IEM Katowice 2024 - Page 91

On February 12 2024 21:30 Glorfindelio wrote:


Maru played absolutely out of his mind on Radhuset--but this is exactly what I mean. No one else besides Serral would have been able to beat him at that stage of the game. Maru entered into the ghost, liberator stage of the game from a position of strength, and you can see the commentators talking about Serral's dire position as Maru sits comfortably on six bases after his most recent attack fails.

But the moment Maru moves to take the gold, Serral gets the perfect fight to swing momentum for the next 10 minutes, where he basically accrues small victories in every engagement until taking a couple bad ones at the very end. And then he pulls off the perfect tech switch with the last of his resources and Maru doesn't have the money to match it. If Serral doesn't break Maru's attempt to grab the gold the first time, there's no way he wins. Hell, if he even trades slightly worse despite having enormous momentum for the last half of the game, he loses.

People don't understand how tricky it is to engage into entrenched Terran with Lib/Ghost, never mind when it's Maru. How many times have you seen Reynor crash into an entrenched Maru and break? With respect, he struggles to best Spirit in games like that. Dark gets consistently mauled in late game vs Maru and it doesn't look close. Solar is very good at that stage, but loses more often than not. Serral is the only one that wins games like this. No one else touches Maru in late game TvZ (though Clem has gotten quite close), but no one plays like Serral.

All of that being said, many of the games could have gone either way if even one engagement had gone differently, or if Maru had scouted those early attacks a bit sooner. Even that last game, if Maru plugs that mineral line gap so a group of banelings don't merc like 16 SCVs, his early tempo lead likely snowballs into a win, but he let runbys ravage his scvs time and time again.

Serral was simply intractable and glacial in his dominance this tournament, and for me, the sheer skill of it was something to behold. Fight it, run from it, destiny still arrives as they say. And who knows, maybe Maru unleashes a similar run this summer--it's certainly possible.