Today marked SuperNova’s official retirement from pro SC2.

While he was never accounted among the greats of SC2 pros, his career was a successful one. He had 13 Code S appearances, has reached the playoffs three times and played as the ace for nearly every team he ever joined. But those are just his results, what made SuperNova great was that he was an outlier.

In SC2, we as players, as spectators, as fans, as a scene are outliers. In the grand scheme of things we are a niche culture, a subculture of eSports and gaming as a whole. Despite or because of that, we as a community want to, need to seek validation from the larger audiences. So it becomes natural to try to regress back to the mean, to try to emulate the successes of other games, to try to achieve the success of other larger scenes like LoL, Dota2 or CS:GO.

And just like the scene as a whole, pros naturally regress to the standard in their quest to seek success. It is a natural step. As a game gets figured out, the best paths are written down, refined and then passed around. This is especially true for the Terran race as most of its history has been defined by standard builds and compositions. It is a clear road sign to success, one nearly every player follows. Nearly.

If we are outliers, then SuperNova was an outlier among outliers. In an earlier article I talked about his incredible use of preparation. He was among the few handful of players to ever take preparation to that height. On that alone he could be accounted as one of the unique players of the game. But more than that from 2011 to now, if you hid every pro gamers name in every VoD, I could still point out nearly every important game SuperNova had ever played.

This was a man who took strange builds, strange compositions and unique attack patterns to untold levels (the only Terran even crazier than him was Gumiho). He played marine/tank/banshee against Protoss in WoL. He played mass hellions against Protoss in WoL. He played hellbat bio/thor against Zerg an year before it became a standard build (pre transformation-servos removal). He played Hellbat Bio against Protoss in the early stages of HotS. He went for Mech builds against both Zerg and Protoss in the early stages of HotS when both were considered completely unviable.

And the way he constructed attacks was a thing of beauty. With the first attack, he could completely control the entire flow of a game against anyone when he was playing at his best. Even the greatest players in their days, players like: MC, Losira, Leenock, Trap, MMA, Mvp, DRG, Innovation, Soulkey.

With a career that lasted 4 years, in a game that naturally forces players to go along a standard path, with a race that punishes those who play unique, SuperNova went against the grain. He stuck to his guns and in his games you got a strong sense of individuality. You could nearly see him yelling in his games, “This is who I am, this is where I stand.” In a scene where players scramble to copy and refine the current standards of the game, SuperNova held his ground.

There is something beautiful about that. In a world where people are pressured to conform to a natural ideal of normal or standard, but in this one instance, in this microcosm we saw one man hold to himself to the very end.

He never won a Premier Championship. He spent most of his years getting knocked out early in Code S. He will never have a tangible object of his achievements he can hold. Yet his games were intense, entertaining, complete with varied unit compositions, builds and on his best days he could compete with and win against the very best.

Against the natural inclinations of human nature and society, against practicality, against the very nature of SC2 itself, SuperNova played by his own rules from beginning to end. And that is his legacy. Years from now SuperNova can say to himself without a shadow of a lie that he stayed true to himself. That he was SuperNova to the very end. And we were lucky to be witness to that.