On his way to the MLG championship, MMA drew upon that unique winning formula of equal parts luck, skill and perseverance. But in his finals series, MMA dismantled LosirA with pure class. Out macroed, microed, positioned, and multi-tasked, LosirA conceded each game having savaged his opponent's economy, but neutered in the face of MMA's end-game forces. The story of how MLG was won is the story of how MMA has developed his awesome TvZ, and why it's a small but meaninful change in the short history of Sc2.



It should be obvious to even the most careless of observers that MMA's style revolves around the eight marine drop. His use of this strategy—it's a tactic for everyone else, but MMA nearly makes it into a lifestyle—has born tremendous fruit in recent games apart from the MLG final. In the GSTL Ace match, MMA outlasted DongRaeGu with the same relentless harass.

But MMA's use of the drop goes well beyond what most players would consider feasible or safe. Almost by definition, dropping your opponent requires segmenting your army to achieve either surprise, a positional advantage, or both. The player conducting the drop is taking several risks in order to achieve an advantage. But if the drop is sniped or is cleaned up with no losses, then it creates a disadvantageous position for the dropping player. They have just given away a significant part of their army for nothing. In more than several instances, a drop is designed as a key part of an overall strategy, and it's failure can scuttle the preparation of a player.

It's not even entirely fair to say that MMA drops better than anyone else, although he does some things extremely well. One of MMA's strongest suits is his patience in letting a drop develop, when scouted, he nearly always unloads to kills off the offending scouting unit. Another characteristic is his persistence in keeping a drop alive with pick-up/cliff micro until it is forcibly killed off. Yet in nearly every one of his late-game TvZ games, MMA lost at least one of his drops having done no damage, and in most cases, this occurred multiple times. In other occasions, MMA inflicted only cosmetic damage or suffered damage to his main army in part because he had marines and medivacs engaged elsewhere.

So what exactly makes MMA's drop play so effective?



The critical aspect of MMA's drop play is it's frequency and persistence. MMA nearly always ensures that he drops two places at one time. He wears down his opponents, and snipes key buildings or units if they hesitate for a second. While his opponents are in the dark about his drops, MMA constantly puts himself in a good position to concentrate on his drops, sieging his tanks and keeping his marines split as his drops come in. His aforementioned patience with his drops is also important, as he constantly keeps dropping lanes clear of overlord or zergling traffic—LosirA, it should be noted, was extremely diligent about sending out overlords to scout for drops throughout the game—and finally his drop micro is extremely solid. A combination of these factors;
      1) Superior Multitask
      2) Superior Preparation
      3) Superior Patience
      4) Superior Micro
Gives MMA some insurance that his drop play will do damage at some point. But these are hardly noteworthy observations. The wear and tear that MMA's drop play causes upon his opponents is obvious. In the finals, LosirA made his largest mistake of the series—losing all of his mutalisks in a desperate bid for decisive victory in game one—after losing an expansion and many drones to multipronged attacks. LosirA's gg in the first game of the final set on Shattered Temple wasn't prompted entirely by the loss of his main army and drones. Before leaving, LosirA took a look back at his base, where eight marines and two medivacs were killing his tech. That's when he left.

But MMA's drop play rests upon a stronger theoretical foundation that makes it difficult to simply defend endlessly and win. A strong comparison can be made here to the famous TvP vulture play of Fantasy. There are strong ties between these two players. Both are skinny with narrow faces. Both have a former bonjwa mentor in the background. Both are extremely clutch in teamleague play. And the comparisons are only reinforced in their playstyle. Both dangerously skimp on defense throughout their games in favor of risky offense or expansions. Both favor harassment as a means to an end. Both have displayed questionable crisis management on several occasions, and made brilliant decisions in others. Both are inconsistent, but unquestionably tremendous players. And both abuse terran cost-effectiveness like Hot_Bid does sunglasses or I do adverbs.

In BW TvP, the vulture is versatile and fast. It is seamlessly integrated into the standard terran TvP tech pattern, yet it's usefulness is somewhat diminished after it lays its spider mines. In the TvP horror universe of fantasy's creation, vultures gained an entirely new dimension as fantasy used them throughout the game to raid protoss bases and empty them of probes. Protoss players responded by developing effective vulture-safe wall-offs for their expansions. Fantasy responded by dropping the vultures in. Protosses began to put cannons in their mineral lines. Fantasy took the damage and killed the probes anyway, or else turned on his maphacks to intercept probe transfers. For a period, fantasy TvP's had protoss playing scared, often resulting in a passivity that allowed fantasy to ninja expansions, assume map control, or get away with an appalling lack of defense in midgame situations.

In Sc2, MMA has used his marine-medivac drops like fantasy does vultures. That's because the marine-medivac drop is extremely similar to the vulture runby. It is versatile and fast. It is cheap. It has the potential to be very disruptive. Just as vultures could massacre a probe line in seconds, eight marines can bring a stunning amount of DPS to bear against drones, tech, or a hatchery. Moreover, simultaneous MM-drops are surprisingly efficient uses of two medivacs and eight marines at the most basic cost-benefit level. Compared with TvP, medivacs are more expendable in TvZ, and their primary use is often to pick up marines from lost ground battles than it is to actually make a difference with in-battle healing like they are against a protoss army. Marines, as well, can be lost cheaply in drops, as terran can, and expects lose some of them easily anyway to banelings. Additionally as MKP demonstrated last year, marines are cost effective in virtually any setting, so using them in groups of eight as opposed to groups of twenty or thirty isn't going to greatly diminish their usefulness, especially in surgical base raiding. In comparison using groups of two tanks or four stalkers is obviously idiotic when you can mass them for much greater effect.

Marines and medivacs are expendable, and even more expendable in TvZ than in other match-ups. Terrans usually do not have to make vikings or marauders until much later stages of the game, which means that cheaply lost marines and medivacs always have replacements already in production. The advantages one or two drops can cause in a game is disproportionate to their worth. It's like if the three point line in basketball became a five point line. Sure you might miss a little more often from the new line, but would anyone ever shoot a two point shot?



Even more that with just the hard math, MM-drops show their worth with a whole host of intangibles. If one drop pulls the entire zerg army over to one side of the map, or even just divert the zerg's attention, than it can buy time for the second drop to kill a spawning pool, snipe an expansion or assassinate a wealth of drones. This means that MMA's drops as a whole wind up being cost effective in a way that one drop or two drops could not be. Most terran players make drops only when they are behind, or at highly predictable timings when their first medivacs come out. MMA's drop play is predictable only in the sense that it will happen. But after defending one drop, there is no guarentee of later safety. After passing one particular timing, there is no reason to let down your guard. MMA's drop play is simply more effective because it happens more often, and largely regardless of situation. MMA's drop play actually creates a climate of fear that prevents zerg from running free.

The proof is in the pudding. A critical snipe of a spawning pool (Typhon Peaks), a drone massacre (Shattered Temple), some time wasting overlord sniping (Metalopolis), all contributed to MMA's overall victory in a way that eight, sixteen, twenty four, or even more marines really couldn't. MMA's drops pay for themselves in more than just minerals and gas. They buy time and allow for a faster expansion. They distract and confuse the zerg. They set the stage for phantom drops, or for real pushes. They allow terran to sieze control of the game from an agressive low-tech zerg. When you have macro like MMA and you're facing an opponent the level of LosirA, these things matter. That's the critical insight that fantasy's vulture play abused in BW, and that MMA's non-stop drop play has brought to Sc2.

Even with proper appreciation for the glory that is MMA's TvZ, it's difficult to believe that he can keep this up forever. Fantasy's vulture play has been slowly deflected as protoss BW players have become more adept at the predictive skills needed to defend it. So too will Sc2 zergs regain the multi-tasking ability they seem to have leeched after months in Sc2. MMA's drop play is far from undefendable, and there's no reason that a spine crawler and a transfuse, or a spore crawler and pre-placed banelings can't shut down MMA's play. Or perhaps a healthy dose of all-in ling aggression—LosirA's preferred remedy—will force MMA into a more defensive posture. But for the moment, the advantage lies with the terran and those who are quick enough to press the boundaries of Sc2's micro and multitask.



And in that vein, MMA's win and MLG in general was wonderful for thousands of fans as well as this writer. This is in large part because Sc2's is changing from a maxed-army, ball vs ball standard of play into something more dynamic. And a small piece of that change occurred before our eyes last weekend. It was a great thing to see.