EPTSBENU GSL
Season 2 Code S
Aim for the Stars
PartinG vs ByuL
MyuNgSiK vs sOs
Brackets and standings on Liquipedia
MyuNgSiK vs sOs
If you were looking forward to an inspirational, standard macro PvP series, then prepare to be disappointed, for sOs and MyuNgSiK, while capable of it, are as far from standard as you can get. Both players above all else, love to outwit their opponents, to crawl inside their heads and destroy them from the inside out, using their very beliefs against them. What differentiates them is their past, sOs is an illustrious paragon of the Protoss race, one that has won few but extremely prestigious championships and has pioneered Protoss play in HoTS, while MyuNgSiK is a former B teamer struggling to make a name for himself. In this new age battle of the PvP the result is as up in the air as the coin the players so love to flip.
MyuNgSiK for much of his SC2 career was an overlooked B teamer caught in the shadow of his colossal team mates. Despite being on KT Rolster since their switch to SC2 he barely had any results to speak off and was rarely sent out in Proleague. And even when he did, he usually got destroyed as his 2-6 record in the 2013 edition proved. However towards the end of 2013 MyuNgSiK had his first opportunity to prove his worth and he made his way through the grueling IEM Shanghai qualifiers on the back of weird and wacky mass phoenix style. His qualifying run however didn't translate into a breakout performace, he still had a paltry 3-4 Proleague record and he never got to the RO16 in a GSL in 2014. Finally MyuNgSiK decided he had enough of sitting in the shadow of titans and left KT Rolster for PRIME, and while his Proleague results didn't get any better (5-8) despite the slew of new opportunities, his individual play did improve. He for the first time in his career he reached a RO16 in the first season of S2SL. Then, smelling new opportunity MyuNgSiK made the switch to Sbenu, and his results got even better, he won his first Proleague game with the new team and even carried Sonic on his back after the victory. He then went on to reach a RO8 in the GSL, upsetting many fan favorites including 
Dark, PartinG, Life and 
Bomber. Now MyuNgSiK faces his greatest challenge, a player that is very similar to him in many ways, cunning, ruthless and strange, but better in each way. While it's true that MyuNgSiK's PvP was enough to outwit PartinG on one night, it seems to have been more a freak occurrence rather than a consistent result, as a quick look at his match history will show that he is usually good at beating B teamers but struggles against the best PvPers. Like in all his match-ups, MyuNgSiK likes to mix in stargates, either for oracle harass or straight mass phoenix, he is also very fond of proxies and has some experience dealing with them as well as executing them. However sOs' list of build orders is even vaster. It's hard to see how MyuNgSiK can have a chance in a BO5 against such a seasoned and scary opponent, but it is PvP after all.While MyuNgSiK had struggled for most of his career to find success,
sOs seemingly conjured it out of thin air. It is true that sOs has always had it rough in finding his consistency, even back in 2013 when he was seemingly inventing new builds every week, he'd go from a Season 1 finalist to elimination in the RO32 of the OSL. But if there is one thing sOs knew it as how to win when it mattered, he scraped together RO8 after RO8 until he was at Blizzcon, there he vanquished herO, outsmarted Captain America, outlasted Bomber's onslaught and then thoroughly picked apart Jaedong's brain. He was so efficient in fact that, despite Jaedong winning ASUS ROG Winter 2013, he'd never be considered a championship contender for 2014. Of course sOs soon fell back into his pattern of underachieving, being eliminated early at DH Winter 2013, and following up with a RO8 and several RO16s in Korea. While Zest was busy capturing the imaginations of everyone around the world as well as 3 golds in Korea, people wondered if sOs could stay relevant for there is a limit to how many builds one can invent. At IEM Katowice 2014 and Hot6ix Cup 2014, sOs answered, with mind games. Yes you can map out the game as thoroughly as possible, but the more you do so, the more you overwhelm yourself. While in most cases knowledge is power, sOs knows how to use that knowledge against you. Equally comfortable macroing as he is cheesing, his versatility remained his strength. Even if you try to prepare for cheese, there are dozens of viable protoss all-ins and sOs can execute them all, and if you spend too much time preparing for cheese you run the risk of losing to his macro. Lately we've also seen that sOs architecting his macro builds as much as he does his cheeses and timings. He was one of the first to challenge Zests vision of post Tempest nerf PvP with his variation of Void Ray based PvP, and while he got outplayed, he didn't lose hope. His second try was against Sora in Proleague where it was clear that sOs had learned from his lessons and used them to augment his play, running Sora around and wasting his time until he had assembled his own perfect composition and a bank large enough to destroy his opponent. He also knows how to eco cheese and has become adept at playing with hidden Nexuses, even learning how to defend them and leverage them as advantages. In his Proleague game vs herO he did just that, his opponent into a false sense of security only to draw him into a fight he couldn't win. This is sOs in a nutshell, he is the lovable anti-hero of the scene, a man who will shamelessly proxy anything: two gateways, a stargate or a Nexus just to get into his opponents head and break him.Prediction
Despite sOs' very mercurial nature, for the moment he seems to be on the up and he is much more experienced and proven in BO5 scenarios then MyuNgSiK and masters a huge variety of builds, including several proxies. My money goes on the 100k dollar man.
MyuNgSiK 1-3 sOs
PartinG vs ByuL
Not three months separated the biggest moves of
PartinG's and ByuL's careers. Both players had been performing exceptionally well in Proleague. Both had experienced some success internationally, although ByuL's was more limited—a second place finish in WCS America Season 3 of 2013, while PartinG earned his first championship in HotS just a few weeks later at RedBull Battle Grounds NYC and then took a silver at the GSL Global Championship in early 2014. Both players were by every consideration very good, fulfilling great potential in ByuL's case and recovering a lost dominance of the Protoss race in PartinG's. But in a striking anti-parallelism, both players thrived as they took opposite directions when they parted ways with their iconic teams. The Although one could argue that a factor in the precipitous rise of PartinG's overall win rate (70.91% with yoe Flash Wolves, compared to 62.82% with SK Telecom T1 in HotS) is the "foreigner farming" he's availed himself of in more frequent appearances abroad, it is still not substantial enough to diminish the leaps he has made in improving his play. Perhaps the increased number of chances spectators have had to see PartinG in action is just a reinforcement of what was already suspected to exist in his play: control so superb, so much better than anyone else’s, that it alone could win him games. Perhaps because his play is more public now, and that he must still reserve his most refined strategies for GSL (in which he is earning better results than ever before), PartinG has adjusted his more common and lower profile games to be even more reliant on his micro. In any case, the defining aspect of PartinG’s style is one of the reasons why he is consistently one of the best: he plays to a strength with which nobody on Earth can contest. With regards to his PvZ in particular, it is even more impressive how he has turned his image around from someone who shrouded his greatest weakness with an (almost) impossibly strong build to someone who will be favored against any Zerg except Life because he’s just that good. The shortest explanation for this the swarm host patch. A unit that stifled two of PartinG’s favorite units, blink stalkers and high templar, is now incapable of doing either. Since the influential balance change of April 9, PartinG’s win rate in PvZ has risen 5.96%, up to a frightening 67.24%. The yoe Flash Wolves Protoss is now free to do what he does best. Nearly every game PartinG plays in PvZ now is a gateway opening or nexus into gateway, and eventually he’ll pressure while adding a forge for upgrades and a twilight for blink. Sometimes there are immortals, sometimes there is a third base and a templar archives, but most of the time PartinG wins.
Overshadowed by
Soulkey in 2013 and mostly only successful in Proleague in 2014, ByuL is finally playing like and earning credit for being one of the best Zergs in 2015. Although his results have not skyrocketed since transferring from IM to CJ the way PartinG’s did, the jump from about 59% to 61.42% overall doesn’t quite capture how strong of a player he is. In 2014 he anchored IM as the ace and only consistently good performer, finishing with a 18-11 record, 3-0 in ace matches. For CJ this year he has already reached a similar 17-8 record, 2-0 in ace matches. To complement his Proleague-best statistics, ByuL has reached the Round of 8 in both individual leagues and a KeSPA Cup. Throughout all these, he has beaten an admirable list of players including herO, Dream, Maru, TY, Life, Trap, MyuNgSiK, and INnoVation. Although he is more lauded for his unrivaled ZvT, ByuL is no slouch in ZvP. It attests much to the strength of ByuL’s style in the matchup that his win rate was not affected at all by the swarm host patch (ok, it dropped .64%). He has stayed at roughly 60% with a mutalisk-heavy arsenal of strategies that all take precedence over a mix of roach hydra, roach ling, and early pool styles. There are two conflicting forces that make it difficult to judge how ByuL will fare in this match against PartinG. In his other quarterfinals appearance, the S2SL against Classic, ByuL was thoroughly dismantled by a combination of extremely solid standard play and a surprise phoenix strategy to counter ByuL’s predictable mutalisk transition. To make it to the quarterfinals in GSL, ByuL took down the fearsome PvZ opponent in his teammate herO with very early aggression. While it was a known weakness of herO’s, ByuL’s success with that change in style suggests he learned from his mistakes against Classic and is now playing ZvP in a more adaptive manner. However, such a gamble-oriented plan for a best of 3 will not be as effective in a best of 5. ByuL can beat any Protoss, but which ByuL shows up will dictate whether or not he does. As the two divergent roads wind back to an intersection, each ridden with the successes of its player’s lifestyle change, an air of uncertainty fills the atmosphere. PartinG’s play is by design both hard to kill and hard to stop, while ByuL’s is calculated but vulnerable. Yet PartinG shares some of the weaknesses ByuL demonstrated he knows how to exploit with his beat down of herO. He also knows that PartinG has seen his games against Classic, and has the opportunity to devise an entirely new plan based on how he thinks PartinG will react to it. Ultimately, PartinG’s PvZ possesses a dominating flair that is absent in ByuL’s ZvP. The amount of inherent disadvantage ByuL will need to overcome in this series I think is insurmountable if his best plan is to anticipate and counter PartinG.
PartinG 3-1 ByuL
Though his zerg GSL curse >< Well, this should be entertaining, 2 crazy Protoss players against each other and then Parting. Oh boy!
