by Waxangel


Where They Stand

LG-IM is waaaaay overrated. There, I said it.

Now to explain why.

On paper, the three-headed monster of Mvp, Nestea and MC is absurdly unfair to the rest of the competition. That's nine GSL championships on one team, and the #1, #2 and #3 players in lifetime prize money rankings on one team as well. However, the reality is that they've all been major disappointments in the GSTL.

Let's start off with their gun for hire, SK_MC. MC's overall record in the GSTL is 9 – 6, which is a pretty decent record until you consider that oGs never placed above the halfway line in GSTL with MC as their ace. Here's an interesting stat that might further demonstrate the degree of MC's contributions to the team: MC is 3 – 5 as the last surviving player on his team. Basically, MC's GSTL career topped out at being a luxury rotation player, but he fell way short of being a championship caliber ace that carried his team to victory.

Mvp is similar to MC, coming in with a 10 – 7 record. Surprisingly, he's only been deployed as the team's Ace and final player in a few situations, and most of the time he's come out in the middle of the rotation. In that role, he's been fairly good, but the problem is that he's hardly living up to his superstar billing. Mvp is supposed to be the face of LG-IM, not a player who's getting outperformed by Happy and Yoda.

Nestea is disappointing for a different reason: he doesn't actually give a f*** about the GSTL. Okay, that's a bit harsh, considering I haven't actually asked him his opinion on the GSTL. But the fact remains that he's only ever played in exactly four out of LG-IM's fourteen GSTL matches in history. You have to give Nestea credit for his impactful debut match, where he came out as the team's ace and won them the championship in the inaugural GSTL tournament. However, he's gone 0 – 3 in subsequent appearances, being upset by Alicia, Tails, and Seal in disappointing matches.

Why has this GSL championship trio been so comparatively bad in the GSTL? It could be for a couple of reasons.

First, it's entirely possible that they just didn't care as much. That's not a slight on anyone's character – the fact is that while the GSTL is a fantastically entertaining league for the fans, it hasn't made much headway in terms of becoming a super-prestigious league like the GSL. Just this season, we saw a team drop out and give walkover wins to all their opponents – not exactly a sign of stability and fierce competition. It's perfectly understandable if the three had other competitive priorities, and chose singles competitions with more prize money over the GSTL (the GSTL has a disappointingly low payout).

Second, their styles might not be suited to the GSTL. Maybe in their primes you could have asked them to go out and beat a collection of random players, but that's not who they are now. That's better suited for ladder monsters and mechanically talented players like MKP or ZeNEXLife, who spend hundreds of hours a month swatting away nameless challengers on Battle.Net. The LG-IM trio are masters of laying out plans for multi-game series and preparing for single opponents, and going into a BO1 rapid-fire gauntlet is not their specialty.

All that said, LG-IM is still a very formidable team. Their lack of streaky players makes them less of an all-kill threat than some other teams, but they are a very deep team all around. Mvp and MC at their worst were still solid rotation players, and when you combine them with other such players like Yoda, Losira, and Seed, it's one of the few teams that has no major holes in its one-through-five line-up. Even if the MC-Mvp-Nestea trio plays at its past, disappointing level, LG-IM can still expect a mid-high level finish at least. Also, while it's unlikely that the trio will suddenly get it going in the GSTL, if they can, the sky's the limit.



Though there are still some glaring flaws to fix, TSL looks pretty strong after its most recent period of rebuilding. Depending on how you rate Symbol, he and Polt form possibly THE best one-two punch in the GSTL. Polt has been excellent for all of 2012, and Symbol continues to build up even more steam. He used and abused FnaticRC's aLive and Oz yesterday, and it's hard to see him losing to anyone but the most prepared snipers or GSL championship class players.

The main problem for TSL is that they still don't know who else is supposed to give them wins. None of TSL's supporting cast has been particularly good in the GSTL, with the exception of Revival who has fallen off since looking strong in the summer of 2011. Shine, Inori, and Hyun probably did well enough in practice to deserve their spots in yesterday's match, but they were all disappointing as they were crushed by Moon (who is awesome, admittedly).

It's really a testament to how important star-power is in the GSTL that we can still consider TSL one of the better teams in this tournament. Obviously you want depth as well, but strength in one department can go a long way in making up for a weakness in the other. If the three non-Polt/Symbol players hovered slightly below a .500 win-rate, TSL could probably still make the playoffs.


Players of Interest

LG-IM: Seed, Yoda, LosirA, Happy

When you take away the top two players and look at the mid-tier players for each team, IM has a pretty strong advantage. Just like Moon did for FnaticRC, any one of Seed, Yoda, Happy, or Losira are liable to three-kill TSL's non-aces. The question is what kind of chance do they stand against Polt and Symbol?

Happy, Yoda, and Seed have looked pretty strong against mid-level competition, but none of them have beat a really good player for a while now. Happy or Yoda could be used to snipe Polt in a TvT, and Seed might have a shot of beating Symbol in his best match-up of PvZ, but it doesn't seem like they have that great a chance.

Losira is the most intriguing possibility of scoring a surprise win over TSL's terrible twosome. While he's fallen into a terrible funk when competing in live tournaments, he's continued to be a really good player in online settings. He's cruised through online qualifiers for multiple tournaments now, taking out several Code S players in the process. He's definitely the most skilled player of the bunch, so it will be interesting to see if he can finally get over his live-tournament jinx.

Team SCV Life: Anyone who can step up

Like I mentioned above, the players in the three non-Polt/Symbol spots don't even have to attain a .500 win rate for TSL to go far in this tournament. All they have to do is make a semi-reasonable contribution (are they the true heirs of the SKT Zerg-line?). The TSL supporting cast went 1 – 3 against FnaticRC yesterday, which turned out to be enough for a victory. If they repeat that performance against LG-IM, then TSL is looking at a loss or a 5 – 4 win at best. It doesn't matter to TSL specifically who gets the wins – they could really use at least two from their back-three if they want a decent shot at victory.


The Aces

LG-IM: Mvp and NesTea

Despite the fact that Mvp spent the entirety of the previous Code S proving all of his doubters wrong, I'm going to do something extremely unwise and doubt him again. We know that Mvp is incredible in the GSL, with the best series planning, best mind-games, and best composure in the face ridiculous pressure. But all I'm saying is that he hasn't made that translate to similarly awesome GSTL performances yet. Is it so unreasonable to doubt someone who hasn't proven himself in a certain environment? IS IT? In any case, I've prepared a bottle of whiskey to down for when he inevitably beats Symbol and Polt consecutively.

As for Nestea, I'm not entirely certain he will even play. I'm wondering if the LG sponsorship came with the added pressure of having to perform better in team leagues as well. That was the entire idea behind the huge corporate sponsorships of Brood War teams and the shifting of focus from individual leagues to the Proleague: corporations are interested in eSports because they want their names represented by winning teams playing in a prestigious league. In its present state, GSTL doesn't even deserve to hold Proleague's keyboard, but it's still the most prestigious team competition Starcraft II has. It just may be enough to force some more Nestea appearances.


Team SCV Life: Polt and Symbol

After seeing Symbol stomp through Byul, Moon, aLive and Oz in a monster four-kill, it seems inevitable that LG-IM are going to need either Mvp or Nestea to take him down. While I will never pick Mvp to lose a BO5+ to anyone ever again, best of one is an entirely different story. If Mvp comes in with a sniper attitude and prepares for Symbol on a specific map with a special strategy, then he would obviously be favored. However, that's just not how he's played in the GSTL so far. Instead, he's tried to play like a DongRaeGu, an all-around problem solver who needs to be able to beat any combination of five players on five maps. That's just not playing to his strengths, and Symbol would probably beat an Mvp who came out with a generalized plan.

As for Polt, we're still waiting for him to make an appearance. It was interesting to see TSL save their two best players for last, as opposed to the more common strategy of deploying one of the better players earlier in the line-up. Given the weak performance from the starting three in the previous match, there might be a roster shake-up in the works.


Prediction

LG-IM is the biggest mystery of this GSTL tournament, and it's very hard to predict how they'll do. If the LG sponsorship has changed nothing at all for them, and MC (not present for this match), Mvp, and Nestea continue to treat team tournaments as a secondary priority, then the best they can hope to do is coast to a mid-table finish.


TSL 5 - 4 LG-IM