BoxeR, YellOw, their rivalry and E-Sports - Page 3

I'd also add that if you saw a game with firebathero,
you'd see battlecruisers more often than not, and a lot of incredible trolling (without losing the game).
He was one of the only higher-tiered players at the time who used battlecruisers at all in TvZ.

There was a player named V-gundam and a few other players who started the metal composition that's the norm today.
there was quite a few variances on the Fake-Double (factory) build at the time (gundam rush-ish), which was basically a fast factory with units that pushed across the map, to mask and buy time for the fact that the terran was expanding behind it. usually it consisted of one vulture, perhaps two with spider mines, 6 marines, one tank to deal with the dragoon and if controlled properly, it killed off a fast robo build by protoss.

intotherainbow (player up until 2006 or so) = reavers. as simple as that. also he was hilariously good at trolling with the dark archon and mindcontrolling a worker to play 2 races vs 1. there was this one game he played PvT where he mindcontrolled an scv relatively early, and then proceeded to play mostly TvT and win. Also one of those players known for their corsair control vs scourge.

garimto (2001 player) = zealots. there were so many games of 2 gate pvp where garimto would just win based off zealot micro. it's really funny thinking back on those times

Nal_ra was quite well known for his archons and late-game spellcasting, including that one famous arbiter game on an island map against goodfriend. His rivalry with savior was basically a late-game slugfest with casters and archons and crap. a well known game was dubbed the 'holy war'. alluding to the crusades? I guess.

anytime = dts, carriers. there was this one semifinals where he killed the favourite (yellow) only producing DTs. this was when yellow knew they were coming and had spores up even. he never expected that many dt's though...
a sad moment as a yellow fan ):<.

Stork was basically that protoss who played macro, won with early dragoon zealot bulldogs, and played to win with carriers and storm. has some great games with cannons, reavers, and disruptor web abuse.

Grrrr... was well known for interesting builds, played random before deciding on protoss, and had a pretty good reaver drop. only foreigner to have one a premier sc:bw tournament, and the very first official OSL one at that (before OSL was called OSL). his nickname was something along the lines of green-eyed warrior, and he stayed in korea after retiring early.

Leg, legionnaire is a beloved TL.net community member who pops on from time to time. I believe he even commentated for sc:bw and sc2 as a small one-shot stint, it was cute. he's known as the only foreigner to have performed an all-kill in Korean progleague. he was playing for the all-foreigner team (believe it or not there existed a thing) consisted of a bunch of players I don't remember the full names of. point is, he all-killed, he had the record for most reaver kills in one game, was our foreigner hope, is aussie, and he was a great guy!

Boxer had this knack of winning a game, much like MC or MVP did in sc2. his timings were crisp much like flash but in the sense of the phrase, "timing attack" he'd come at you with a specific vulture timing and wreck you to the point that it didn't matter that his minerals piled up to the thousands, and he was just controlling a handful of units all the while. He had incredibly creative strategies involving drops, mines, marines and medic, and siege tanks.
you could write a book on some of his games because of how epic they were at the time.
...
one example of a game: his opponent had hopeless amounts of carriers built up. the essential counter to carriers at the time if behind were cloaked wraiths. his opponent, knowing this, tried to seal the game by building observers. the counterplay to observers is scanning and swooping in to take care of them before the wraiths died. his opponent proceeded to make incredible amounts of observers to feel safe. so boxer in this particular game (and he did this in quite a few games in history) did something a bit unprecedented or thinkable. he made a bunch of medics, one for each observer. he scanned, flanked with his medics, and casted optic flare on each observer individually to blind their detection. if even one observer was safe from this, the entire tactic fails, but he made it work and killed the carriers with a hopelessly small amount of wraiths. in other games, he made enough ghosts to lockdown each carrier, and kill them with a small amount of goliaths or wraiths. it was great to see, believe me, haha. one of his trademark trolls (that worked surprisingly well) was his usage of EMP + nuke on nexus. this was his fanservice, basically. if you didn't know, if you emp a nexus as the nuke falls, it loses enough shields that it dies to that one nuke, and he used this sort of strategy as a sort of pocket strategy as he was playing for the airforce team.
another example was against joyo on an island map where he had to resort to microing a small amount of units against a large carrier army. it involved dropping, repairing, and whittling down carriers with a handful of goliaths and eventually winning the game this way.

Julyzerg was this player--one of the all time greats--who won something at every era of sc:bw. he was the "god of war".
why? because he just loved fighting and destroying you with floods of units. everything he did was reminiscent of starship troopers, except he was the swarm of aliens. his zergling micro goes in the books as one of the best examples of zerg efficiency. it was simply amazing. imagine life in sc2, but once he got the zerlings in your base, you lost the battle. they'd stay in there for the next 2-10 minutes and pick off a worker here, while you're not watching. scout everything you have in your base, kill more workers mining gas, injure more workers for later, and continue to kill and pillage and wreck your mineral line until you built cannons or made ranged units to finally deal with them.
he was also one of the pioneers of the mutalisk stacking technique that we see now. that started around 2006, maybe later where shark (another Z on MBC) who figured out that if you selected a distant unit and collected it into the same selection as your air units, they would stack with a move command. people grouped slow-moving overlords at the corners of the map, larvae (since they couldn't move) or intentionally trap units in a prison somewhere to efficiently use this technique. for a string of time, july won games just on the back of mutalisk micro, whether you had turrets, stimmed marines, or not. also super famous for his 4 pools and other speedling shenanigans. his macro game was also beautiful to watch. he'd also always transition off mutalisks into ultralisks and just destroy you with way too many units to handle. he was the APM zerg, before APM was even a thing that people watched. seriously, his guy had the sickest zerg micro at the time, and could probably still tussle with the best. his APM peak against best in the ever OSL 2008 finals (final crowning moment for july) saw him at just shy of 1000. it just look absolutely beastly and ridiculous with an average of 350 or more--and that amounts to 6 mouseclicks/keyboard strokes a second.

along the same lineage as july was of course, the storm zerg, yellow not many people are going to claim him as great as boxer, but he really was. he was -the- zerg to watch when zerg was at its darkest, had the most creative strategies, and was basically the strategic version of boxer in zerg form. there are so many memorable games that made him stand out aside from his achievements (and non-achievements).
there is this one game in a pimpest play (best replay compliation for the foreigner scene at the time) where it's ultra low economy mode and it's basically mined out. he has a handful of units left and a defiler. his opponent has one wraith and yellow doesn't have a single bit of anti air. what does he do? take his handful of units, consume for dark swarm energy, and pave a dark swarm pathway for his only remaining drone to make the gas pilgrimage. that is, he needed just enough gas from that one gas mining trip to make that set of scourge to close it out.
I know him most lovingly for his 2cm drops which he displayed once again in glorious OG fashion against bisu long past his peak. this was around the time when the airforce team (full of retired players) actually claimed some proleague wins and climbed out of last place. boy were those the days lol.

there was this player who went by the name GGPLAY and I want to highlight this player in specific because at his peak I have no doubt he was the best at what he did. his peak hit, then he retired to mediocrity in part because of his injury (perhaps carpal tunnel. I don't recall). what he did right was ZvT and lategame zerg. in one series against iris (an incredibly aggressive bio-tank terran player), he managed to go 0-2 and proceed to clean sweep the series (one of the only times this ever happened) in horrifyingly close games. how he did this was on the back of his incredible defiler play. once he got defilers, he was magic. he was Houdini. he snuck himself out of situations where 95% of players would lose. he defended with so little and played this unit to perfection in other to win the series and adoration as the victor of one of the most revered set of games In all of SC:BW. this was stuff that legitimately made fangirls, commentators, and viewers and home scream.
game attached--+ Show Spoiler +

nada is the sort of player who played freestyle at the time. his apm was insane, his multitasking was up to the task, his marine medic was on the same level of boxer, but he had the macro to back it up. he was basically good at everything and anything and that includes winning games. before flash, he was the most winningest player ever with most titles won, a gold mouse (which few people have), and had the most consistency across all the generations of sc:bw. so basically, before flash was flash, nada was flash. or rather, flash became the new nada.

oh and who could forget Reach. this guy was my favourite progamer at the time, until he stopped playing around 2006-2008. he was one of the original macro protosses, and was the original bisu with his good looks, crazy hair, and amazing micro. the community nicknamed him the MAN-TOSS because each one of his strategies and moves were so damn manly. he would take engagements he had no business taking. all of his units were named after him. zealots = manlots, storms = manstorms, dragoons = mangoons, reavers = manreavers, scarab = manscarabs!! IDK!, everything about him excuded manliness, which a certain female Samsung coach commented on. he would move a handful of dragoons in front of a mine to bait the activation and chase, then back up and start the attack animation in time to kill the mine. this was called minesweeping and it was a way (a very situational and seldomly attempted way) to clear out early mines without an observer, something he was definitely known for was his zealot bombs. my god those were glorious. in PvT he'd mine-drag using citadel zealots to kill a giant cluster of siege tanks and vultures. it became the way of dealing with the mid-game terran slow-push with turrets. you'd have one or more shuttles to delay the push and force the terran to place mines and tanks in inconvenient places. I remember a game where he used a DT to mine-drag. now if you didn't know, the spider mine has the attack animation, then it deals the damage. so if you picked up a unit that was juuuust about to get hit, it wouldn't take any damage, but the mine would splash--DT's obviously being used because you needed detection, lest units like zealots be killed by vultures the moment they're dropped.
his storm usage (much like jangbi) was also absolutely baller. that was where his Korean nickname came from. he was basically the god of storm, it would blanket the entire siege line and easily clean up the fight.. and cemented him as one of the alltime greats of PvT.
the last of his notable games was vs. choujja (another great zerg on KT at the time) there was a massive devourer and mutalisk air army (a potent combo against air in ZvP) that got locked down entirely by a few casts of maelstrom (a disabling spell on dark archons that was rarely used) then he walks in with his air army and archons to rub it in.