Patience - The Everyman

Of all the teams in Starcraft history, it’s arguable that StarTale are the team that’s gone through the most hardships. From the acrimonious circumstances surrounding their GSTL loss to Prime in Las Vegas and the slow bleedout of talent that followed, to their impoverished pleas for a sponsor and the farcical nature of the SBENU fiasco, to the devastating blow of Life’s conviction for match fixing earlier in the year, it’s undeniable that they’ve been through more than most.

Which makes it even more magical that they remain one of the most successful teams in Starcraft history. They made up for their numerous near-misses in the GSTL by picking up the inaugural IPTL championship; they’ve tallied up a total of 16 premier individual championships. Only Incredible Miracle and Team Liquid have won more. As of 21 November, they have disbanded as a team, leaving behind a glittering resumé over their seven year history. However, they didn’t leave before adding one final trophy to the top of the pile.

Patience has long been one of the most hot-or-cold players in the Korean scene. His debut success came in 2013 at Dreamhack Winter still lives on in the memory—an inspired lower bracket miracle run through sOs, Polt, MMA, INnoVation—en route to a landmark 3rd place finish, as does his follow-up top 4 finish at Dreamhack Valencia in 2015. Unfortunately though, so does the barren stretch that filled in the gaps; the failure to progress past the top 32 of WCS EU or the Korean starleagues; the consistent meek surrender in weekenders once he came up against one of the tournament’s heavyweights.

His slow blossom into a genuine consistent threat in 2016, then, has been both a surprise and a delight to watch. Patience racked up dual top 4s in the SSL as he finally added consistency to his game, while qualifying for KeSPA Cup and BlizzCon was a sign of his elevated status within the new-look Korean scene. With his win at HomeStory Cup, Patience finally fulfils the promise he made us with his debut performance; with his win at HomeStory Cup, Patience has finally reached his final form.

It’s always been the case that the most celebrated champions are those with some defining characteristic. Look at ByuN—currently fêted for his superb micro—or Zest, for his absolute understanding and control of PvT. Patience though has no such outstanding characteristics. What makes him special is that he’s not the immaculate player that so many other champions have seemed to be. His micro is sometimes found lacking; his multitask might fail under heavy harass; his strategies not the rock solid late game styles of the macro gods, nor the frenetic chaos of perennial cheesers.

Instead, he’s the everyman of Starcraft II in 2016; the player whose foibles and errors make him relatable. While it’s players like ByuN who remain the unrealistic ideal of mechanical purity that so many strive for, Patience is the player we could all be. The player who takes every ounce of mechanical skill he has, allies it to a fantastic strategic mind, and squeezes out every last drop of talent available. And as he took the decisive seventh game of the Grand Finals against Zest, the crowd erupted, recognising a player who has finally managed to reach his peak.

There are still many things for him to worry about. The WCS system for 2017 is still yet to be announced; the new patch will bring vast changes to a meta that he’s begun to conquer; the disbandment of Afreeca has left him teamless once more. But those worries can wait. Just for one day, Patience stands on top of the world.

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Day 4 Recap - TL Writers back on form

If Days 1-3 were a story of results as expected, Day 4 was a reminder of the changing landscape of the Starcraft II scene in 2016. All four quarterfinals were shocking in their own way. While Zest and Patience did manage to overcome aLive and SortOf respectively, their victories were far from the runaway stomps predicted. Zest might have spent most of the year clinically dissecting terrans for fun, but aLive’s heavily aggressive drop-focussed style caused him serious problems, especially during the terran’s incredible comeback on New Gettysburg. Meanwhile, SortOf came desperately close to becoming the second foreigner in the tournament to beat a Korean, putting up a great fight in his 2-3 loss to Patience. Still though, his loss takes the WCS-Korean rivalry in the tournament to 1-26 in series (83-20 in maps), with PtitDrogo the sole foreigner preventing the Korean All-Kill, and after the wave of euphoria following KeSPA Cup and BlizzCon, the traditional Korean party pooper was in full effect here. Sure, there are caveats—Nerchio and ShoWTimE aren’t present, for example—but overall this can’t be regarded as anything other than a disappointment for the foreigner contingent. Hopefully this is a mere blip after the major advances made during the year.

We saw one of the tournament favourites Solar crash out against Stats. The lack of a winners’ interview saved him from the awkwardness of having to translate for the player who just beat him, but afterwards we got the chance to chat with him (go check out that interview here). Meanwhile, sOs fell to Rogue in the Jin Air teamkill, and as expected, the series quickly descended into madness. With island bases seen on New Gettysburg, carriers on Galactic Process, and a proxy hatch counter to a proxy 4-gate on Apotheosis, this was undoubtedly one of the most purely enjoyable series of the weekend, if only for the utter chaos that ensued.



Rogue’s wackiness didn’t stop there; he peeled off the same swarm host build on New Gettysburg that he inflicted upon herO in Proleague earlier in the year. Despite that early win though, Zest always looked the more composed player, taking the next three games to progress to the final. He was met there by Patience after an impressive win over Stats—his disruptor-less mothership counter to Stats’ standard late game disruptor-heavy composition on Frost was particularly impressive.

The final proved to be one of the best of the year. Both players displayed a wide variety of strats as the game went the full distance, from proxies to end-game mass tempest compositions. It all ended in one of the best disruptor vs disruptor games on Frost that we’ve seen all year. Patience’s non-stop aggression dictated the tempo of the game, as he constantly blinked aggressively to bait Zest into disruptor shots. As the game swung his way, Zest began to take more and more hits, bleeding out more and more of the expensive AOE units. Everybody was glued to the screen—everyone apart from his teammate Stats, that is, who was busy doing shots instead. Finally, Zest was forced to concede the game, and Patience was crowned the champion of HomeStory Cup XIV. For a player who’s forever been viewed as an outsider in the Korean scene—the player with a 'lucky' one-off run at Dreamhack Winter; the player who went to Europe and failed; the player at the back of the queue, watching a glittering array of Korean protoss dominate the scene in turn—it was finally a chance to step into the spotlight.