The Fresh Prince of Jin Air

The year was 2013. Maru had just lost against Madbull in the GSTL. Despite being the youngest player in the scene, he was also a veteran. One of the rare breed that had played the game from day 1 and had even qualified for GSL Open Season 1. Going into OSL 2013, everyone thought of him as a known quantity. A player with some sparks of potential, but not one that you’d ever expect to lead his race. He then crashed through the door and destroyed everyone culminating in his first ever victory.

The year was 2013. Team 8 is dying. Their three star players in Sea, TY and Jaedong have all left for greener pastures. There is no sponsorship, the team is dying. Their leader retires. But a miracle happens and they get picked up by Jin Air. And while it is a strong line-up (True, Cure, Rogue, PigBaby, Check, Terminator), there are no stars. Jin Air then hires on Ryu Won as coach and Maru and sOs as their aces. The roster is complete, but no one would realize the monster that was about to be unleashed in the form of the Prince.

The Prince of Jin Air, more commonly known as the little psychopath in Korea, grew stronger than he ever was under the regime of Ryu Won and Jin Air. In the 2014 Season he went 7-3 R1, 5-1 R2, wins the playoffs with a triple kill against MVP, R3 3-4, R4 4-5, helps secure his team victory in playoffs of R4 and is the only player to show up at all during playoffs. He ended the season with a 30-19 record, the highest record of any Proleague player.

In one year he had gone from a player that was losing to Madbull to the strongest player in Proleague. This form has continued in 2015 as he went 4-3 R1, 5-1 R2, triple kill vs KT in playoffs of R2, 6-2 in R3, an All-Kill of KT and double of SKT in playoffs of R3. I can say unequivocally that he has consistently been the highest impact player for his team for nearly all of 2014 and 2015. You can replace Maru with nearly anyone else and no one (with the possible exception of INnoVation) could have replicated the feats he did for Jin Air in Proleague. Jin Air is a strong team filled with unique players with numerous achievements. But Maru stands above them. He is their Ace, their foundation, their psychopath, their Prince.

2015 Proleague

With the way that Maru has played out the 2015 Proleague season, it’s no surprise that he’s tied in first place in wins. He’s been so good this year that he gets this cool analysis page. Peaking at an over 70% win ratio at times, he’s got eight wins over the next Terran player, and also claims the top spot for ace wins for a Terran player. While INnoVation had started the Proleague season with the most promising start, Maru has come out much further ahead than any other Terran. Overall, Terran has been performing relatively poorly compared to the other two races, with Terran only claiming two of the top 10 spots. There are clear strengths and weaknesses in Maru’s play. His TvT is all around solid if he doesn’t play mech, his TvZ is atrocious to say the least, and above all his TvP has ascended to god tier, arguably the best of all time of any player. He’s even earned the Round 2 MVP award, not that it should be a surprise considering his level of skill. Now that we’ve got the cliché introduction out of the way, this analysis will be broken down into three parts: TvT, TvZ and finally TvP. Let’s start with his TvT:

Tied for the best TvT record in Proleague thus far, Maru has a plethora of openings and builds that he utilizes to beat his opponents. Overall favoring bio to mech, Maru can play almost any style, from aggressive bio drops, to head on army vs army fights. The biggest weakness in his play lies in his mech play, which is rarely seen. His list of kills is as follows:

Killed	Killed By
INnoVation	BrAvO
MarineKing	Flash
byong
Flash
Hack

Quite impressive. He beat INnoVation, the TvT titan, twice, defeated two strong opponents in Bbyong and Flash, and while Hack and MarineKing aren’t the strongest of opponents, they still could have prepared builds to snipe the Prince. His loss against BrAvO can be attributed to his choice to go mech, and his loss against Flash from a poor engagement in a choke point against a planetary fortress. Both of these games could have been wins had Maru played bio, and not gotten eager respectively. Now, let’s break down Maru’s early game TvT and see how he transitions into the mid game.

TvT - Early Game

Throughout Proleague so far, Maru hasn’t changed his opening TvT builds much. His most common choice is a banshee, being used in six games out of nine. What’s more interesting, however, is his willingness to not research cloak. Out of the six times he’s gone for a banshee opening, three have involved cloak while the other three haven’t. Furthermore, Maru only uses cloak on non-two player maps, save one case. His tendencies revolve around going for cloaked banshees on four player maps, and cloakless banshees on two player maps. More importantly, Maru cautiously executes his build order and denies his opponent vision. Looking at his match against Hack, Hack is able to squeeze into Maru’s base with an SCV around the time the second gas normally begins. Maru decides to wait until the SCV is killed off before dropping the second gas. Contrast that to his first game against MarineKing. MarineKing has no vision of Maru’s base, and Maru is able to drop the second gas without delaying it by a few seconds. In fact, Maru has each of his builds working so precisely that his SCVs leave his base at the exact same time:




In his first game against MarineKing, Maru scouts the early command center with no defensive bunker, and changes his build to include a hellion with a handful of marines to put on some early aggression against the lone reaper. While the most this accomplishes is delaying the command center, it’s enough damage to give him a slight lead in the early game while he transitions into his cloaked banshees. Against Hack, Maru only gets to scout Hack at the second base his SCV goes to, and without being sure if there will be a bunker or not, goes for the standard tech lab on factory and continuous marine production. The similarities in these two games lie in the cloaked banshee follow up.





Similar to the games on Merry Go Round, Maru sends out an SCV scout, and molds his build around the scouted information. In his second game against MarineKing, he immediately scouts a CC first on the low ground, so Maru starts making non-stop reapers and hellions, following it up with cloaked banshees. This game plays especially well into Maru’s reactive style as he also scouts a two rax follow up without gas from MarineKing, and with no early starport from MarineKing, Maru is able to get tons of damage done with the banshees. Against INnoVation on Deadwing, Maru instead goes for the fastest possible banshee by making a tech lab on the barracks before the factory is complete, and directly builds the starport onto the tech lab. With the large map size, Maru can afford to only make a single marine followed by the tech lab and another marine. INnoVation’s reaper isn’t able to make it to Maru’s base in time to get any damage done, as there’s enough defense out to ward it off by the time it gets there. And keep in mind, all of these decisions are based off of the first SCV scout timing.

Maru again opens with banshees against Bbyong on The King Sejong Station. Before his scout was even denied, Maru had already skipped out on the second gas and planned on only making a single banshee without cloak, seeing what damage he could get done. It’s a low risk opening, as you can put on high pressure relatively early in the game, and he backed it up with a safe viking and siege tanks.

In his last game that he opened with banshees, Maru deviates from his standard of not getting cloak on a two player map. This was a very uncharacteristic game out of Maru; he didn’t send any SCV scout at all, and didn’t make a reaper either. In fact, he even gets scouted by Flash but decides to execute the banshee build anyway, and meets missile turrets and a raven at Flashs base. Quite the misqueued game, and ends in a loss for Maru.

Out of the last three remaining games, Maru went for a proxy in two of them. This is a much more rare occurrence now than it previously has been, and we really only see Maru executing proxy plays at the highest level in TvT. Rather than being the reactive player, Maru chooses to be proactive, and dictates the pace of the game right out of the gate. Putting on a high pressure play like this early in the game gives him the flexibility back at home to either tech up or raise his economy ahead of the Terran counterpart while they are contained in their base. The problem in both of these games lie in the fact that both of his opponents scout it early on, and have time to react accordingly. Even though the proxy gets scouted, Maru is still able to inflict damage.





Against INnoVation, INnoVation scouts the proxy extremely early, before the tech lab even finishes. This gives him time to get a bunker up at his ramp and devise a game plan to counter the proxy. Knowing that the proxy got scouted, Maru opts only to make two marauders and punish where he can. After the second marauder completes, Maru lifts the proxy barracks and uses it as vision up the ramp of INnoVation, not only giving him harass capabilities on the wall, but also providing an essential scout. Maru sees that INnoVation is going for a cloaked banshee opening, and can react to it accordingly per the Terran openers. Maru only invests 75 total gas into the proxy: 25 into the tech lab, and 50 into both marauders. It’s worthy to note that he skips the concussive shells upgrade one typically gets when proxying marauders. As the build was scouted so early on, INnoVation would not likely be out of position with any units, nor would he be required to pull SCVs while getting the bunker up. This means that Maru’s factory and starport timing are not that far behind INnoVation’s; Maru is able to get a viking out around the same time the first banshee arrives at his base, and can already have missile turrets up in his mineral lines and around his production facilities. INnoVation is unable to find any holes in Maru’s defense, as Maru is able to pick off the two banshees at the cost of only five SCVs.

Against Flash, the proxy was scouted much later than against INnoVation, but still relatively early on for a proxy build. Seeing the scouting reaper out of Flash, Maru knew there was no bunker yet and could complete concussive shells in addition to more than two marauders. In this particular instance, he went up to three marauders, and a micro battle ensued between the marauders and SCVs in Flash’s base and the reaper vs SCVs in Maru’s base. In the end, Maru’s mechanics were superior to Flash’s and ended up killing the reaper, while keeping his marauders alive long enough to do significant economic damage to Flash. Again, with the scouting barracks, Maru was able to identify what Flash was going for, and reacted accordingly in his defenses. This time around, Maru needed to prepare not for cloaked banshees, but for a six marine one widow mine drop with a hellion at the front. Even so, Maru was still prepared and held the attacks with ease.

As for the final game against BrAvO on Cactus Valley, in which Maru ended up losing, Maru opened up similarly to the game he played against MarineKing on the same map. There were immediate differences between this game and the one against MarineKing, however; upon scouting BrAvO’s base, Maru recognized BrAvO’s build order as being a gas first into the fastest possible banshee, meaning he would not only have more units out to defend the initial reaper/hellion harass, but would also have a wall at the ramp. Rather than making two reapers and two hellions, Maru only made two reapers and a single hellion, and followed it up with a widow mine to potentially pick off the first hellion from BrAvO should he send it across the map. The most damage that Maru could hope for with his first units was maybe an SCV or two, and perhaps a couple of marines. With a full wall-off, only the reapers would be able to hop into the base, and with simple positioning out of BrAvO even this maneuver could be denied. After all was said and done, Maru sniped an SCV and took his leave. Now, just to exemplify how coordinated, calculated, and meticulous Maru is, let’s break down this game even further and analyze exactly what steps he made throughout the first seven minutes of the game:

• Sends his first scouting SCV in time to get a full scout off if it was a reaper opening before dying
  
• Upon scouting gas first banshees, immediately reacts by waiting for two reapers and a hellion to push into BrAvO
  
• After seeing a hellion from BrAvO, starts a widow mine and places it in the middle of his ramp to prevent a hellion scout from BrAvO
  
• Identifies that he has map control for the time being, which allows him to halt unit production at two reapers, one hellion and a widow mine, and start his addons (specifically a reactor on the barracks, followed by swapping the factory onto the reactor and a tech lab on the barracks)
  
• Starts a viking immediately after the starport finishes to intercept the inevitable banshee that will come
  
• Sends his hellion to a common banshee rally point, and scouts it exactly when the hellion arrives at its patrol point
  
• After confirming the banshee, swaps the starport onto the tech lab and immediately starts a raven and followed by a command center
  
• Successfully intercepts the banshee mid map before cloak is done, dealing damage to it and delaying it just long enough so that the banshee will only arrive to his base as the raven completes
  
• Skips out on reactored hellion production as the only threat will be the banshee; he can invest current minerals elsewhere (which go into a command center)

All of these little moves might be hard to see watching it live, and Maru executes them flawlessly game after game. He leaves his builds open for tweaking, and adjusts his build as information is gathered. Coupled with his world class micromanagement, Maru can effortlessly pull ahead in the early stages. He’s mastered the art that is early game TvT, and enters the mid game with an advantage.

Post Early Game

Now that the early tomfoolery is out of the way, we can get into the meat and bones of TvT. As we’ve learnt from Maru’s early game, he normally heads into the mid game with an advantage, however slight it may be, and at worst on an even footing. So what does Maru do heading into the mid game? His style can be generalized by the following points:

• Gather information about his opponents composition
  
• Hit an unorthodox timing with his first units
  
• Attain and maintain map control
  
• Threaten multiple fronts and wait for his opponent to move out of position

Not the most unusual playstyle, in fact most of these points are utilized by almost every pro. So what separates Maru from everyone else? Let’s take a closer look at each one:

TvT - Mid Game

Maru loves information. He loves to scout, he loves to scan, he loves to place random units on the map, and he loves to scan even more. Whatever tools he has at his disposal, he will use to get the information he wants. As mentioned in the early game portion, Maru is surgical with his early scouting to have the perfect response to what his opponent is doing. The same applies to his mid game. After all of the early aggression ends, Maru will usually scan his opponent to confirm a composition. This can be deduced by seeing what infrastructure his opponent has; if there are barracks going down, it’ll be bio, if there are factories going down, it’s mech.



In the image above, Maru was unsuccessful in running hellions into the base of Bbyong. Predictably, Maru invested in a scan at 8:21 to deduce what he was up against. The scan saw everything: Reactored vikings, siege tank production, no addon on the barracks, and a third command center not shown in the image. Seeing the early greed, and the more likely mech composition coming out of Bbyong, Maru himself plays exceptionally greedy, staying on only a single barracks until after he establishes his third base.



In his game against Flash, Maru successfully held the marine/medivac/widow mine/hellion push, and immediately after holding, scanned to see his options.



His proxy barracks had earlier scouted exactly when Flash’s second command center started being built, and all Maru needed to know was what kind of infrastructure Flash had. With this scan, he saw no addon on the starport, a tech lab being built on the factory, and a reactored barracks pumping out two marines at a time. Not only would a counter attack work after holding Flash’s push, but the cloaked banshee follow up would also be effective due to the low number of vikings, lack of turrets, and scans.



Against INnoVation, Maru again perfectly scanned the base of his opponent to see what he was going for. He saw the third command center starting, another factory, and only a handful of air units. This opened up the greed option to Maru, and he gladly took it by delaying his second through fifth barracks until he established his third base, similar to his game against Bbyong.

Maru carefully and strategically gathers information about his opponent’s composition and game plan as early as he can, and develops his strategy around the information he’s gathered. As we all know, Starcraft 2 is a game of information, and Maru can play it the best.

Odd Timings

Coincidentally (read: intended), the scan timing also serves to set up Maru’s first push. Not only is Maru able to deduce what composition his opponent is going for with the first scan, but most of the time he can also deduce the size and composition of his opponent’s army. Depending on which addon is attached to each structure, he can infer the unit count and composition of his opponent and based off of this, create an odd timing to get initial air control or deal economic damage. In some instances, Maru can even set up a contain outside of his opponents base, and straight up win out of that position.



Here, Maru is able to set up a contain with previously gathered information. He opened up with cloaked banshees and with these was able to see exactly what kind of setup Hack had. He saw a starport with no addon, a tech lab on a factory and a reactor on a barracks. This means that Maru can outproduce Hack in the viking count with his already reactored starport, maintain even siege tank count, and only be behind on the marine count. A scan up the ramp confirms that Maru has positional advantage on Hack and can set up a contain outside of Hack’s natural base.

This game is the perfect example of the odd timings that Maru hits. The core of his first push is to gain the superior viking count, and get air control. With air control, Maru can do a plethora of things, such as keeping a contain on his opponent and trading out his vikings for his opponents vikings so that Maru’s banshees can have free reign in the sky. With the information he’s been able to scout, Maru sends out his army when he has the superior viking count and can trade at least evenly with his opponents army.

What’s even more peculiar is his tech progression throughout this push out. There isn’t any correlation between when maru starts his stim, adds his extra production facilities or his third base. That is to say, Maru will push out when he just starts his stim, when stim finishes, when he starts his second and third barracks, after he establishes his third base, etc etc. When Maru smells blood in the water, he pounces on the opportunity.



Following the scan of Flash’s main and the previous push executed by Flash, Maru was able to conclude exactly what possible unit configuration Flash had at his base, and hit his timing much earlier than the previous example, while still effectively trading out his army for Flash’s. Not only is he able to trade army for army, but his cloaked banshee follow up massacred Flash’s units with his severely reduced number of vikings. Another prime example of the seemingly wonky timings that Maru hits, yet they are perfectly calculated based on his previous point: gathering information. This timing sets up his next stage of the game, map control.

TvT - Map Control

Map control is a huge part of Starcraft 2 strategy. Map control allows you to do multiple things, from dropping your opponent to expanding freely. In fact, map control is so important in SC2 we had an entire show discussing it. His previous timing attack sets up this part of his game plan. Bringing the fight to his opponent's base, this gives almost all of the map to Maru, and from here he can decide how to continue the game. The most common style we see out of Maru is a biomech composition, as it remains pretty mobile and can keep map control compared to a mech player who’ll stay turtled until they hit critical mass.



Maru brings the fight to MarineKing, and by trading out his superior viking count for MarineKing’s vikings, Maru was able to get map control and push across the map with his ground force. Behind this, Maru created an anti-hellion wall at his natural so that the hellions cannot run by into Maru’s base, and this also gives Maru the option to push across the map and put pressure on the third of MarineKing. With the previously mentioned viking trade, there is nothing to contest the cloaked banshees in the air for Maru, and MarineKing is forced to abandon his third base position, all the while Maru continues to set up his succeeding bases and tech.



In this particular case, Bbyong was able to outmass Maru in the viking count. The initial air fight went in favor of Bbyong, so Maru took this opportunity to abuse Bbyong’s smaller ground army compared to Maru’s and landed his vikings. While this trade ended up slightly in favor of Bbyong, Maru was still able to grab map control out of this, and kept Bbyong on three bases while Maru moved up to four. With map control firmly in his hands, Maru was able to execute his strongest quality: attacking on multiple fronts.

Multi-pronged harass

Thus far, Maru has not been in his most ‘comfortable’ stage of the game. Sure, he is flawless in his scouting, timing attacks, and securing map control, but when he truly shines is in the late game when there are multiple battles going on. Maru is the master of end game army control. His ability to split his army up and strike on multiple fronts at the same time while his opponent is out of position is on a whole other level than any other player right now. Not only is his end game army control pristine, but his ability to judge whether or not to take a fight is also top notch; he is able to trade his bio armies for seemingly unwinnable fights, and in the end comes out on top somehow, someway.



In this gif, Maru is able to perfectly execute his late game style: attack on two fronts simultaneously and pick off an objective. The execution is simple, Maru simply splits up his army into two even parts, and threatens multiple fronts with them. By splitting up his army in two, not only does this mean he can threaten two ground locations at the same time, but it also means he can load up each group into medivacs and drop somewhere rather than stay on the ground. This opens up many more areas that Maru can attack and puts that much more strain on his opponent. Seeing Bbyong’s siege tanks unsieged, he chooses to stay on the ground with one of his forces and fights head on into a mech army. This will of course eventually favor Bbyong at the end of the fight due to each player’s army size, but the real win here for Maru is when he runs his second army into the third base of Bbyong and cleanly destroys it. All in all, it’s a big net win for Maru, as he is up a base, has map control, tech advantage, and a similar size army.



Here is Maru again, with another multi-pronged attack. This time however, the first attack is in the form of a drop, which MarineKing successfully holds. However, due to the immobility of mech, MarineKing takes heavy losses, and loses a command center outright. Again, due to the immobility of MarineKing’s composition, he is unable to get back to his third base in time to defend it and suffers heavy casualties again. Maru initially started this with two separate armies; one drop in the main base, and the other on ground en route to MarineKing’s third. After dealing the damage in the main base, Maru combines his two armies together and smashes through MarineKing’s dismantled forces.



What happens when Maru can’t attack multiple fronts at the same time? Deadwing is known for being super easy to establish four bases, and for good reason. A meching player barely has to move his army to reinforce either fourth base position, counteracting mech’s mobility flaw. In fact, this entire game was the complete opposite of what we’ve seen Maru do so far. Maru was the one taking economic damage all game long. Maru couldn’t prevent INnoVation from going up to four bases and maxing out his mech composition. But what Maru was able to accomplish was resetting the tank count often enough to keep it relatively low.



Throughout the game, Maru used multiple micro tricks to take advantageous engagements for himself. When he can’t force positional mistakes out of his opponent, he will do the next best thing: out micro his opponent. Before fights, he pre-splits his bio to counteract the splash damage from siege tanks and hellbats and utilises medivac drops to bait out siege tank fire onto themselves. All throughout this game, Maru had map control the majority of the time and was able to pick and choose his fights as he saw fit.



This gif is by far the highlight of the game. Why was INnoVation’s seemingly impenetrable army easily so dismantled by Maru? Going into the fight, INnoVation had twelve siege tanks, eighteen hellbats, and a massive viking and banshee fleet. He was also up against a wall, which limits Maru’s surrounding capabilities to only 180 degrees. There were only two things that INnoVation did wrong in this fight:

• His vikings were out of position to ward off the bait drop
  
• Poor focus fire with his siege tanks

While these are only two errors, they were enough to swing the fight in Maru’s favor. Previously, INnoVation saw the four medivacs attempting to drop his base and yet still had his vikings out of position. With better viking positioning, Maru perhaps would not have picked this fight; instead he would have had to find an alternative to force back the mech army or wait until INnoVation moved into a worse position. With his vikings out of position, this led to his second mistake: poor siege tank management. Nearly every single siege tank shot went off on the four medivac drop that was on top of his siege tanks. Had INnoVation been able to ward off this tactic, his siege tanks would not only have done more splash damage to the frontal army of Maru, but also would not have killed themselves. This also allowed Maru’s main army to get on top of INnoVations tanks unscathed. Following the first volley, INnoVation continued to do a poor job focus firing with the tanks; they continued to fire onto the remnants of the drop, which were single bio units compared to the clumped up main army units of Maru.

It’s worthy to note that Maru’s army was massive. He had a large army advantage going into this fight, and unless INnoVation made no mistakes, he was probably going to lose the fight anyway. On Maru’s side of the fight, he executed everything to near perfection. Maru scanned to see what kind of set up INnoVation had, and split his army into a large arc so that they engaged onto INnoVation’s army simultaneously. Maru hit his timing perfectly. Right before his main army was in range of INnoVation’s siege tanks, he unloaded the four medivacs so that the siege tanks were baited into firing off on the drop. The massive arc of Maru pounced onto INnoVations army, and absolutely destroyed it. Another scan cleared the remaining banshees. Maru cleaned up and countered to take the win.

It’s not one glaring quality that makes Maru a monster in TvT, but a myriad of different strengths. He gets through the early game with fantastic reactions and decision making, sets up his mid game for map control and finishes his opponent with pure skill. His only weakness is when he plays mech, and one could attribute his loss against BrAvO to his decision to playing mech instead of bio, and his loss to Flash as a “fluke”. So how do these qualities translate into his other matchups? Let’s take a look at his TvZ now.

It’s no secret that Maru’s TvZ record in Proleague so far has been abysmal. With a reputation such as his, there’s no excuse for his terrible performance. How can someone with such talent be so humiliated? His 31% winrate against Zerg is amongst the worst in Proleague, especially for a player of his caliber. Let’s see who he’s been able to beat, and who he’s been beaten by:

Killed	Killed By
Life	Byul
ByuL	Dark
Curious	Life
	soO

Looking at who he’s had to face in TvZ, it’s a lot more understandable why he wasn’t able to hit a positive record. Dark, who’s an absolute monster in ZvT has three wins against our Terran prince, and ByuL himself netted three wins, who also has extremely solid ZvT. Not to mention the other two players, Life and soO, who were once considered by far the best ZvT players on the planet. It’s no surprise that these four players were able to take out Maru. While he did lose to these players, Maru was able to take a couple games off of Life, one off of ByuL, and another against the recently hot Curious. Now, let’s take a look at Maru’s choice of builds.

TvZ - Early Game

Maru’s TvZ shows a little more variance in build orders than his TvT. The map doesn’t seem to affect what Maru will open with; he will CC first on smaller maps such as foxtrot, and reaper expand on larger maps like Cactus Valley. Out of the thirteen games of TvZ that Maru has played, he has opened with:

• 3x CC first
  
• 2x 11 rax 3 reaper expand
  
• 2x 11 rax 2 reaper expand
  
• 2x 12 rax 1 reaper expand
  
• 2x 12 rax gasless expand
  
• 1x proxy 11/13 reaper rax
  
• 1x 12 rax 15 gas

As we can see here, Maru has used seven different builds over the span of thirteen games. His first two command center openings occurred in his first two matches last year, and his last occurred in his last match. Otherwise, he has always gone for a barracks first play, varying from an 11/13 rax proxy reaper cheese, to gasless expands. Curiously enough, it doesn’t seem that Maru prepares a specific build for an opponent; rather, it seems that he decides what he wants to do on the fly and goes for that. There’s a high frequency of Maru opening with an eleven barracks instead of a twelve barracks; this signifies that he wants to get at least some damage done with the initial reaper while there are still no queens or lings out. An eleven rax reaper will only be around six seconds faster than a twelve rax reaper, but this is enough time to get an extra drone or two.

Combined with the eleven rax opening, Maru will typically go for three reapers. Three reapers are the required number to effectively kill off an early queen, and can buffer a lot of damage when the hellions arrive. When not opening with three reapers, it’s usually a situational decision. Against ByuL on Vaani Research Station, Maru correctly predicted that ByuL would fast expand at the gold base, and successfully dropped a bunker there and loaded his reapers into it. Against Dark, Maru made a marine to attempt to kill an out of position overlord hovering over Maru’s base. When going twelve rax reaper, Maru stops at one reaper and uses it for scouting purposes only. Other than opening with a reaper first, Maru has also shown that he’s not shy of opening with other builds, such as a CC first, and even double proxy rax. This can make it hard for his opponents to get a read on what exactly Maru will open with.



Interestingly enough, when Maru opens with three reapers, he doesn’t go for the standard queen harass. Instead, he will only poke at the front with two reapers, and keep the third one at home to defend his building CC at the natural from a zergling runby. This leads to ‘safer’ play, signifying that Maru would much rather safely establish his command centers and play for a macro game, rather than attempt to deal early damage to the Zerg.



Maru’s follow-up to his reapers is intriguing. When making only a single reaper, Maru will always play without banshees. He will instead invest into the third command center, double upgrades, and sometimes even more than six hellions. To go along with his greedy play, Maru plays defensively; Maru will always rally his newly made hellions into his natural, rather than into his reaper/hellion ball currently harassing the Zerg front. When making two or more reapers, Maru will always follow it up with a banshee, whether it be with or without cloak. Maru does like to go for a timing with his banshee, which normally involves a hellbat push. Regardless of how many reapers Maru opens with, his goal is the same: make it to the mid game.

So which of these builds are effective, and which builds don’t work? Let’s take a look at his win-rates with each build:

Win:

• proxy 11/13 reaper rax – 100%
  
• 12 rax gasless expand – 100%
  
• 12 rax 1 reaper expand – 50%
  
• 11 rax 3 reaper expand – 50%

Lose:

• 12 rax 1 reaper expand – 50%
  
• 11 rax 3 reaper expand – 50%
  
• 12 rax gasless expand – 50%
  
• 11 rax 2 reaper expand – 0%
  
• 12 rax 15 gas – 0%
  
• CC first – 0%

A big part of Maru’s losses come through his failed timing attacks. In fact, almost every single one of Maru’s timings fail to get enough damage done, and as a result he heads into the mid game at a disadvantage. For someone who can execute near perfect engagements in TvT, how has his skill translated into his TvZ so poorly?



This is one of the hellbat timings Maru went for. There is nothing inherently wrong with the attack itself; the splits were good, the banshee stayed out of detection range of the spore crawler, and the drones were denied mining time for a lengthy period. So why wasn’t Maru able to scrape a win out of this? There are two things that wemt wrong for Maru in this situation:

1. Failure to deal significant economic damage
   
2. Late transition into mid game

While delaying some mining time at ByuL’s third base, there was no real economic damage done. ByuL had already made it up to 62 drones prior to the attack, while Maru was sitting on only two bases and 44 SCVs. With a heavy investment into cloaked banshees and hellbats, this attack needed to get damage done, whether it be drone kills, or a base snipe. Not only does ByuL only lose two drones from the attack, he is also able to even further delay Maru’s third base by overlord creeping the third base location. ByuL has played very greedy throughout this game, and Maru simply could not get enough damage done to justify the attack investment. Following the attack, Maru not only needed a good amount of damage done, but he also needed to transition into his mid-game. A transition is necessary because this sort of attack cannot kill Zergs. Following the attack, Maru had yet to complete his second through fifth barracks, let alone the addons for them. To make matters worse, he was almost a full set of upgrades behind, and his stimpack had just started. At this point, Maru had to rely on ByuL not attacking him until he could build up a respectable bio ball and had stim. In this phase of the game, you want to be constantly harassing and rallying the bio units across the map, and force the Zerg into mistakes; Maru simply could not put on the pressure he needed too, and this was all a result of the failed hellbat attack.



Another similar situation. This time however, Maru was in a much worse position going into the fight; he had no additional barracks on the way, no upgrades, no third base, and even no stimpack on the way. The only advantage Maru had was a superior worker count, but with ByuL having the gold base, this advantage was cancelled out. Maru was again able to deny mining time at the gold base, but this is not permanent economic damage. And again, Maru was unable to get a significant amount of drone kills.

At this point in the meta, hellbat timings are figured out, and even with Maru level control he still failed to deal damage with them. If not hellbat timings, what other methods can Maru use to gain an advantage in the early game? One strategy that Maru is known for utilising almost every series is the proxy 2 rax. Surprisingly, Maru has only used it once throughout his 2015 TvZ proleague run, and it resulted in a win.



In this game, Maru opened with an 11/13 proxy rax, and planned to make reapers out of them. Knowing ByuL, Maru correctly assumed that ByuL would take the gold base as his first expansion, and this is Maru’s way of countering this strategy. Everything went according to plan for Maru; ByuL took the gold base and started a very late pool, which was perfect for the earlier reapers to start dealing damage. At this point the game was already over; ByuL cannot defend the non-stop reapers coming at his base with the build he chose, and Maru even got a bunker down, which wasn’t necessary for this strategy, but cemented his win.



This game produces a similar opening. Rather than taking an expansion at the gold first, ByuL opts to pool first, remembering the last time they encountered on this map. However this time, Maru simply opens with an 11 rax reaper, and plans to build a bunker at the gold base, forcing ByuL into a heavy zergling commitment early on. Again, everything goes to plan for Maru, as he is successfully able to plant a bunker at the gold base of ByuL, and ByuL responds with heavy zergling production. This opening has succeeded in its intent; force ByuL to cut his economy to defend the reaper pressure, while Maru builds up his own economy

Compared to his TvT, Maru goes into his TvZ with a set build, rather than a reactive one. Although he does use a plethora of slightly different openings, he is most of the time not able to find the necessary damage he needs to enter the mid game ahead. This comes through a combination of his build choices, and his reactions to what his opponent is doing. Going into the mid game, we can see that Maru has even more glaring mistakes, which ends up costing him game after game.

TvZ - Mid Game

In all but two games, Maru has chosen to play the 4M playstyle in mid-game TvZ. This lends well to his playstyle of dropping everywhere and fighting on multiple fronts. He tries to use an early game timing to throw off the Zerg while he sets up his mid-game infrastructure and tech. As we saw earlier, this doesn’t always work for Maru. Regardless, Maru still sets up his infrastructure for his mid game, establishes his third base, and starts the 4M parade.

Let’s start with Maru does right. Maru is a micro monster and applies his micro skills to their full potential in his play. He relies on his splits to carry him through fights, rather than pure macro to out produce his opponent. If he can get into the mid game on even footing, Maru won’t stutter in his army control. His focus goes into the big fight, so that he can get the best engagement possible.



This is a standard mid game engagement in TvZ. Going into the fight, Maru has already pre-split his army, keeping the hellbats at the front of his army, and the marines behind them. A previous scan allowed Maru to clear some creep tumors leading up to the third base of Curious, and this gives Maru the option to either engage on the creep, or wait for it to dissipate. Another scan ahead reveals the exact army composition of Curious, and Maru decides to go for the army trade. The information from the scan acts as an anchor of positioning for Maru; he can see everything that Curious is doing, and can set up his army into the best possible position before Curious pushes into the bio.

Another one of Maru’s strengths is his relentless aggression through heavy multitasking. When everything goes to plan, Maru is able to endlessly pull and pry his opponent apart, essentially keeping them pinned in their base while Maru continues to build up larger and larger armies. Combine this with his impeccable micro, and you get a nearly unstoppable force that continues to trade in Maru’s favor, fight after fight. Maru constantly repositions his drops to push his opponents multitasking capabilities to the max, all the while sending out new drops to reinforce current ones.



After scouting, and successfully holding an all in from Life, Maru launched the counterattack. He was forced to make a couple of siege tanks to help hold the bust, and when he countered, used them to their maximum potential. This entire push used the siege tank as its core, and so the first step is to set them up in a good spot. The perfect spot was the low ground next to the ledge to Life’s natural base, and this is exactly where Maru set up shop. While already in a solid position, Maru further protected his tanks by holding position on a marine and a marauder on the exposed side of the siege tanks, protecting them from the initial round of lings. The second step was to unload the rest of his units on the high ground, using the siege tanks to zone out Life. The move was successful as Life postured around until all of Maru’s units were unloaded from the medivacs. The last step was to simultaneously protect the high ground bio from banelings, and the low ground tanks from zerglings. Life split his units up perfectly so that the zerglings would swarm the tanks on the low ground, while queens and banelings would attack the bio units on the high ground. To counteract this move, Maru focus fired incoming banelings with his siege tanks, and used hold position on the high ground bio units so that they attacked the low ground zerglings attacking the tanks by default.

The entire series of decisions throughout that fight happened on the fly and in a matter of seconds. This fight showcased Maru’s masterful micro and ability to use units to their highest potential. The conscious decision to place the siege tanks right under the ledge with the marines and marauders protecting them, the perfect focus fire, and the hold position on his bio units all required an extremely high level of mechanical precision, and Maru accomplishes it with ease.



Immediately after the first engagement finished came another swell of lings, and Life was determined to finish off the last tank. Even though Maru had traded massively in his favor, he still lost a decent chunk of units from the initial fight. There was no longer a bio wall protecting his tank, his low unit count had low damage output, and Life had the advantage of reinforcements. What could Maru do this time around to come out ahead in this skirmish? Following the suit of the first engagement, Maru again used hold position on his high ground bio so that they could target the low ground zerglings attacking his siege tank. The result was a lot of dead zerglings, and a siege tank surviving with four HP. Maru was again able to keep this siege tank alive, all thanks to his wonderful micro. Eventually the siege tank did die, but not before Maru took the supply lead, all on the back of the siege tank push.



Now ahead in this game, Maru went in full out aggression mode. He was ahead in upgrades, army, and tech. The only advantage that Life had at this stage in the game was an economy lead, but it is such a minor advantage that it was almost negligible. Maru’s macro didn’t skip a beat giving him plenty of reinforcements, and so he started to abuse his incredible micro intensive drops to pull Life apart. His first drop came from the remnants of his initial push, and a few reinforcing bio units. With this, he abused the fact that Life had no mutalisk tech out yet, and pulled Life’s entire army back into his main base to defend the drop. This opened up Life’s natural base for another drop that Maru sent out, and Maru found the perfect position to drop in, behind the mineral line in between two evolution chambers. It was a costly mistake from Life to position his structures there and Maru took full advantage of Life’s inability to defend his natural base mineral line. These are more examples of the on-the-go thinking that Maru exemplifies.

With all of the micro tricks and control that Maru has, his glaring mistakes far outweigh his pros. If he can carry himself into the mid game with an even footing with his opponent, he will normally win. But, Maru has multiple weak points in his game, and they affect him throughout the game, not only in the mid game. There are two main mistakes that Maru makes frequently:

1. Lowering depots
   
2. Lack of minimap awareness

These seem to be such minor mistakes that can easily be fixed, but Maru invests too much focus into micromanagement, rather than other aspects of his play. He may be able to take engagement after engagement, but when he loses an entire mineral line for essentially free, he has no follow through for the rest of the game.

The first mistake is such an easy one to fix, but yet as Maru has shown that time and time again, he keeps making this mistake. Having depots lowered allows the Terran army to flow through it freely, and conversely this also allows runbys to happen. He typically sets his rally points to a position between his natural base and third base, and as a result he needs his natural wall depots to be lowered. This can cause major pain for the Terran, both in terms of economic damage dealt and psychological damage as well.



Against Dark, Maru was able to get away with a command center first with taking little damage. The game naturally flowed into a standard bio vs muta/ling/bling TvZ, with Maru moving out at 11:30 with his 1/1, stim, and two medivacs. What Maru didn’t expect however, is the baneling runby that Dark was preparing outside of Maru’s bases. Dark’s goal here is clear: bust the wall and kill as many SCVs as possible with the remaining banelings. Unfortunately for Maru, he left his depot wall down as to rally his bio units outside of his natural base, and this works out perfectly for Dark as he just runs into the natural of Maru, not having to waste any banelings on the wall. This starts off a massive chain reaction of SCV death.

Simply having the depot down allowed Dark to save an extra five banelings, and after damaging the natural mineral line of Maru, Dark has seven banelings left over to enter the main base. Had Maru lifted the depot wall, this number would have been reduced to two, requiring much less of a commitment to defend. As a result, Maru has to pull everything back into the main base to kill the banelings, which opens up his third base for harassment. Dark makes no mistake, and ravages that base as well. A total of 38 SCVs were killed, and many deaths could have been prevented had Maru been able to buy the little extra time necessary with a raised wall.



Against ByuL, Maru was in an excellent position after the openings. As previously discussed, Maru successfully planted a bunker on the gold base of ByuL and was harassing it with reapers. In returning the SCV that built the bunker, Maru lowered his main wall to let it back in. An unfortunate timing for Maru, as ByuL was sending lings across the map, and slips into the main base of Maru. This forces Maru to bring back his reapers, and giving up his stronghold position on ByuL. A wondrous position from Maru, decimated by the simple mistake of lowering the depot.



Against ByuL again, Maru was in a much worse position than the previous time. After a failed hellbat attack (discussed earlier), Maru is forced to play ultra greedy, and cuts all unit production in favor of addons and upgrades, leading into a stronger mid game at the cost of low defense now. This time however, ByuL displays a play of brilliance; creeping the third base of Maru with an overlord forces Maru to send out what marines he has to kill it. As required to traverse a wall, Maru lowers one of the depots to send out his two marines, and ByuL pounces on the opportunity to run in.

An uncharacteristic miscontrol happens out of Maru, as he selected the bunker instead of the supply depot. Had he initially selected the depot instead of the bunker, the wall would have been up. With such little defense to begin with, Maru can do nothing but weather the storm and uses his SCVs to defend the runby. Had the wall been up, Maru would have taken no damage whatsoever from the zerglings, and at least have a chance in the game. From this point on, Maru is crippled and this mistake has costed him the game.



In another game against Dark, Maru makes it through the early game on relative even footing against Dark. Curiously, Maru takes the adjacent third base, which is closer to Darks base than the pocket base is, signifying he wants to go heavy on the aggression. This makes it much more difficult to defend as there are many more ways to harass and run around Marus bases than taking the pocket third. Dark takes full advantage of this by morphing in banelings at the pocket third of Maru, and hits the perfect anti-timing. Maru was just lining up to start the pressure with his two first medivacs, but before he can make anything happen, Dark runs into his natural with a massive amount of banelings, and simultaneously takes out Marus third base.

Such a small mistake results in all of these big plays from Zerg. While it is normal to have a depot down to rally units outside of, Maru lacks the necessary skill to react accordingly to runbys. He invests too much focus into his main army, and while his micro is superb, this alone cannot win games. Losing 30+ workers regularly to runybs is just too detrimental to Marus economy, and eventually he fizzles out and loses. A combination of lack of vision and minimap awareness is to blame for this mistake, and this leads us right into our next topic, his minimap awareness.

The second mistake is a much harder one to fix, and that’s watching the minimap. The major reason behind all of the runbys are because of not watching the minimap; with better map awareness Maru should be able to lift the depots in time to prevent lings from running in, but with too much focus on his main army control, this part gets overlooked. Not only does this skill attribute to preventing runbys, but it also helps with pulling SCVs against a muta raid, and seeing when the opponent engages your army. The minimap is like a little cheat sheet for your vision; anything inside of your vision can be immediately noticed and reacted too if you are paying attention.



Let’s go back to the first runby we analyzed. Focused on splitting his army up, Maru is too busy in the main fight to take notice to his minimap. Not only does Maru get vision of the banelings running by, but he also gets hit by them prematurely, which itself pings the map of the location of the attack and gives an audio notification. A full 7 seconds go by before Maru reacts to this runby, but by then it’s too late as Dark is able to explode half of Maru’s mineral line. There is no excuse here for Maru, it’s just bad play overall from him. There’s absolutely no reason that a runby of this magnitude should be happening, especially with early warnings going off.



Minimap awareness is essential for defending any types of attacks, not just runbys. Against DongRaeGu, the game had been relatively even until DRG was able to sneak in his muta pack into Marus base. A delayed reaction from Maru results in six free SCVs, and a further misplay adds another seven to the total tally. Thirteen SCVs for free is a lot of damage done, and most of these could have been prevented had Maru been watching the minimap. The driving factor to allowing all of the runbys is from the lack of awareness; it can’t be stressed enough how much damage can be mitigated by watching the minimap and reacting a second earlier.

There are two faults Maru is making in this category. The first fault is his intense focus on his main army. As discussed earlier, having good army control is great, but if it costs you in another area then sometimes it may not be beneficial, but detrimental. The second fault is a lack of vision. Throughout his Proleague run so far in TvZ, Maru has consistently made no effort to gather vision across the board. There is no effort to place marines across the map to spot for runbys and muta packs, watchtower control normally goes to his opponent, and rarely will he put up sensor towers. Vision control has the biggest pieces of information possible to reacting to what the opponent is doing, and Maru overlooks this part of his game just as much as his minimap awareness. While maru could find no counter aggression to work; his drops kept getting spotted early on thanks to DRG’s superior minimap awareness and vision across the board.

Compared to his TvT, Maru seems to be much sloppier and tries to take unneeded shortcuts to get to where he wants to be. Rather than playing a reactive style, he goes into this matchup with a predetermined build, and executes it regardless of the situation. Sometimes this works, but most of the time it results in a loss. He’s got clear errors in his play that can easily be fixed, and if he does he can turn into a TvZ monster that his other matchups display. Now, let’s take a look at his most renowned matchup, TvP.

By far the scariest and most dominating matchup in Proleague this season, Maru has showcased an insanely great TvP. With a winrate of 82%, and previously 93%, it’s almost a guarantee that Maru will take any vs Protoss match he enters. His style is relatively the same game after game: early drops, followed by heavy macro, and finally huge doom drops everywhere. An in-depth analysis of one of his proleague games was done here, but we’ll talk about it some more anyway. As always, here’s his kill and killed by list:

Killed	Killed By
Zest	Dear
Stats	Classic
Classic	her0
Creator
her0
Dear
MyuNgSiK
Zoun

Very impressive. On his kill list, we have Zest (x5!!!) without even dropping a single map to him. Having such a massive record against a top tier Protoss says it all, and we still have other TvP titans on his kill list. herO, Classic and Stats, all immensely good in the PvT matchup fall like flies against Maru. The only three Protoss able to take out our TvP god are Classic, Dear, and herO, who in themselves has shown excellence in PvT. Dear is of course the odd one out, but he has shown in the past the he can pull out stellar play from time to time. Let’s take a look at his early game:

TvP - Early Game

Following suite in his TvZ, Maru shows much more variance in his openings than his TvT. In fact, almost every game has a slight difference in between them; some games will be reaper expands, some will be proxy factory/starport, and others will be fast three command centers. They also seem to be situational, that is to say that Maru specifically selects his opening build per opponent, and per map. Against a player like Stats, who is known to chronoboost out the first couple of gateway units, and loves early oracles, Maru will invest in an early engineering bay and bunkers to fend off the aggression. Against Classic, Maru opts to risk an early third command center, knowing that Classic is more passive and tends to play a bit more defensive in the early stages. So exactly what kind of variation does Maru show? Here’s a quick breakdown of his build selections:

• 10x reaper expand
  
• 3x 1-1-1
  
• 1x CC first
  
• 1x proxy factory/starport
  
• 1x 11/11 proxy rax
  
• 1x gasless expand

For simplicity’s sake, we’ve generalized most of his builds into these ones. Breaking them down even further however, we see that most of his reaper openings have slight deviations after the reaper. Against Stats, Maru immediately drops an engineering bay and a bunker in his main mineral line in response to scouting the early proxy stargate. Against Classic, Maru opts out of scouting completely with his reaper, keeps it home to defend any proxy gateway, and drops an early third command center. Reaper expands account for roughly 59% of Maru’s TvP openings, which leaves plenty of games with different builds. True to Maru fashion, he squeezes in a proxy 2 rax against Creator, and still maintains various other openings such as gasless expand, proxy factory/starport, and command center first. This makes it hard for his opponent to know exactly what is coming, as each variation of build has slightly different timings on follow up drops and attacks.

Similar to his TvT, Maru is extremely precise about his first scout. His preferred timing that he likes to hit is to be at the Protoss base at 3:40, roughly around the time that an expansion, or stargate goes down. Rather than wait for the first reaper to arrive at their base, Maru will take the less risky route for the reassurance of no shenanigans from the Protoss. On larger, four player maps, Maru will even send the scout early to ensure that he gets a relatively early scout even if he scouts in the wrong direction. 3:40 is a key time for Maru’s scout to arrive; this can delay a nexus from going doing, scout gas timings and check number of pylons in their base. This can allow Maru to respond with an engineering bay block, and check for common proxy locations should both gases be taken and saturated and a missing pylon.



Let’s take a closer look at his reaper openings. Combined with his early SCV scout, Maru can choose to either send it across the map to gather further information, or keep it at home for a little extra defense. Upon scouting a missing pylon with the SCV, the reaper can be used to scout proxy locations around Maru’s base as well. There are two options that Maru has when opening with reaper. The first is to immediately send the reaper to his opponent’s base and try to kill a probe or two. The second is to delay the scout for a bit, and send it in later when tech generally goes down for Protoss.

The first option is surprisingly much rarer, as Maru has only done it once. The goal is simple: harass their economy line and force their units to stay at home to defend the reaper. The constant threat of an early scout can also delay the Protoss’ tech choice, giving Maru much more time to prepare for the variety of aggressions that can come.



The second option is by far the most common out of Maru, and that is to play defensive/delay the reaper scout until a later timing. Maru will use his SCV scout to delay their nexus for as long as possible and keeps his reaper at home. Sometimes he will use the reaper to scout proxy locations, and other times he will simply keep the reaper at his natural ramp to defend any quick zealot. Following his SCV skylarking, Maru will aim to have his reaper at his opponents base by the 5:20 mark. This is the typical timing that a Protoss will choose their tech building after a nexus first, and Maru wants to spot it as early as possible. With most maps containing multiple ways into the base, it’s almost impossible for a Protoss player to prevent the reaper from getting at least a decent scout, and this is enough for Maru to act out on.




With just over half of his games opening with a reaper, what about the remaining games? Maru has also shown a wide variance of openings, ranging from extreme greed in a command center first, all the way to the aggressive 11/11 rax. These builds are much less ‘reactive’ than his reaper expands, in the sense that he can’t adjust much on the fly; he must dedicate himself to the build and execute it to the best of his ability. For example, his proxy factory/staport leaves almost no defense back at home. His widow mines and medivacs will spawn on his opponents side of the map, which leaves only marines back at home to defend any aggression. With the drawbacks of scarce defenses, this gives Maru the opportunity to put the hurt on his opponent.



In the picture above, Maru executes a two pronged attack at 6:15. A handful of marines and an SCV at the front force Zest to dedicate either a photon overcharge, or stalkers to his natural base, while Maru flies into Zests main base with two hellions and a widow mine. The drop is effective, with Maru netting ten probe kills. Not only did the first drop do massive damage, but Zest opened with blink, leaving him with no detection. The leftover mine in Zests main base cannot be killed, leaving Zest the inability to mine from his main. From this point on Maru can continue to produce drop ships and send his marines across the map, as Zest has no choice to defend his natural base while he tries to get an observer out.



Why build your buildings in your base when you can build them in your opponents? After getting proxy stargated and semi successfully defending it, Maru built a factory across the map and floated it into the base of Stats. With turrets and marines at home, Maru can start pumping out widow mines directly into Stats base. The chain of events that follow are all but catastrophic for Stats. The factory baits Stats’ units to kill it, otherwise mines will just be endlessly produced in his base. This gives a huge opening at his front ramp, and Maru correctly identifies the situation and sends his marines across the map. With only one pylon powering the cybernetics core at the ramp, Maru is able to unpower the core with only 2.3 seconds left on warpgate, and ends up killing the core before it can finish. From this point on Stats is completely dead; there are widow mines still being produced in his natural base, Maru is able to pick off the MSC twice, Stats loses his oracle to a widow mine, and an endless stream of reinforcing bio units keep pressure on the main base of Stats. The counter cheese has worked.

All in all, his early game TvP exemplifies every good trait that Maru has. Not only can he execute set builds and gain an advantage through this method, but he can also play reactively and create new timings on the fly, again besting his opponents. Much like his TvT, he goes into the mid game with a lead, and he has yet to shine in his most dominant matchup.

TvP - Mid Game

Perhaps considered the scariest matchup currently, Maru’s midgame TvP is unrealistically strong. Game after game, he uses the same style to dismantle and demolish his opponents, regardless of build, map, playstyle, and situation he is put in. Maru doesn’t care what his opponent is doing, he will execute the same style every game, and come out with a W. So what kind of style does Maru play? It’s quite simple, drop after drop, in conjunction with an attack somewhere else. Now, this isn’t something new, and in fact a lot of players use the same style. So why is Maru able to blow all other Terrans out of the water, and display such a huge level of skill above the rest? Let’s take a look at a few examples.

There are two main strategic maneuvers that Maru uses throughout the mid game. The first is continuous dropping in differentiating sizes, and in different locations. This isn’t anything special as nearly every Terran these days will drop at some point in the game. The second is unique to Maru, and that’s the ‘colossus dive’ technique. The aim is to continuously trade his bio units to keep the colossus count low, and thus requiring no vikings for his playstyle. Game after game we see Maru open with some form of widow mine drop, gauges what his opponents build is and based off the information, will choose to play greedy, or put down the extra barracks. Let’s take a look at how he uses his scouting information off of his first drop to play out the mid game.



Against Zest, Maru scouts everything. The drop in the main base sees the four gateways being made, and a marine runby in the natural shows a robotics bay being chronoboosted. No third base, no forges, five gateways, colossus being chronoboosted out, what could possibly be coming? A colossus all in of course. Seeing this, Maru prepares appropriately by adding his fourth and fifth barracks well before his third command center, adds bunkers to his natural base, and keeps attempting to drop Zest while his main army is out of position. The threat of the drop forces the mothership core to stay at home for defense, which greatly hinders Zest’s attack. Maru holds, and with Zest’s economy in tatters from the earlier drops, Maru simply counters after holding the all in, and wins.



Against MyuNgSiK, things play out almost the exact opposite as it did against Zest. Being an already big map, Maru chose to drop an earlier third command center without the proper scouting information, but this doesn’t mean he can’t play any greedier. The first drop scouts a limited number of ground units, a sizeable phoenix force, and an early third base out of MyuNgSiK, so Maru takes the greed to the next level. He completely opts out of any form of defense at home, and purely goes for widow mine drops, keeping MyuNgSiK pinned in his base, while Maru plays ultra greedy back at home, by not making any biological units in favor of continuously making medivacs and widow mines, and setting up his barracks infrastructure with all of his addons. A much further in depth article about this game can be found here

In both of these games, Maru essentially opened the same way up until the first drop hits, and this is where his deviation comes in. The drop itself is meant to act as a scout foremost rather than a damage dealing tool, and with this scouting information he can set up the rest of his game to where he wants it to be: continuous drops, and colossus trades.

One of Maru’s signature moves it to drop a location regardless of defense. Unless there is a significant amount of stalkers and colossus holding down a base, Maru will dive in with four + medivacs and unload the bio into the mineral line. This drop also acts as a Kansas City shuffle, as Maru has another attack prepared somewhere else when the Protoss player moves units back to defend the drop. Not only can Maru use these two attacks to attack two different places, but under the right circumstances, can combine the two forces into one, and make one massive attack at a singular location, abusing the fact that Protoss typically have their army split up into two places.



Against herO, Maru uses a two medivac drop as a distraction for his bigger army. The drop is the first to hit and forces herO to pull back more units than his initial four stalker defense to hold it off, and loses a forge researching +1 armor in the process. The bait works, as herO pulls back way too much to defend the drop, and opens up his third base for attack. Unluckily for herO, a micro mistake leaves only his two colossus alone at his third base, and Maru pounces on the opportunity to kill them both off. Initially meant to cancel the third base, this drop tactic has paid off much more than Maru anticipated, and from here is an easy win.



Against Stats, instead of dropping in one location and attacking in another, Maru combines his forces into one and smashes through a Protoss army. Stats is prepared for a drop in his main base, and has his colossus army ready in his third base for the eventual attack from Maru that he sees with an observer, but what he didn’t expect was the three medivac drop to flank in and drop on top of the colossi. Frantic forcefields go down as the medivacs drop over them, and probes are forced off the line to buffer extra damage. Almost all gas units are eliminated from Stats, and once the attack is finished Maru can simply boost out with the remaining forces and continue to employ these tactics.



Against Zest, Maru uses a slight variation of the drop flank. Rather than dropping units directly on top of the colossus, Maru already has them on the ground and uses them as a direct flank against the Protoss army. Like Stats, Zest is prepared for a two pronged attack with armies in both his natural base and third base, but again, Maru simply combines his armies into one, and overwhelms a single Protoss army located at the third base of Zest. This gives Maru enough of an army lead to force Zest into an all in position, and wins the game from there.

An important reason why these drops work out so well for Maru is that they eliminate colossus. With his viking-less style it’s extremely important to limit how many colossus the Protoss can get to, otherwise Maru’s bio ball will evaporate to a critical mass of them. In most of the previous examples, Maru is able to snipe a large amount of colossus, which in turn forces the Protoss to stay at home and try to hit that critical mass they are looking for. This leads us nicely into the second tactic that Maru employs: the colossus dive.



Here, Maru completely ignores everything that isn’t a colossus. His units are all focus on the towering figures, as zealots chop away at his bio, and stalkers do what they can. The goal is the same as always: reset the colossus count. Vikings in this situation are nearly useless anyways because of the mass phoenix count, so the only way to eliminate the colossus are to catch them out of position, or to snipe them off in an engagement. Maru makes this look easy as he simply runs past the chargeless zealots, and hops onto the colossus.



Even with time warps and forcefields, Maru still somehow finds a way to slip units through and on top of the colossus. The situation is the same as before: zealots in the front lines, stalkers in the back, and this time, supporting sentries for forcefields and a mothership core for time warp, but Maru doesn’t care. He carefully keeps his SCVs attacking on the front lines to pull aggro, while he stutter steps his bio units forward to get close enough to the colossus. Three colossus down along with the rest of the Protoss force, and even though Zest was already dead, this battle exemplifies how good Maru is at eliminating colossus.

All of these cool tricks couldn’t be done without pristine micro, so just how good is Maru at micromanagement? We’ve seen his ability to flawlessly execute multi-pronged attacks, pick off key units, pick up and get out with favorable trades all over the board, and we’ve seen his smaller early game engagements with little packs of units, so what’s left to see? Nothing much really, but let’s look at more stuff anyway.



The hottest pick up of all time. Under high pressure already from getting blink all-ined, Maru makes a tank to help hold off the push. With the blink up onto the high ground, and the medivac far out of positon to make the play possible, Maru keeps his composure. This play requires two perfectly executes parts to make happen. The first is to boost the medivac as soon as possible towards the tank, which in itself is pretty simple. The second part is to move the tank towards the medivac, bringing it that much closer to being picked up. Everything has to work perfectly for Maru to make this play work; a single mis micro anywhere, and the tank, along with probably everything else Maru has, is dead. The hot pickup works, as the tank is literally a single frame of getting hit by the last stalker shot it needed to die, and Maru performs a miraculous hold off of this. It seems Maru has played Starcraft Master, and continuously unloads and picks up the siege tank, dealing extra damage, baiting out useless stalker volleys that hit nothing, and unloading the tank one last time right before the medivac dies with it inside. Dear even has to blink on top of the tank one last time to finish it off, and in the end loses six more stalkers than he should have.

Addendum

Round 4 ended in disaster for Maru. After peaking at 25-10 in the first three rounds, Maru plummeted in the score lines with five losses in a row. Without going into too much detail, let’s take a quick peek at what lost him these games:

1. vs. BrAvO: Maru ends up going mech, which he simply should not do.
   
2. vs. Classic: Didn’t send out a single drop, let Classic play greedy and get away with it. Unable to trade for colossus, made vikings, and to cap it all off, wasted tons of money on useless nukes.
   
3. vs. DRG: unable to prevent creep spread, loses early hellions to lings. Similar to the game against Classic, DRG went untouched in the early game and played greedily, giving him a much stronger mid game than Maru. There were little drops from Maru, little mutalisk defense, and little creep spread throughout the game. A combination of mutalisk damage and the inability to return the damage to DRG crippled Marus economy, and was eventually overran.
   
4. vs. herO: Proxy gate threw off Maru early on, and herO was able to take an economic lead off of this. Oracles kept Maru pinned in his base while herO took an early third, and a massive gateway attack finished off Maru.
   
5. vs. Flash: Arguably ahead, or at least even the entire game, Maru took a horrible fight on top of a protected planetary fortress, safeguarded by siege tanks, vikings, hellbats, you name it. The counterattack killed Maru.

Maru’s play was so bad this round that his coach sat him out in the last week, which they ended up winning. His less than stellar play this round is purely his own fault. He changed his play style for the worst, choosing compositions he’s not familiar with, strategies he’s not good with, and decisions he normally wouldn’t make. It seems he was on edge this round, as his first losses in the round eventually snowballed into worse and worse play.

Conclusion

While still sinking in the last round, Maru has had an incredible run through Proleague this year, and with his help has gotten his team into the playoffs of Proleague. Should Maru fix his minor weaknesses found throughout his matchups, and retain his current strengths, Maru could soar to new levels of skill unseen since the King of Wings himself was in his prime. This is how he ascended to the throne, this is how he became The Fresh Prince of Jin Air.