Written by: Soularion

Serral has been around for so long it's kind of odd to think about. It was in 2013, when he was only fifteen-years-old, that he made his first splash at DreamHack Bucharest, where he played an impressive macro set against SuperNova and took a game off the Zerg legend Jaedong. A month later, he won Finland's Insomnia XV LAN over local powerhouses elfi and Welmu, and his name started to be whispered around the community.

A prophecy was written: One day, this fifteen-year-old was going to become one of the best players in the world. He would give the rest of the world hope against the Koreans, but not with cunning and guile—the traditional weapons of the foreigner. No, Serral would become an incarnation of overwhelming power. From the very start, he was a macro player: living by the tech swap, dying by his drones, and taking pride in games which went late.

For a time, that was his weakness. Tournament after tournament, qualifier after qualifier, he played great—up until he lost. The aforementioned series against SuperNova, perhaps the first time he was truly noticed, perfectly encapsulated what his career would be for years: Two high-paced, smartly played, action-packed games, which resulted in two losses. Serral was brilliant once more at Assembly 2014, where he tookTaeJa to five games as a 15-year-old, dragging the weekender king to the verge of elimination. Serral was the loser, once more. Serral crushed Patience and Bunny by a combined 5-0 at the 2014 Copenhagen Games, only to lose in HyuN in the semfinals. He was so close, and yet so far.

Serral was so close that fans were practically frothing at the mouth as they thought about him actually going the distance. However, smaller, local tournaments were all he ever won. Those victories cemented him further as a local legend, and made foreign fans all the more rabid about his potential. At sixteen or seventeen years of age, he was already one of the best Finnish players ever. But that was all.

Looking back, it's amazing how Serral was perfectly in-between success and failure. He would take a step forward, only to take a step back (sometimes two steps at a time). But it always balanced out. He always returned to the same position—so reliably that he became a cliche of StarCraft II broadcasting. What say you, Caster R? Serral, that talented young player who is feared and respected by all his peers, can he finally unleash his potential at this DreamHack/WCS/Assembly? No, he can't.

The prophecy remained. Not in a way that made it seem that time would solve all things, that talent would inevitably shine through in the end. Nor did it hang over his head like a sword of unfulfilled expectations, held by a narrow strand of hope. It simply remained.

Serral's fame began to dwindle as Heart of the Swarm came and went without a defining moment, but Legacy of the Void seemed to bring forth new opportunities. Serral earned three wins against Korea in Nation Wars III, and won several impressive games against the likes of ShoWTimE and Bly. He finished top eight at DreamHack Leipzig 2016 in the best premier tournament result of his career. Then, Serral journeyed to Katowice for the first WCS Circuit Championship, the first WCS event under the reorganized system. His tournament run ended in the first round: a 0-3 loss to FireCake. Spring passed with Serral failing to earn qualification to the WCS Circuit Championship (he lost to Optimus and Uzikoti), and he exited HomeStory Cup XIII with a 1-6 record. Serral's first competitive year of LotV ended at the WCS Summer Championship, where he went out 1-3 to uThermal in the first round.

At that point, perhaps, it would have been reasonable to call Serral a player doomed by his own quality. He was a player with a strong preference for the beautiful macro game, but without the decision-making ability nor killer instinct needed to win them consistently. It's an unfortunate fact that the most entertaining players are rarely the best players. For entertainment comes with close games, and by their very definition, close games come with a heightened risk of defeat.


The greatest players are not the ones who wait for prophecies to come true—they're the ones who can achieve the paradoxical feats of accelerating fate and taking destiny into their own hands. For Serral, I believe that moment came during the qualifiers for last year's IEM World Championship. A torrid run through the open qualifier saw him reach the top sixteen ... where he promptly dropped out in the first round against ShoWTimE in a resounding 0-2 defeat. Serral went down to the loser's bracket. He was faced a gauntlet of of deadly and desperate survivors: Harstem, Stephano, Snute, Nerchio, and Elazer. If he lost any of those sets, he wouldn't go to Katowice. He beat them all. In the closing stretch, he beat Europe's three best Zergs by a combined map score of 7-1. It's no coincidence that, on year to the day he qualified for Katowice, he won his title in Leipzig.

Four months later, it was in front of a WCS Jönköping crowd that Serral made it to his first final. He ended up losing to Neeb in a heart-breaking seventh game. If there was ever to be a breaking point, a failure that Serral could not come back from, that should have been it. But we realize now that it was moments like those which forged Serral, like fine steel. Bathed in the fire of disappointment and hammered by the weight of defeat, Serral emerged as an implement of destruction.

At Leipzig, Serral fulfilled the prophecy that loomed over him for years. He went on one of the most impressive runs by a foreigner in the WCS era. He defeated Namshar, who was on fire for the entire tournament. Then MaSa, a sparkplug capable of upsetting the cagiest veteran. Then Nerchio, who for all his ZvZ woes, is still Nerchio. In the semifinals, he defeated one of the biggest favorites of the tournament in SpeCial. And finally, Serral dominated the German hero ShoWTimE in the finals. For a second it looked like Serral would match Neeb's 17-2 from last year's WCS Montreal. While Serral fell short, there's no doubt as to who braved the tougher bracket.

There were no easy wins, and even to the very end, ShoWTimE fought with a passion that Serral must have recognized. Last year, it was Serral who was battling to reach the top of the mountain, fighting to prove himself as the European hero, fighting with every bit of passion and hope he had. This year, Serral won, leaving ShoWTimE to continue down his path for redemption.



Some may say the wait was too long. But in a way, there's no better time for Serral to have won a championship than right now. All of the momentum from years of starting and stopping, from progressing and backtracking—it didn't vanish into thin air. It stayed pent up, barely restrained, until it finally had a chance to explode. Serral is the first person to qualify for this year's Global Finals. This wave of momentum will carry him there, where he will arrive stronger than ever before.

The prophecy has been fulfilled. But the legend is still being written.

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