TY vs ByuL

It’s been a long, long road to the top for TY. Six years grinding away on the WeMade Fox B Team; two working with the squad that would become the Jin Air Green Wings, before a final transition to his current spot on KT Rolster adds up to half a lifetime of dedication spread across Starcraft and its sequel. Since his transition to Starcraft 2, TY has always seemed to be the ultimate highlight player. Be it out-multitasking Maru to death with banshee harass, having the balls to bunker rush Classic in Game 6 of the Proleague Finals, or his whole range of masterfully exploitative siege tank rushes, chances are everyone’s got a favourite TY VOD. But while that ability to conjure wins out of nowhere might endear him to his fans, the fact that he hasn’t been able to do it consistently has been the unfortunate barrier to his entry into the top echelon of the scene. It’s telling that, for all the praise and hype and highlights, all he has to show for his career so far are a smattering of top 8 finishes, alongside his recent semifinal spot at IEM Shenzhen.


TY: "Wow this is the third straight time they've picked me to lose."

Poor results in Season 2, alongside limited opportunities in Proleague following Life’s usurping of his spot in KT’s four man core lineup led us to believe that his powers were on the wane. Instead, it seems like the break from the weekly grind may just have been the making of him. His impressive run through consecutive IEM qualifier gauntlets for Shenzhen and gamescom was one of the more impressive feats in recent memory, with his momentum only halted by soO and INnoVation a series away from success in the latter event. He’s simply looked crisper and more error-free than at any point since his flawless Round 1 of last year’s Proleague campaign. His newly found aptitude for ghost usage has given him a rather antiquated edge in late game TvP that’s seemingly been ditched by every other terran, while his traditional strength in TvT has hit new heights (a win rate of 79% across the past four months).

The one big chink in the armour then, is his TvZ. It’s the one matchup in which he’s retained his trademark inconsistency, and he’s traded series with Life, Rogue and soO recently, with only a curious weakness to Losira ruining the 50/50 symmetry amongst his higher profile opponents. Their series in Shenzhen was an eye opener, with Losira’s early aggression perfectly punishing the greed required to get his tech-heavy style online, and it’ll be interesting to see if TY can counter ByuL’s similarly aggressive tendencies.

The CJ zerg has been on a roll in the matchup recently—he is 8-2 in his past 10 ZvT series, beating the very best Korea has to offer in the matchup. Series victories over INnoVation, FanTaSy, Dream, TY and Maru are as close to anointing him as king of the matchup as it gets. His quarterfinals victory over INnoVation in particular was essentially ByuL in microcosm. His ling muta bane play against bio is comparable to the best we’ve ever seen, while his dogged insistence on hanging in against mech was commendable. Talk all you want about INnoVation throwing the Terraform match with his missed upgrades, but it would have been all too easy for ByuL to GG out early when it seemed that the SKT Terran had the game in the bag.

In fact, in terms of the intangibles which separate the great from the merely good, it’s ByuL’s tenacity which is the most striking. A quick fact—of all the players to have lost their first final in a Korean Starleague, only INnoVation managed to return to take the title subsequently; and that was after a year-long funk. ByuL is on the verge of making it to the finals again at the first attempt. Granted, we said the same about soO again, and again… and again, but the point stands that it’s been a rapid turnaround for the distraught zerg left tearing up on stage at the climax to Season 2. For a player who's taken hit after hit this year (losing to TerrOr? Really?), a swift chance to atone would be a sweet reward indeed.


ByuL: "I will dedicate my win to all the zergs that have died to mech."

So now we come to the big question that will decide everything—will it be mech or bio? We saw INnoVation get beaten down on Coda when he tried to switch it up to catch out ByuL, and it’s probably fair to say that TY isn’t quite INnoVation yet in TvZ. Mech however brings its own problems—the turtle mech style is pretty much the antithesis of the controlled chaos that TY normally wields—but is probably the less dangerous option compared to going head to head with ByuL’s muta ling bane. The variant he used against Rogue in the Ro.16 was much more mobile than the tank-heavy composition favoured by INnoVation though, with particular emphasis on hellion-banshee and widow mine harass. Matched up against ByuL's naturally counter-attacking style, this could be a welcome return to more dynamic games than the trench warfare we've been inundated with recently.


Predictions

TY will have to up his game to progress here. Going 1-1 with Rogue in mech games in the Ro.16 was a good start (game 3 was won by holding a limp ling all-in), but it's likely that ByuL will be fully prepared to counter any of the mech variants we've seen recently. Whether he can pull off another miracle, though, is another question.

TY 2 - 4 ByuL