A Greater Hunt

Neeb's status as the greatest foreign player in Legacy of the Void was uncontested until Serral began his meteoric ascent. It should be telling that at this point, he has already been the 'foreign hope' at BlizzCon twice. Both times a foreigner made the semifinals. Neither time was it him. Despite looking great ahead of both his Global Finals appearances, Neeb has not been able to bridge the gap between the good opponents and the legitimately amazing ones. He has lost sets to Dark, soO and Rogue, three of Korea’s very best, and while he has looked competitive at times, he’s also been utterly outplanned, outplayed, outmatched. For all his achievements prior, BlizzCon has seen Neeb at his absolute worst.

Neeb has never done all that well with weight on his shoulders. He excels as the underdog, not as the favorite. When he first came into prominence in 2016, he was "that guy with the firetruck picture", maybe "that guy who used to play Terran", maybe "that guy who made the Ro16 in WCS America once... I think?". He wasn't exactly unknown, but neither was he a credible threat to anything. One of StarCraft II's ghosts - a player that is considerable, but rarely more. Not until he started winning online sets against Polt and Hydra (and eventually transitioned that talent to offline results) did the tune really begin to change. We all know the story of his rise at KeSPA Cup, becoming the first foreigner in over a decade to win a tournament on Korean soil, and doing so with the odds stacked so heavily against him. Even the caveats people reasonably attach to that performance (that it was dominated by a single matchup – PvP – and didn’t feature as great of opposition as it perhaps could have) pale compared to the incredible fact that a foreigner had actually won a tournament of that caliber. And he did it all as the underdog, every step of the way.

Then, gifted with the blessing and the curse of now being the most successful player in the west, he lost at BlizzCon. While the set against Dark stands out as an example of how outclassed he was by the very best, it’s worth noting that his exalted PvP failed in groups, as he struggled with Patience and dropped a set to Zest. In 2017, the fickle grew skeptical of Neeb. he wasn’t the same monster online, he faltered in groups at IEM Katowice, and even when he won his first WCS championship (!) it wasn’t without faults. In that year, Neeb succeeded because of an almost unheard-of clutch factor; in do-or-die games, he found his voodoo - when on the line, he showed that he could still pull through, he just needed to be pushed to the brink in order to do it. It wasn’t that Neeb was some dominating force the way Serral was. He struggled. He just persevered.

Well. Okay. In all fairness, there was certainly one event where Neeb was a dominating force; WCS Montreal, where he went 17-2 on route to a third championship in four years. But that’s only one side of the coin. In the same time frame, he lost out in Code A, expelled at the hands of Hurricane, one of the year’s most hilarious upsets and a set which Korean purists forever hold up as a glowing example of even the best foreigners falling short. He faltered in BlizzCon, too; while his style worked at first and he was able to win a supreme lategame fight against Rogue, the soO/Rogue duo figured his style out and read him like a book in later sets. All of WCS was on Neeb’s shoulders last year, and when the games got tense, he couldn’t find a way to win.

That brings us to 2018. Somehow, Neeb has gone from winning three WCS championships to a single semifinals appearance. At that, he has been routinely mediocre against Koreans (posting a 49% winrate against them, on the year), yet is still in potentially the best position going into BlizzCon that he ever has been in. All of this is due to his run at GSL Season 3, a run which perfectly epitomizes Neeb as a player and summarizes why he is so eternally frustrating yet brimming with potential at every turn.

It’s easy to look at that run – which saw him lose to Maru and Dark in very, very one-sided sets – and disqualify it on the basis of facing 'easier' opponents; he beat aLive, Losira, Impact, and Reynor in order to make the quarterfinals. None of those players made BlizzCon. None of the Korean ones even came close, with only Impact having a notable year at all.

At the same time, he had planted a seed. He lost to Impact at IEM Katowice, after all, and he lost to aLive at the same event the year prior. Combine this with his loss to Hurricane in 2017’s GSL Code A, and his near-loss to Pet which would’ve completely spoiled his miraculous run at KeSPA Cup, alongside dropping games in his best match-up to Patience at BlizzCon 2016, and Neeb has had a clear pattern of losing to players beneath his level, or at least making things far sloppier than they should be. To see him play with confidence and eliminate those firmly beneath him was a welcome sight, and yet, without his performance in the quarterfinals, would’ve been easily forgotten.

It was there that Neeb faced off against Rogue in a rematch of both BlizzCon 2017, where Neeb was eliminated at Rogue’s hands, and the finals of Hangzhou Carnival, easily one of the most confusing events of the year. In Hangzhou, Neeb defeated HerO(jOin) and Rogue only for the entire community to be conflicted on whether or not to care about it. At GSL, with everyone watching, with the community waiting to see Neeb crumble once again at the hands of a champion, it was that other Neeb we were treated to. Dominant Neeb. And this time, people certainly cared.

Not only was Neeb in his best form of the year by far, displaying convincing and consistent play that easily swatted away some poorly planned aggression from Rogue, but he was doing so on the greatest stage a Starcraft player could possibly do it on. Look at all of the comments made after foreigners succeed, be it at KeSPA Cup for Neeb or GSL vs the World for Serral; ‘It isn’t Code S’. The GSL's flagship tournament is the very peak of competition, the 8-year beating heart of the Korean scene, and Neeb made his mark on it. He became the first foreigner since Jinro in 2011, who did so in competitive scene so different as to be unrecognizable today, to make the Code S semifinals.

In 2016 and 2017, Neeb played the role of the generic foreign hope. Yes, he played fantastically; yes, he dominated domestically; yes, he showed flashes (and sometimes entire tournaments) of brilliance, even against Koreans. But at the end of the day, when that hope was faced with its most considerable threats, he crumbled. It may sound harsh, but it hardly an insult. There was a period when Stephano was considered by some to be an obvious candidate for a Code S championship, but those hopes never materialized. Naniwa did his best and made his mark twice, but never honestly came close enough. Players have risen to and fallen from that catchy but questionable status many times. "The foreign hope" is an elusive concept. The goal posts can move quickly. None of those WCS championships matter, on the grand scale, compared to BlizzCon and IEM Katowice, where Neeb has routinely fallen. In 2018, Neeb is no longer the foreign hope. He is, for the first time since his ascent in 2016, not the greatest foreigner in the world. That title belongs to a Zerg player.

For Neeb, there is a greater hunt. He has his WCS titles. He has his trophies. He has all of the domestic success one could ask for. He even has the scattershot success against Koreans; but not on the biggest of stages. Not until this year. Not until now. No longer does anything matter except for how he performs at BlizzCon; if he was to win BlizzCon, this year of his – lined with sloppy form, shoddy sets, and periods of flat-out mediocre play – would be beyond redeemed. Neeb got a taste of what it was like to be redeemed in GSL, where two paltry games against TY prevented him from achieving the highest of heights ever reached by a foreign player. If he was to surpass that at BlizzCon, this would be the most successful year of his career, and arguably the most successful for any foreigner. For Neeb, there is nothing else anymore. Only this.