Modified banner by Smittmeister

Quarter-Finals Preview
Six Protoss, One Zerg, One Terran


Brackets and standings on Liquipedia

VODs on Youtube

WCS Europe Season II Finals Weekend

It's time for the final leg of the tournament. Eight out of the original thirty-two contestants remain, and they will battle it out over the next two days for the title of European champion.


The first step will be the quarter-final matches that will begin at 12:00 GMT (+00:00) August 10th, with the semi-finals and grand finals to be played on August 11th. TeamLiquid takes a look ahead at to the quarter-final matches.

Quarter-Final One: MMA vs. HasuObs

by Waxangel

Acer.MMA and mouz.HasuObs hail from two different continents, but their stories are curiously similar. Both players are veterans of several years, with their experience in progaming going beyond StarCraft II. Both players can call 2011 their best in pro-gaming, a year where MMA won three major championships, while HasuObs took fourth in TSL3 and IEM Guangzhou. They fell into mediocrity in 2012 under the shadow of BL-Infestor, but HotS has revitalized their careers. Reaching the round of eight in this season WCS Europe is already the best international tournament result they have attained in a very long time. Alas, only one of them can continue their road to redemption and move onto the semi-finals.

HasuObs has more to gain with a win here. Despite being a household name in the European scene, a top player in Germany, and a regular at every European tournament, he still doesn't have that premier tournament title all pro-gamers yearn. At the very least, a top four finish would already match his career best finish at major internationals, and it would be his most impressive run since TSL3. Back then, he defeated the legendary Boxer to earn his semi-final berth, and this time around he is facing Boxer's disinherited heir.

MMA's has less to gain and more to lose, as winning the championship is almost a bare minimum for people to consider his revival to be legitimate. That's the shadow of having once been the best player in the world, and people will always compare MMA's current form to his glory days when he was taking championships left and right.

The match seems to lean slightly in HasuObs' favor. MMA's return to form in is 2013 based on the same match-ups he won championships with in 2011: his TvZ and TvT. In contrast, his TvP is then and now, a weakness in his game. He admitted as much in a post Ro16 interview with ThisIsGame (Korean), talking about his surprisingly easy 0 - 2 loss to NaNiwa.

On the other hand, HasuObs' PvT has traditionally been his best match-up, and you could argue that it is still his best now, at least on a statistical basis (check out his recent record on Aligulac.com). He might be a bit over-stereotyped as a passive, deathball oriented player, but it's true that he plays that kind of PvT very well. He also has his own bag of tricks to use as well, and he played against type in his 2 - 1 win over Mvp, going for a creative forge & 5-gate all-in in one game, and a two base storm rush in another.

MMA's method of overcoming his PvT weakness in 2011 was to take risks, and I don't think that will change much in 2013. So expect greedy triple orbitals, hidden bases, tech rushes, SCV-pull all-ins, and anything BUT safe, middle of the road play (think Bomber in his OSL run). Whether or not HasuObs wants to play long games or not, it will be important to sniff out what kind of tricks MMA is up to early and react accordingly.

With too little time to prepare between rounds, I'll take HasuObs to win this match-up. If MMA had been in Korea, then maybe he could have hashed some gameplan together with his Axiom friends in the period of a few days, but having to prepare in Germany gives HasuObs the advantage even in that regard.

Prediction: HasuObs 3 - 2 MMA

Quarter-Final Two: Welmu vs. MC

by stuchiu

From the very beginning, PvP has always had a reputation as the coin-flip matchup. Players must often commit to a build before they can ever scout their opponent and must hope that their build counters or at least breaks even with their opponents. Of course, much of this reputation was established during the dark ages of PvP before 4-gate was nerfed multiple times, cannon rushes were plentiful, and InCa's DTs still roamed the earth (and who knows, they may still roam unseen).

Through many patches and thousands upon thousands of games, the match-up has become much more skilled based, with all-around "safe" builds being developed, defensive micro improving by leaps and bounds, and the MSC being introduced to the game. Nowadays, ignoring the occasional proxy double gates, PvP has become much less punishing and has become a match where expands have become the norm rather than an abominable aberration. Even so, no one should dare to come out and say “PvP is all skill” in a brazen way, lest he suffer the fate of Oz (who was only freed from his PvP curse once Own3d went belly-up and the video of the interview was destroyed).

This match will be a battle between old and new masters of match-up, between the first King of PvP in SK_MC and the latest King of Finland, NrS.Welmu. MC is from the first age of PvP where everyone believed that no one could be consistent in a matchup, but it turned out that MC was the only one who had a weighted coin. No player has hit a 90% PvP winrate except during that era, and it was achieved by the first Protoss hope, MC.

For MC, as it is for many old Koreans, this is about redemption. Once a favorite to win every tournament he entered, MC has become an aging beast. There are cracks in his play. He is no longer at the forefront of his race. His attacks have become a less fierce, his all-ins less inspired. While still a threat to anyone, he has yet to show the ability to just WILL himself to wins that he once possessed in WoL. For MC, a player who had to sit on the sidelines and train with Mvp while Mvp took the crown of Europe, this is the best chance to get back into the limelight since the HotS release. For MC, a victory here will be a resounding announcement to the world that his era hasn’t ended yet.

If MC represents a titan of the old age, then Welmu is at the vanguard of the youth movement. A young player from Finland, his career was mostly one of being an online monster while remaining on the fringes of the main tournaments in Europe. Since 2013 however, he has come into his own, beginning as he won the crown of Finland at Assembly Winter. He was one of the few players to always reach the top 16 in every qualifier for Premier league in WCS EU. While he couldn't make it into the Premier League for season one, he quickly qualified through the Challenger league and then into WCS EU season 2. He has now topped both of his ro32 and ro16 groups.

This is a clash of generations. Can the veteran Korean use his superior experience to trick and defeat the young rising star. Or will Welmu end MC’s hopes to once more hit the podium on the world stage?

Prediction: Welmu 3 - 2 MC

Quarter-Final Three: NaNiwa vs. Duckdeok

by stuchiu

With Stephano retiring, Alliance.NaNiwa has been chosen as the de-facto heir to the European crownd. In many ways, the title is deserved, as though there are many great players in contention for the throne, none have had the results of Naniwa, none have shown the same quality of play, and none have fought quite so hard both inside and outside the game to get there.

If you look at Naniwa’s career as a whole, he has both reached the depths of the abyss and nearly touched the heights of heaven. Through all of the drama and time in exile, one thing has shone through above all: Naniwa is someone who is obsessed with becoming a better player above all. That obsession has often had Naniwa play the part of villain as he didn't care for the public relations required of a highly visible competitor, and his inability to come to to terms with the fact that no team would pay him just to be a good player cost him several opportunities.

But after the dissolution of his previous team, Quantic, and several months of teamlessness, Naniwa has slowly and surely rebuilt his public image. His redemption arc even led him to land team Alliance (a team Sortof like EG), and his days of making the forums burst into flame wars have ended (for the most part). He even seems to have adopted more Korean mannerisms, staying humble and speaking of hie desire to show good games to his fans. And while the old Naniwa bursts out of him every once in awhile, Naniwa has finally become the champion the foreign scene wants to support, not the one they are forced to get behind because of his undeniable skill.

While Naniwa has lived long enough as a villain to become a hero, MVP.duckdeok has changed from an unknown Korean into the bad guy of the tournament. Young in age but still one of the oldest GSL veterans, he spent most of his career as a fringe Code A player who once hit Code S before falling out entirely. Similarly, he dominated his group stage in NASL Season 4 before dropping out right before the main lan to HerO. Because of this anonymity Duckdeok, played the part of the ubiquitous, faceless Korean when he applied for WCS Europe. So it was with raucous joy that Europe cheered and yelled EU HOLDS!!! after duckdeok failed time and time again in the first qualifiers. Even in his first challenger appearance he fell in the first round and barely made it into Premier over Krass.

So going into this season of WCS EU, no one expected much of anything from duckdeok. He was just a Korean invader who wasn’t beloved like MC or Mvp or had been adopted like ForGG or Stardust. Was it any surprise that in such a situation, Duckdeok turned to the dark arts? Following in the footsteps of teammate Sniper, he learned the greatest victory is the victory over the fan favorite, and the greatest prize is the gallons of tears from thousands of fans. Using all-in after all-in Duckdeok eliminated favorites DIMAGA, Dayshi, Stephano and Lucifron as the fans and casters all watched dumbfounded at Duckdeok’s new found strength. Will the new evil claim another victim or will Naniwa defend and become Europe’s new king?

Prediction: Naniwa 3 - 1 Duckdeok

Quarter-Final Four: VortiX vs. Grubby

by Waxangel

After losing the spotlight to his brother Lucifron for most of HotS, attention is finally shifting back to mouz.VortiX in Season II of WCS Europe. Without doing anything especially notable, VortiX has racked up a very nice string of results in both online and live tournaments (refer again to our friend Aligulac for a detailed look), and he heads into the final eight as an under-the-radar candidate to take it all. His PvZ has looked particularly great, defeating MC, RuNa, MaNa, and even San in recent matches. Possessing strong ZvZ as well, a ZvT against MMA—who is terrifying against Zerg—is probably the only match-up he would really hate to draw in the tournament. As the #2 foreigner for much of the late-WoL period, VortiX might finally ascend to the throne now that Stephano is gone.

All of this is bad news for Grubby, who comes into the Ro8 after an emotional victory over Mvp. It's hard not to cheer for Grubby to win the entire tournament after that, he still has three more opponents to beat if he wants to claim the first major title of his SC2 career. We've called Grubby good-but-not-great several times in the past, and each major tournament sees us (and his legion of fans) waiting to see if he can take another step forward. This Protoss-heavy tournament could be his best chance at success since IEM Singapore, but to play PvP he has to overcome the formidable challenge of VortiX first.

VortiX's style is a mixture of predictable and unpredictable. While you can expect him to go hydra-roach-viper in a 'standard' game, he is also very fond of mixing it up with early aggression or all-ins. This willingness to mix up his strategies has been a hallmark of VortiX's play even at the apex of broodlord-infestor, where he was just as capable of winning games early as he was late. Grubby has experienced this first hand in the tournament, in a loss to VortiX in the Ro32 where the Spanish Zerg gave him three different looks: hydra-roach-infestor into ultralisks late game (VortiX won), baneling bust (Grubby won), and mass roach-ling early (VortiX won).

Meanwhile, it's hard to put a finger on Grubby's PvZ. He's opened gateway first, looked for cannon rushes, gone for zealot-phoenix aggression, taken fast thirds, gone for sentry-drop harass—basically he's tried most of the things Protoss can do. One thing that we that we have conspicuously seen him not do is go for fast sky transitions, something we see from certain Korean players and notably NaNiwa in Europe. Grubby is capable of a wide variety of strats, and some games may just come down to one player taking a build order advantage when both players go for early aggression.

Adding everything up, I think VortiX will come out on top. His recent wins against players like MaNa and MC were impressive, whereas Grubby didn't look the best against Ret (even though he won) or DRG. Throw in VortiX's 2 - 1 victory against Grubby already in WCS, and I have to go with the Spaniard.

Prediction: VortiX 3 - 1 Grubby

Writers: Waxangel and stuchiu
Graphics: shiroiusagi, Smittmeister
Banner photo: ESL
Editor: Waxangel.