Starcraft 2 is a 1v1 game. And because of that it becomes natural for the stories, narratives and attention to generally be focused on the champions of tournaments, the players that can climb to the top of the scene and lift the trophy over the rest of his peers. Still, we hold team leagues in high regard. In this arena, incredible matches, incredible moments and incredible players have come forth. In Part 1 of the Team League Special I go over some of the greatest all-kills and the greatest coaches.

Lists are not in any particular order.

(Some of) The Greatest All-Kills

The TOTO Destroyer

(complete name John Lennon Bandanna Terran TOTO Destroyer)

The IM team lost, and it was all Coach Kang’s fault. To be fair to Coach Kang, it is normally a good idea to field a B-teamer against the weakest team in the league to get experience. Hell, fielding another B-teamer is only just a moderate risk. But he fielded 3 B-teamers against qxc in Horror, BBi and dreamertt. All 3 were summarily destroyed in solid play and he was then left to bet it all on Mvp, who got rushed. qxc then hadouken’d the audience, took off his bandanna and threw it into the crowd. He was applauded by the Korean netizens as they gave him nickname after nickname including: The Bandanna Man, John Lennon and The TOTO Destroyer (A Korean liquibet system). Coach Kang would continue to coach one of the best teams in the world while losing nearly every team league with increasingly baffling decisions.

The Bo9 Reverse All-Kill

The IM team lost in GSTL and for once it wasn’t Coach Kang’s fault. Losira had just 4-killed TSL, eliminating Revival, Inori, Polt and HyuN. The last player standing was Symbol, a player many pegged at the time to be the next big zerg. He then pulled off the impossible against what was still the strongest team in the world—at least, individually. He reverse all-killed IM defeating Losira, YoDa, Happy, Mvp and NesTea. It is one of only two reverse all kills in Korean Team League history and the only one that was a Bo9 against the best team at the time. Symbol would then go on to become a top 3 zerg, but he could never get over his hump during his peak skill to win a championship.

The Best KT

Once upon a time, there used to be a rivalry between SKT and KT. They traded Proleague titles multiple times in BW, they both had championship caliber players that constantly traded series and sets and for the most part it was even. And then Feb. 11, 2014 happened. On that day Zest declared to the whole world his candidacy for best player of 2014 by all-killing SKT in the 1st round robin playoffs, defeating Rain, Soulkey, soO and PartinG. Zest turned it into his personal mission to destroy the hopes and dreams of SKT fans everywhere, routinely slapping every SKT player he faced throughout that year. He went 63-43 in maps and 28-11 in series proving once and for all that the best KT of them all was Zest.

The Application

I have no proof. There isn’t a single shred of evidence to be found. But I can’t help but think that Billowy was recruited by SKT for the sole sake of spiting KT. In the second round of the playoffs in 2014 Proleague, MVP were having the run of their lives. However, the problem was that despite their momentum, they were still seeded fourth against KT. It was a monumental mismatch and it would take a miracle to win. Billowy was that miracle. Match after match he eliminated KT player after KT player in the most hilarious way possible—by making stalkers and blink stalkers. At the climax of the match, Flash finally learned from the mistakes of his fellows and built bunkers to defend against the inevitable all-in. After waiting for a while without any sign of aggression, he then salvaged all of his bunkers and moved out, only to get all-inned by blink stalkers. Nearly 1.5 years later on SKT, Billowy would be fielded against KT again in the Round 4 Playoffs of PL 2015, where he would eliminate Stats with a 3 gate. Some things never change.

Only Genius Things

The last time Genius was relevant was during his 2012 GSL run where he eventually lost to DRG in the finals. After that peak, he went on a slow descent into LoL (Strangely he would never go full LoL like his ex-SlayerS teammates CoCa and Puzzle). He would finally reappear on Azubu where he quietly did nothing for six months, until the first night of the GSTL playoffs, where the coach decided to send him out first. His reason? No reason, really. His confidence in Genius? None at all. Genius would then go on a 4-kill rampage against StarTale’s best before losing in a PvP to Avenge. The next day he would skip the playoffs to qualify for WCS EU and pay his own way to make it to the Ro4 of WCS EU Season 3. There, he was eliminated by MC, who told him that he had a dumb brain, but who then used his build to great effect against other protoss later on. Some people live weird and fantastical lives; I’m pretty certain Genius is one of them.



*Many All-Kills were left off this list as they will be discussed in future parts of this article series

Best Coaches

We cannot know what goes on in a team house, how much a coach affects a team, or how exactly he helps a player develop. What we can do is look at their results, evaluate them based on the talent their team has, their counter pick order (to a certain extent) and interviews from their players about their roles on the team. Given those qualifications, SC2 has had 3 coaches that have stood above the rest: Choya, Ryu Won and Kim Min-ki.

Choya

Choya won 2 GSTLs, reached a Ro4, and now coaches the MVP team in Proleague where they have finished 5th, 6th, 7th and 6th in the 4 round robins. What qualifies him as one of the great all time coaches is that in terms of talent, he generally has had some of the weakest lineups on his teams. However, he gets more out of them because of intelligent counter picking in players and maps. In both his GSTL title runs, he had the 5th best team in terms of talent across the board but was always able to create favorable positions for Leenock to clean up in the early stages. Once they got to the finals, GuMiho ended up winning the whole thing. What really stands out however is his Proleague run, where he clearly has the 2nd worst roster out of the 8 teams. Even without a clear ace player, he is able to find favorable matchups or matchups that at least give his players a chance to win. He has gotten the most results of any coach given the level of talent he has had to work with. On top of that he is loved by his team and was willing spend his own money to keep his team afloat, making him also one of the most admirable.

Ryu Won

The coach with the most results by far is Ryu Won. He won two of the early seasons of GSTL with SlayerS and helped them get to the finals of another. Afterwards he moved on to Woongjin Stars in 2013, where he led the team to #1 in the overall round robin. What makes this exceptional is that the Stars had the least amount of ace matches played in the league. They played a total of 5 ace matches in 42 matches total. Considering that it was a Bo7 and the only two “sure” wins they had were in Soulkey and sOs, that meant that the other members of Stars had to pick up at least 2 other wins, often against better players. Ryu Won was able to make the best of his players and often got favorable matches for his players in the line-ups. After the dissolution of the Stars, he went to Jin Air in 2014, where he got the team to every round robin playoffs, winning the second round robin, but was defeated by KT, the eventual winners, in the semi-final of the playoffs.

His worst season was in 2015 PL when he coached KT. They were the PL Champions of 2014, and many considered them favorites going into 2015 as they had Flash (who had been a heavy ace for them in the last 2 years), Zest (the best player from 2014), Stats, (a protoss playing on a top 5 level), Life (winner of BlizzCon) and TY (an above average PL player in the 2014 season going 17-12). Many fans blame Ryu Won for a disappointing season, but looking closer we can see that a lot of the problems come from the decline in performance from multiple key players, as well as a misconception of players' overall skills. First the positives: Zest and Stats did their jobs with 28-15 and 22-12 records respectively. However, the big problem was that there was no reliable third man.

Flash went from the “ace” of KT to a negative record of 14-18. TY was below average at 9-10. Two of the core components of the KT Lineup had effectively stopped working. Life, even when he was the best player in the world, was just an average team league player, and that trend continued here as he scored a measly 12-11. Compare that to the other three top teams who had Rogue, Bbyong and in SKT’s case Dark, Classic and Dream. Put frankly, KT just didn’t have depth beyond Zest and Stats, meaning that when the games got to the ace match, they could only depend on Zest, who suffered 2-5 in ace situations. While there probably were problems in Ryu Won’s coaching of the team, it was pretty clear that the team as a whole could not hope to break past the top 4 without a reliable third man, which they never found.

Finally, the last point in Ryu Won’s favor as a coach was his development skill. Multiple players have credited Ryu Won with increasing their skill and gameplay, including sOs, Soulkey, Woongjin Stars, SlayerS and most notably MMA.

Kim Min-Ki

The final coach is Kim Min-Ki. He was the coach for the STX lineup and led them, along with INnoVation, to their first and only Proleague title before the team’s dissolution. Much like Ryu Won, he was great at picking line-ups, but instead of having two stars, he just had one super-ace in INnoVation. Despite having a super ace, it rarely got to ace matches for STX and when it did, INnoVation would more often than not clean up. Perhaps his greatest claim to fame is that he developed every single player on his roster. His A-team roster included: INnoVation, Dear, Trap, Classic and hyvaa, four out of five of whom became champions and three of whom became GSL champions. And while teams have every once in awhile raised a player or two to championship contender level (Dark and Dream come to mind in 2015), rarely have so many come out of one coach, which speaks volumes to his scouting and development of them.