With WCS Austin complete, the community turns their gaze back to Korea. There's only one week left in the GSL Round of 32, but there's still a glut of tantalizing matches to be played. Meanwhile, SSL Premier is fast approaching its critical stages. Just as the Round of 16 will be finalized in the coming days, this week's games in Premier could determine who moves on to the postseason.


Foreign Uprising

The first GSL of 2017 featured a lone foreigner and that count has doubled this season. Scarlett makes a not so triumphant return, keen to improve on her disappointing performance last time around. Billed as the next foreign hope, there was a lot of buzz surrounding her presence in Season one. She had a relatively weak group, but a sobering loss to Classic and a close defeat at aLive’s hands abruptly ended the hype. Scarlett has been largely invisible since that night. She’s been a constant in online event, but they haven’t featured the stiffest competition. When she has faced top tier Koreans in qualifiers for IEM and the GSL Super Tournament, she hasn’t exactly distinguished herself. That level of competition is exactly what she’ll be facing on Wednesday. She starts off versus the defending champion before fending off Classic and KeeN for a spot in the next round. Undoubtedly Scarlett is talented and quite possibly one of the best foreigners, but fans want to see greater results to validate her time spent in Korea.

Joining Scarlett in Korea is MajOr. Calling him the new kid on the block would be a disservice given that he’s been around from the beginning of Starcraft 2. But the fact that this is his first GSL cannot be understated. His path to this point was far from convincing. Wins over JYP and Hurricane give us little reason to believe he can go toe to toe with group members herO and ByuN. However, his performance at WCS Austin went a long way in dispelling the image of a player who habitually falls apart at LANs. His skill was a known factor going in, but he’d never managed such a respectable performance on the big stage. He gave the eventual champion, Neeb, his closest match of the tournament and looked lethal in every game. MajOr’s run at Dreamhack was the most impressive feat of his career; whether he’ll be able to build on it remains to be seen.


Finishing Strong

One of the quirks of the round robin format of SSL is that you don’t know what your opponent’s record will be or what form they’ll be in when you finally run into each other. Players who have Zest or sOs left on their schedule probably consider themselves lucky. Others don’t have such a fortunate road.

ByuL is one of the three players tied at the top of SSL Premier. After a brief dip in form, he’s been playing extremely well as of late, once more showing bits and pieces of his vaunted 2015 form. His ling/bane/muta play has been particularly devastating. No other Zerg is capable of even holding a candle to his skill with that composition. Despite sitting in pole position, he still has a long road ahead of him. He’ll need wins against Maru and Stats if he wants to assure himself a spot in the postseason. Solar and INnoVation are favored against their respective week eight opponents, so it will be critical that ByuL recovers from last week’s loss. His run thus far in SSL has given the community reason to believe ByuL is elite once more, but it could all fall apart with a pair of lackluster performances.


The Scrum

Lost amidst the talk of Zest and sOs’ failures, of Solar, ByuL and INnoVation’s ascents, is the fact that SSL Premier has turned into a dog fight. Only one win separates fourth from eighth place. Stats, Dark, Patience, Maru and aLive find themselves in a race that could earn them anything from a playoff spot to demotion. In fact if the top standings remain steady, only one of these five players will show up in the postseason.

For all the talk of Stats versus ByuL or another ZvZ between Solar and Dark, the most important match of the entire season might just be Maru against Patience. Patience looked to be in horrible form going into IEM. Of course he got knocked out in the group stages, but he showed signs of improvement. Since then he’s given fans more reasons to be hopeful, but has failed to string anything of real significance together. Getting bounced from GSL was horrendous given that he was the favorite to advance. Even his above .500 record in SSL is suspect, the product of aLive’s benevolence.

While Patience will be relying on his above average PvT, Maru will be facing down the barrel of a gun. Maru used to be a TvP god in HotS, but the matchup has never quite clicked for him since the release of the new expansion. He hasn’t been able to harass in the unique way he used to, his drop play has been far from effective and he has never appeared comfortable with the new compositions he has to face and wield.

Patience is on a two week losing streak while Maru is recovering from a 1-3 start. A win here won’t guarantee anything for either player. One thing is for certain though: with rankings so congested in the middle of the pack, one loss could very well spell doom.


The Defense Begins

A player hasn’t won back to back seasons of GSL since NesTea did it in 2011 (and no one before that). That’s exactly what Stats will be trying to replicate when Group G kicks off midweek. Stats' form has been waning in the month or so following his victory against soO. But that’s not totally unexpected: a busy schedule, featuring SSL as well as the Super Tournament has given him little time to rest, recover and reflect on his first Starleague title. Those who expected Stats to retain his previous form have been left wanting. He stumbled his way through SSL and looked far from convincing, while being bounced in the first round of the Super Tournament by GuMiho.

Stats’ career has always been the model of upward trajectory, but that isn’t the story any longer. He’s a champion now and if he wants to become one again, he’s going to have to reacquaint himself with the form he displayed at the end of 2016. He’s already locked up a spot at Blizzcon but as Zest showed last year, you tempt fate by resting on your laurels after an early victory. Stats’ title defense begins Wednesday. Does he have what it takes to join NesTea among the pantheon of GSL champions?


Weekly Schedule:

Mon - SSL Premier - Stats vs ByuL / Maru vs Patience / Solar vs Dark / Zest vs aLive / sOs vs INnoVation
Wed - GSL Ro.32 Group G - Stats / Scarlett / KeeN / Classic
Sat - GSL Ro.32 Group H - herO / MajOr / ByuN / Armani
Sat - SSL Challenge - Classic vs Dear / ByuN vs herO / Ryung vs TY