream Leaguer, while fan favorites Anytime, Rock, YellOw, Reach, and Pusan and slumpers such as sKyHigh and Kwanro didn't manage to capitalize on the trend. Woongjin and KT were the big losers in these prelims, boasting 0 and 1 qualifications, respectively.

Other than SKT, which had both a lot of players qualify through prelims and a lot of players who lost in the MSL Ro32/Ro16 last season, the representation of each team in Survivor is surprisingly uniform, and the matches are looking good. There's plenty of new blood hungry to make their mark on progaming, so hopefully we'll see some new faces in this MSL.

But on the flip side, for the first time in living memory, the preliminaries had only two rounds--a total of just 102 players over 26 groups. This is probably due to the lack of B-teamers remaining on the rosters, so I hope gloomy naysayers don't start a big flame war about this. The MSL perseveres despite legal trouble and Wings of Liberty, and for this we should be thankful and supportive fans. Here's to another season of MSL!

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