His Greatest Failure

It is very rarely the case that you can see a game, a match, a moment break and forever change a person’s career. Seed did it once to ByuN in the GSL semis where he pulled off a miraculous comeback. We haven’t seen ByuN since. Mvp did it once each to TOP and Squirtle.

In DRG’s case there are two moments we can point to and think, "this is when he stopped being one of the greatest in the world." Some think it was when he got reverse swept by Life in the Iron Squid Finals. For my money it was the playoffs of GSTL 2012 Season 2. That season of GSTL was special for one particular reason: the final two teams would play the grand finals live in Pusan, DRG’s hometown. This was a man whose ID literally comes from a district in Pusan. A player that was official recognized by Pusan as its official SC2 representative. So, it came down to the semi-finals. In the semis of that playoffs, team MVP faced FXO. Leenock had just beaten TAiLS and Lure to tie things at 4 apiece, and MVP was forced to choose an ace. It was a choice between Sniper, the player that had the best record on the team (7-1) or their traditional ace in DRG. They went all-in on DRG. How could they not? Despite only playing one ace match previously he was their best player, their greatest hope in getting to Pusan. But when it came down to it, when DRG’s biggest dream was on the line, he failed. This was just a day after losing 3-0 to MC in the Ro4 of Code S, which also denied him a spot on the stage on Pusan. Double heartbreak for the Final Boss. As a player he was never the same again and I don’t mean skill wise, but mentally. He never seemed as happy, never seemed as intense, never seemed as ambitious as he was before. Not all stories have happy endings and in DRG’s case, sometimes I wonder if he had succeeded here, would his entire career have gone differently?

His Hardest Victory

iloveoov was as decorated a player as they come. He was one of the bonjwas of Brood War, a player who dominated his era with an iron fist. One of the forefathers of his race, the heir to Boxer and the figurehead of the biggest eSports team in the world, SKT. He then moved on to become a player-coach for SKT before enlisting for his military service. On his return he was hired as Boxer’s replacement to be head coach. And with it he was given what many considered to be an All-Star team going into 2014: Classic, Rain, PartinG, Soulkey, soO, FanTaSy. Though he ended the season 2nd to KT, it wasn’t enough. Not for someone of iloveoov’s caliber who had won multiple leagues both as a player and a coach. He believed that the problems of the team laid with him and going into 2015, he changed the team again. This time however it was a resounding success as his roster fulfilled his dreams of being the best.



Translation of the interview

Live by the Sword, Die by the Sword

While Choya is one of the three greatest coaches to have ever done it in SC2’s history, he was also a career player. Strong early on, he was never able to make it big, even though he continued to attend qualifiers. That didn’t stop his ambitions one bit. Combined with the fact that he had to take risks with his team league choices to win big against better teams, every once in a while, he’d field himself instead of one of his players. The most notable example of this was in the GSTL 2012 Season 1 Group stages. To understand the context of his choice, first look at FXO’s roster at the time:

Lucky, Leenock, Oz, Tear (aka Hurricane), asd, GuMiho Choya.

Among these players, Lucky, Leenock, Oz and GuMiho were of the upper echelon. Tear and asd were decent B-teamers and then there was Choya, who hadn’t had a notable result as a player for 6 months prior.

In Group A, they were facing elimination against SlayerS, one of the better teams in the league. The match had gone 2-2. Puzzle had beaten Lucky. Oz had 2 killed Puzzle and CoCa, and Ryung had beaten Oz. Ryung defeating Oz in essence had put FXO at check. Oz was their best protoss player, so sending Tear/Choya would be repeating the same matchup with a worse player. Ryung was a TvT specialist so sending asd/GuMiho wasn’t a good prospect either. They could send in Leenock who had the best chances of winning, but he was their ace and best clutch player.

In a move that shocked everyone at the time, Choya sent himself. He then took out Ryung and MMA before getting PvP’d by CranK. It was one of the boldest decisions ever made in GSTL and Choya won.



Then the exact same scenario happened in the playoffs. Prime was up 3-2 on FXO. B4 had beaten GuMiho and asd, while Lucky had beaten B4 and Creator. ByuN had beaten Lucky in turn. With 2 slots left to use, the seemingly “better” choice would have been to use Oz (in retrospect we found out later that Oz’s PvT was pretty awful during that time though). Instead he threw himself in to snipe ByuN. But this time it failed and Leenock was unable to clean up the rest of the match. While his cowboy days are long over, I sometimes look at the Proleague studio and wonder if Choya is just one step away from ripping off his suit and playing the ace match himself.

The Last Stand

SlayerS was one of the most beloved teams in Korea and the world in the early days of SC2. It was led and created by BoxeR. It gathered interesting and strong players. MMA was Boxer’s chosen son, and the other two terrans, GanZi and Ryung, only ever talked about getting more of Boxer’s love away from MMA to become his favorite son. They created the infamous blue flame hellion build and had won two of the early GSTLs.



Then it was all destroyed mid-2012. There were multiple reasons why, but suffice to say no one was happy and all of it imploded. However they were still enrolled in GSTL Season 3 so they decided to play their last team league match and the first player they fielded was YugiOh. YugiOh was the least known player on SlayerS despite being one of its first. Not surprising as he was never flown anywhere unlike the other SlayerS players. He never had any results in the team leagues. He had 6 consecutive seasons in Code A (eventually being crowned King of Code A), but very few people even watched Code A. He wasn’t even part of the main SlayerS team house and was just an online partner. In fact the one time we did see him interact with the other SlayerS players in any form was the group nominations for GSL November 2011 where every SlayerS player in Code S bickered with each other to pick him for their group as they considered him an easy win. YugiOh for his part was just glad to be there, even though he was mocked for his lack of skill.

Yet in their final GSTL match, the last player left from SlayerS original roster was YugiOh. The only moment he was allowed to shine for the team would also be the team’s last. In one of the most emotionally intense team league matches ever played, YugiOh destroyed MVP by getting a triple kill before they had to bring out the future GSL Champion Sniper to take him out. In many ways this GSTL match epitomized YugiOh’s career. Given a bad hand, he fought to the very bitter end to try to achieve his dream of being the best player in Korea and in the end that work, that intensity, was broken.

The Miracle Run

Can you imagine a world where Prime was able to make the playoffs of Proleague in a single round? Neither can I. Yet something just as improbable happened once, in the biggest miracle SC2 Proleague has ever seen. In 2014, Team MVP could have been the worst team in Proleague. They were 2nd to last in the first round and below Prime in the last two. Yet in the second round, Coach Swagger and team MVP pulled off the biggest miracle PL had ever seen. They barely scraped by into the playoffs (they lost to Prime and IM, but beat SKT, KT and Samsung). It was an insane performance where no single piece was more important than the next. Swagger led his team of rag tags to the playoffs and there Billowy performed one of the greatest all-kills against KT. The shocks continued as they won a hard fought Bo7 against CJ (who had beaten them soundly 3-1 in the round robin) before being destroyed by Maru. This is still one of the most insane runs to have ever happened in team league history.

The Day SC2 History Was Actually Written

2013 Proleague was a resounding bust. Beyond the Mind Mind Mind videos, for the most part there was very little to love about the league. It was held in a mall with no crowd. There were a deluge of games, there were no playoffs for rounds and the least hyped teams in the league had made the finals: Woongjin Stars and STX Soul. Yet there was one aspect it did perfectly. It became the breeding ground of the future. Most of the unknown great players of that time would rise from that Proleague finals.

On one side was Woongjin Stars led by Ryu Won. They were a team that had dominated the round robin and had seeded themselves into the finals off their incredible season-long performance. On the other side was STX Soul led by Kim Min-ki. Their only star player was INnoVation, yet many of the others put up strong results that helped the team get to ace matches where INnoVation could clean up.



Before then, MLG and the community had made great fanfare about the arrival of the KeSPA teams, especially of the star players like Flash, Jaedong, Stork, Leta, FanTaSy, Soulkey and Bisu. It was a triumphant roar, one that seemed to reverberate in the Anaheim convention center: "We are KeSPA and we have arrived."

That was all fanfare. It was loud, it was hyped, it was dramatic, but that’s all it was. The real day KeSPA arrived was the finals of Proleague 2013. When the KeSPA training regime had kicked in for the next batch of new stars. When coaches Ryu Won and Kim Min-Ki had finished developing their teams. And in that finals, 6 champions of tomorrow appeared (4 of which were yet to be crowned): INnoVation, Soulkey, sOs, Dear, Trap, Classic.

Yet it was much less hype, much more sad, much less triumphant. Barring Soulkey (who was at both MLG and this PL Finals), man for man, result for result, the unknown players of that PL Finals far outstripped those that were invited to that MLG Exhibition. In that Proleague Finals, the two best teams in the world faced off one last time and the SC2 world would feel the reverberations of that final for years to come.