The rising star of our last power ranking, Dear did little to justify our faith in him over the last thirty odd days. Having made the quarterfinals of GSL after a dominating Round of 16 performance where he defeated ZvP killers soO and Rogue, Dear was summarily swept by Zest. That was all part of a relatively quiet June in which Dear went 5-4 in matches. If losing in such embarrassing fashion was a clear indication that Dear's Ro16 performance was a flicker of inexplicable brilliance, then going 10-6 in games during the GSL Season 3 qualifiers (against the likes of RazerBlader, Prince, KeeN and Rushcrazy), was an even more alarming sign of his precipitous decline.

This months’ rankings were compiled before GSL Season 3 kicked off, but had Group B been taken into account it’s a certainty that Dear and sOs would have swapped places. Dear currently sits ninth on the WCS points leaderboard, but having been eliminated from the last GSL of the year, he’ll need a tremendous performance at the second Super Tournament if he wants a shot at making BlizzCon.

Trap comes in at number nine for the fourth straight month. There's no more appropriate spot for a player who came within a single match of advancing to the quarterfinals in both Code S seasons this year (he lost to Stats and TY in decider matches). He's exactly good enough to be the ninth place player in the GSL.

Following his elimination from GSL, Trap put up a respectable 13-6 match record in assorted competition, beating the likes of Dark and GuMiho while also losing to Cure twice over the same period. We shouldn't read too deeply into such results, but they do seem to confirm Trap's ongoing 2018 narrative: He can win a BO3 against any of the top eight players in the GSL, but he can't win the two BO3's that matter on RO16 match day.

Trap's next challenge is getting out of a GSL RO32 group containing TY, RagnaroK, and Bunny. It's a deceptively tough group, but we get the feeling that Trap will advance and secure his #9 spot for a fifth consecutive month.

Perennial title contender Dark tumbled down the rankings last month after suffering the ignominy of RO16 elimination in GSL Code S (losses to Trap and Classic). However, anyone is capable of the occasional misstep—even Maru lost to Classic in the Super Tournament—and we're willing to extend Dark a ton of credit for his overall form in 2018. While Dark has been inconsistent in big matches, his peak-level Zerg play has been topped only by Rogue so far. Remember, it wasn't too long ago that Dark was being held up as the one shining beacon of hope against the Zerg-butcher Maru.

[On a barely related note, Dark lost to Impact three times in the previous month, while he put up an otherwise excellent 24-5 match record against all other players. What does this mean for Dark? Absolutely nothing. However, we just really wanted to point out that Impact continues to be a bizarre, incomprehensible, online-only god.]

GuMiho retains his place in the top 10 after a largely successful month in which the towel terran posted a 27-8 record in matches. It’s an impressive resume, though not the one by which we will remember GuMiho’s June. After topping his Round of 16 group by defeating ByuN and sOs, GuMiho was ejected from Code S by TY in a tightly contested five game series. A quarterfinal exit can’t be what GuMiho was looking for, especially since his play was only just rounding into form after a slow start to 2018, but it moved him into 13th place in the WCS rankings, within striking distance of a second consecutive BlizzCon appearance. He’ll need a deep run in GSL to reach that stage, however. His performance in his upcoming GSL group will go a long way to determining if that’s a realistic aspiration as well as dictating where he will lie in next month’s power ranking.

Serral continues his climb through our power rankings despite not having played a single game against a Korean in over a month. Wins over Namshar, Lambo and souL are nice, but Serral has a reached a point in the rankings where trouncing foreigners won’t move him up any further. He’s already proven many times over that he is the best foreigner in the world, and has displayed what is quite possibly the best form a foreigner has ever achieved. Winning another WCS Circuit event would be nice, but it wouldn’t shoot him past names like Classic, Maru or Rogue.

The true tests will come in the coming months at GSL vs the World and BlizzCon. After starting off IEM Katowice with wins over Rogue, Impact, Zest and Trap, Serral is 1-4 against Koreans since March 4th, a mark which stands in stark contrast to his otherworldly dominance in WCS events. Serral will have to elevate his game to another level if he wants climb into the tier of the true elites.

TY is still here! It may seem inexplicable, but losing to Zest in the GSL semifinals did not strike TY from our top 10 list. There’s a case that losses to Hurricane and herO in online tournaments could have done the deed, but a positive performance against GuMiho and a respectable effort in the aforementioned offline semifinal saves TY’s skin for now.

TY only played 19 games in June, a fact which will probably frustrates his fans to no end while making him incredibly difficult to rank for our purposes. Weighting performances is more important than ever as the writing staff tries to figure how much going 1-2 against Hurricane and herO in online competition compares to a Round of 4 appearance in GSL. There’s no doubt that TY will continue this maddening habit in July, leaving fans and critics alike little hope of figuring out what form he’s in.

Zest may have managed a second place finish in the last season of GSL, but he’ll have to settle for fourth in the clearly more enlightened Team Liquid power rank. Whether this is an indictment of him, the level of his competition, or the sanctity of GSL, we’re unsure, but it’s quite possible that Zest is not as good as his finals appearance would lead us to believe. After all, he barely survived a sloppy series against TY before being butchered in the finals by Maru. He then flew out to HomeStory Cup, where losses to Lambo, Stephano, and Solar meant he finished in 5/6 place.

While Zest’s play against Protoss and Terran carried him to the GSL Finals, his PvZ remains a glaring issue. He was 4-7 in June (and the first of July) against Zerg, though two of those wins came over RiSky and EonBlue.

Making the GSL finals has all but guaranteed him a spot at the WCS World Championships, but an early exit in Season 3 would do little to inspire confidence that he can make a deep run in the year end event.

Season 2 of GSL came to an unceremonious end for Classic in a 1-4 loss to Maru. He was spectacular during the run up, reminding us time and again why he’s been regarded so highly in 2018. But in the end, it was an inexplicably poor performance—something which is becoming alarmingly common—that brought his tournament to an end.

Classic has gone 45-9 in matches since the beginning of the year, beating all the top players while vaulting himself to second on the WCS points rankings. Many of those nine losses are rather puzzling though given the fact that Classic entered nearly all of them as the heavy favorite. Classic ran roughshod over the field at Katowice, but was swept off the finals stage by Rogue. He was the best Protoss in the world when he met Stats in GSL Season 1, but he stumbled there as well. He crumbled to Dark twice: once at WESG and once in the Super Tournament (after giving Maru his only series defeat of the last three months). Losing to Maru in the Season 2 semifinals is merely a continuation of a pattern which gives credence to the theory that even with his exceptional record, Classic isn't championship material.

Now that GSL is over for Classic, he’ll have three more tournaments to buck the trend in the coming months. Converting form into titles is always the goal, but Classic, who was the second best player of the first half of 2018, still has a ways to go if he wants to do just that.

In a testament to just how dominant Maru has been over the past few months, Rogue advances one spot in the power rank by losing a closely contested match to Maru in the GSL quarterfinals. It's reminiscent of TeamLiquid.net power ranks in 2010, where players got credit for not getting totally embarrassed by Flash.

Maru's merciless maulings of Classic and Zest on his way to the Code S title left many fans believing his five-game series against Rogue was the true championship match of the tournament. Rogue fans will be quick to remind you that Rogue actually beat Maru in the late-game—which had previously been thought of as impossible—while Maru took his wins with early-to-mid-game aggression. Given Classic and Zest's PvZ performances in recent weeks, it's all too easy to envision Rogue administering similar beatdowns on his way to the title.

Outside of his spectacular series against Maru, Rogue was typically lackadaisical in June, putting up a pedestrian 16-9 series record. At this point, we just have to accept that from Rogue. He'll get upset by Scarlett in the GSL RO32. He'll lose to Neeb in the Hangzhou StarCraft Carnival. Rogue just doesn't seem interested in being the most dominant player. He's here to hunt the biggest paydays, only bringing his best when the stakes are at their absolute highest.

June was another banner month for Maru, who solidified his hold on the number one spot by winning a second consecutive GSL Code S. Doubts were plentiful heading into his semifinal against Classic, but Maru dispelled all concerns before making Zest look like a North American GM on the world’s biggest stage.

Maru is fast entering historic territory. He just became the second player to win consecutive Code S titles and a third doesn’t look so far-fetched. He’s poised to be the second player to make all three GSL finals in a calendar year since the tournament switched to the three season format, though three wins would far outclass soO’s previously unmatched 2014. Such a feat might seem impossible, but Maru’s 35-7 record since the start of GSL Season 1 indicates that such a reality rests in Maru’s hands alone. He’s beaten every elite player in the world and posts an absurd series 22-1 record since IEM Katowice wrapped up. At this point there’s no doubt that Maru is the best player in the world. The only question is for how long he can keep it up.