When writing up all of the different lists of greatest players of SC2, I realized that I had never expounded upon what I meant when I talk about the relative strength of a player’s strength compared to their relative scene, as well as the overall increasing strength of the player base from the end of 2010 to now.

When thinking about trying to quantify something as broad and vague as this. First I wrote down important moments when there were large strategic or tactical developments that impacted SC2 on a large level. In this case, it wasn't enough to create a new style or build, but it would have to become immediately widespread and eventually become rote in the meta. In this case San's High Templar PvT or Thorzain's mass Thor strategy do not count. Both were unique to the player, but both strategies were nerfed almost immediately upon their revelation before it made any impact on the player base. This also means niche builds that weren't widely used or map specific weren't considered (like Catz's gold base ZvP builds or Scarlett's mass muta into broodlords ZvZ).

Strategic and Tactical Revolutions through SC2

Zerg

For Zerg, NesTea was the most important player when it came to understanding the fundamentals of the race, particularly larvae management and how that affects economic/positional development across the map. Beyond that the most important player to Zerg's development as a race was Life. Yes Stephano had the largest impact of any player, but his metas and compositions (the most important of which all revolved around the infestor) were nerfed in HotS.

On the other hand, Life's most important contribution to the Zerg was the tactical revolution in all three matchups. His style of aggression and more importantly counter-aggression changed every Zerg matchup when it came to the positional and tactical decisions any player had to make. While no one ever perfectly emulated Life's style of SC2, his tactical plays became part of the basic fundamentals of Zerg play that every player would include to some extent in their repertoire.

Protoss

For the Protoss race, MC was the most important player because much like NesTea, he built the cornerstone of the Protoss race, specifically the understanding of force-fields and warp prism mechanics.

When it came to PvP, there were two strategic and tactical revolutions that occurred in SC2. The first was by Rain who taught the world how to always transition into late game PvP, the exact unit composition you can make, and how to engage in PvP. Afterwards, sOs had a very large impact in 2013 (though much like Stephano the stuff he made lasted about an year before Zergs had adjusted), while later on it was Zest in 2014 who had an even better understanding of tactical positioning and how that affected and interacted with all of the build orders in PvP.

Tactically however, the most important player was most likely PartinG. In the most important PvT series ever played against jjakji, he unveiled his 2 base storm build (Set 1, Set 2). While the build is now defunct because it can't hold against MMMM, the real things to take from that series was his use of flanking storms, retreating storms, and how the HT would be implemented into the Protoss army (before him, they were always added on at the end as they were too complex tactically for other Protoss to get immediately).

Terran

Terran is an exception to the rule. The other races had one early player create the building blocks of the race while new players would come in with either strategic or tactical revolutions. In Terran's case Mvp did both. He created the founding blocks of macro play for Terran players for both Bio and Mech. Tactically he showed every Terran player how to play end-game TvT. He created the SCV pull against Protoss, he made and got nerfed mass ghosts, and most importantly he made hellion/banshee into the triple CC (The single most important TvZ build ever made in SC2).

Besides Mvp, the most important players to the Terran race were MKP and Polt. MKPs creation of the marine split has immense tactical and strategic effects on TvZ for the rest of SC2. In Polt's case, he played tactically the most important TvT of all time in 2011. On Metalopolis against MMA(Link), he used the standard Marine/tank composition. But he used it aggressively as he attacked entrenched positions over and over again with split marines against tank lines. That single map changed the very basic rules of unit interaction in TvT for the rest of time and had immense tactical reverberations that eventually had huge strategic implications on both build orders and compositions.

The Increasing Skill Line

With all of that in mind, now it is time to consider the increasing skill level over time. For my money there were 3 large jumps in skill in SC2. The first was near the end of 2011 right before jjakji's GSL victory where a new upper class of SC2 players had come into the fold (MMA, aLive, Oz, DRG, Leenock, jjakji, PartinG, Squirtle, NaNiwa). The next was mid 2012 where the younger talent of WoL had started to fulfil potential and the first few KeSPA players had transferred over (Life, TaeJa, Creator, Symbol, HyuN, RorO, Rain, Stephano). The last bump of skill happened past the halfway mark in 2013 around the time of the PL Finals where the last of the KeSPA transfers had gotten nearly 1.5 years of practice and were now coming into their own (sOs, Soulkey, INnoVation, herO, Dear, Trap, Classic, Zest, soO). After that, only a handful of new players would trickle to the top, but there would never be large leaps of new players entering the top class all at once as the previous time periods.

Many of the strategic and tactical revolutions coincided with each wave of new champions and their understanding of the game became widespread and become rote in the meta. And it is from this understanding of SC2's timeline that we can start to understand and contextualize the achievements of the various players therein.