It's been a long time since Liquid fans have been able to celebrate a new signing, but we think these two players were well worth the wait. We're extremely happy to present Liquid`MaNa and Liquid`Bunny.



As a player who's been around since the Brood War days, MaNa seems like one of the oldest veterans in the scene. In reality, he was still a teenager just a few months ago, having turned 20 years old last December. Although MaNa had a quiet year in 2013 after achieiving great results in 2012, he's a player who still has every bit of potential to become a champion again.

2013 was also a year when MaNa had to leave mousesports, the only home he had known in his professional career. I've always had the utmost respect for the mousesports organization, and I was personally a big fan of their 2011-12 line-up of Morrow, HasuObs, Thorzain and MaNa. Ever since then, MaNa was a player that I had a special interest in, thinking he would be a great player for Liquid if we just had the opportunity.

At the end of 2012, we even had a conversation with MaNa about possibly joining Liquid. However, MaNa decided to stay with mousesports out of loyalty to the organization that had helped him become a great player. Once we heard he was being released, we decided to pursue the idea of Liquid`MaNa once again. Things worked out this time around, and we were able to sign one of the longest standing Liquid candidates.

I believe in MaNa's skill, potential, and work ethic. Even though he suffered some setbacks in 2013, I believe that he will come back stronger than ever in 2014.



For some time now, Bunny has been known to fellow progamers as one of the best Terran players in Europe. Though he wasn't able to play to the best of his abilities in WCS 2013, he kept working hard to improve and have a better shot in WCS 2014.

Liquid agreed to terms with Bunny in early February, just a weeks before his WCS Premier League matches. The transition to a new team didn't faze Bunny, and he made an important breakthrough by advancing through his group and making it to the live Ro16. I would have loved to have announced Liquid`Bunny before the matches, but we're just as proud of him nevertheless.

Making the Ro16 was a key moment for Bunny, and I'm confident he's going to keep getting better and surprise everyone before the year is over. I've always believed that skill shown on the ladder and smaller tournaments will inevitably reveal itself on bigger stages as well. Bunny can count on our support as he strives to show the world what he can really do.

I want to thank Copenhagen Wolves for making this transfer easy and making their players' needs their first priority. I love what they are doing with aspiring Danish players, and I wish them much success in the future.



Welcome to the team, MaNa and Bunny. I'm excited to work with you guys in 2014 and I hope we can do great things together.

Finally, I'd like to thank our sponsors HyperX, Razer, Twitch, Barracuda, NeedForSeat, and Shinythings. They're the ones who keep this team going and make great signings like this possible.

Connect

From Liquid

Interview with Liquid`MaNa

I am doing good, thanks. I've been practicing quite a bit recently and some of the results are paying off already. However, there's still a long road before I can rise at the top once again.



My name is Grzegorz Komincz and I am from Poland. This year I'll become 21 year old Protoss player. I am a former Mousesports gamer, I've been there for 4 years. Before Starcraft 2 I was playing Starcraft Brood War kind of professionally, I was one of the best foreigner players there at the beginning of SC2 era.



I've started my Starcraft time by playing the Demo with my brothers which was included in some computer magazine. It really looked like a fun game then and luckily for us, our cousin who was living very nearby us had a full version of it. It really was fun to play together on LAN and we discovered then that there's something like internet and professional gamers in Korea. We really wanted to become one of them. As the time passed, me and my brother were getting better and better and from being best in city we became one of the best in Poland and started to mean something on the world scene too.



I have made all my gaming dreams come true. I wanted to become a progamer - check. I wanted to win a big tournament - double check, however winning something bigger than DreamHack and ESWC is a work in progress ^^. I wanted to visit Korea - check. I wanted to visit Korea and play in a big tournament there - check. Be one of the best/the best foreigner - check, but now I am not even close to that one so I have to come back very shortly! I am happy with the past, but not very happy with the present. I have lots of work to do to be at the top again.



For the first few years I wasn't visiting Teamliquid.net at all. Then very rarely just to check news about TSL and so. Then I started to get addicted to the community and reading the most important news and topics. Teamliquid has become one of the three – must-be-on sites on my browser. I am happy that we have a big site that gathers all the community and shares the passion to the same game as I do.



In the previous year Victor approached me that he's interested in me joining Team Liquid. After a couple of talks with Mousesports and Team Liquid I decided to stay with mouz for another year as the offer they made was very satisfying for me and at that time Mousesports had a rough time so I wanted to help in developing the team. Then this year when I was parting ways with Mousesports I wrote to Victor that I am gathering offers from different teams and that I am available. Couple of weeks later Victor contacted me that HyperX is going to be the sponsor of TL.net and we started the talks again, about the past, future and so on. In the end we came to an agreement earlier this month and I am happy to be here now.

I have never heard any bad things about Team Liquid from any of the players, and I know basically all of them. Only good opinion about the team from players is very important to me. Also I am a player who's very stable so I was looking for a team which is also stable. As I said I know basically all of the Liquid players as well as the management so it's very easy to switch from Mousesports to here. It's like travelling to another family in real life.



Nothing very specific, we've been friends for such a long time already that there didn't have to be any special welcome to me or anything. I am grateful for a warm greetings from them and I am sure we will be having lots of fun in the internal chats as well as exchanging our gaming experience. The first talk we had in the chat when I arrived was a discussion about Scandinavian women and their beauty. It was a very professional and reasonable discussion of course.



I've been at the bottom of the scene for too long. I am very hungry to become a champion and anything else than becoming a champion in this year is going to be a failure to me. My another goal is to be the foreign hope and Korean slayer. With good amount of support of my fans and teammates I am looking very forward to achieving these goals.



Since Bunny is new to the Starcraft scene, I haven't had much opportunities to talk to him privately. However we met at Homestory Cup as well as we talked together on Artosis' META show. As he's my teammate we have to get to know each other more. We've played some practice games before so it's just going to be easier as we're in the same team now.



You're very welcome. As I said in the previous questions, I am hungry for a victory. Please support me in my new team and I will do everything I can to complete my goals for the future. It's time to make a big step forward.

And of course, a shoutout to my new sponsors, HyperX, Barracuda, Needforseat, Twitch.TV, Razer and Shiny Things!

Interview with Liquid`Bunny

Thank you! It’s going well, I’ve been in high spirits ever since I passed Ro32 in WCS.



Hi I’m Patrick "Bunny" Brix 21 year old Terran player from Denmark. I have been playing SC2 full time for little over a year now, starting when I finished high school. I've been playing various games ever since I was 4 years old, but I don’t have a competitive RTS background apart from SC2, the closest would probably be playing Brood War and WC3 with some friends over LAN. When SC2 got released I never really had a goal to become a high level player, let alone a professional, I just played it a ton because I enjoyed it. Eventually I ended up getting better and better and well… here I am I guess.



After having played for a while and improving a lot, I started going to some Danish LAN tournaments (I think I was high master at this time) I got to experience how exciting it feels to compete, it was at this point I really fell in love with the game. I won my first LAN in October 2011, wow that’s a really long time ago! Even though the prize was not big, it still felt absolutely great to win something for the first time. Afterwards I just kept playing and practicing, but it wasn't until 2013 that I got a good international result by qualifying for premier league.

Looking back on 2013 as a pro player I’m not very satisfied, I didn't manage to make any good runs even though I was feeling confident in my skill. I’d like to blame it on myself getting too nervous for matches, something which I've definitely improved a lot recently.



I like fast games with lots of fights and micro, one of my original reasons for choosing Terran was that their units felt the most fun to micro! I think my strengths would definitely be engagements and timing sense, I usually have a good idea of when to attack. Good thing I don’t have to play against Swarm Hosts like Protoss or I might have gone crazy.



I started the group off by losing 1-2 to NaNiwa, then I beat sLivko 2-0 and finally NaNiwa 2-1 to advance. When NaNiwa typed gg in the last game, I jumped up and I think I almost managed to break my headset haha. Honestly even though I won I have a hard time feeling completely satisfied, NaNiwa played very cheesy games and it seems like most fans were thinking he wasn't playing seriously, so instead of me getting credit everyone ended up talking about how NaNiwa played.



This is very hard for me to predict, there’s so many good players this time around, even getting past the Ro16 will be very difficult. If I get a decent group I should be able to go to the Ro8.



If anything it gives me confidence. Aligulac is a very well made site but of course it’s not completely accurate. I don’t know if I’m good enough to call myself number 1 yet, but that’s what I am aiming for! Last year TL couldn't even give an international Terran award because nobody was performing, perhaps I can try to earn it this year.



I think it’s partially due to Terran not having many all ins / tricks to win with. If you’re faced up against a superior player and you have to win by having better mechanics and decision making, the odds of you winning are not very high. I think this is also why we very rarely see foreign Terrans beat Koreans. Terran can also be very frustrating to play, especially against Protoss, many players end up just blaming balance for their losses instead of actually trying to improve. But I won’t say I have the final answer, these are just some of my thoughts, I do hope however that I can bring a bit of hope back.



I hope that I can get some good results at offline events, those were lacking last year! I’m also looking very much forward to playing in team leagues, I've never really had a proper experience of playing as a team before. I expect 2014 to be a great year!!



MaNa was in a DreamHack finals back when I was still just a fan of the scene, so experience wise comparing me to him, I’m a bit of an amateur haha. He’s always friendly and willing to joke around so I think it’ll be fun being on the same team, I also feel he’s in good shape recently.



Thanks for the interview, and thanks to everyone who’s always cheering me on and sending positive tweets on twitter. I’ll do my best to show some great games this year, and now that I’m on TL I’ll also be streaming more, so look forward to that! Shout out to my Danish Skype group who often plays too much hearthstone and too little SC2. Oh, and I might as well start practicing. Thanks to the sponsors : HyperX, Razer, Twitch, Barracuda Networks, Need for Seat and Shiny Things for making all this possible!

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