Road to BlizzCon 2019: Trap (#3 WCS Korea)

The Inglorious Climb

by Orlok

The WCS Global Finals is an arena that's filled with familiar faces year after year. It’s an inevitable phenomenon in the current StarCraft II scene, where the influx of new talent isn't what it used to be and the old veterans have nearly a decade of experience to draw upon. This year is no different, with most of the WCS Korea representatives having multiple Global Finals appearances to their name. If a player can still surprise us in this day and age, chances are they've done something special.

Enter Trap, Korea's only first-time Global Finals participant this year. At the start of 2019, if you had told me that Trap would finish the WCS Korea season as #2 in the standings, I would have considered it a very bold prediction, bordering on GGemini insanity. Just ten months ago, Trap’s identity as a player was firmly fixed as that of a solid, capable, but ultimately limited player. His permanent round-of-sixteen status in GSL Code S made him an opponent to be respected, but never truly feared. And thus, it was one of the biggest surprises of the year to see Trap shatter his limitations in spectacular fashion, realizing the potential that many didn't even believe existed.


Legacy of the Void has seen more than one veteran make a belated ascendance to championship-contender level, but Trap's road has been particularly arduous—not the least because he WAS champion-quality and then lost it all.

Old school fans might remember Trap as one of the most intriguing prospects of the initial KeSPA invasion, winning the Proleague Rookie-of-the-Year award during the 2012 hybrid BW-SC2 season. Initially, Trap's individual league results lagged far behind his Proleague performances, as he spent several consecutive seasons in Code A/Challenger. However, Heart of the Swarm gave him the kick-start he needed as a solo player, and he wrapped up 2013 with a 5th place finish in Code S Season 2 and top four finish in the WCS Season 3 Finals. Trap's first championship finally came in 2014, when he made a heroic run from the losers bracket to win MLG Anaheim. Trap reaffirmed his quality soon after at the 2015 IEM World Championship, where he came in second place to Zest.



Up to that point, Trap's career seemed like it was following the typical growth curve for a talented, young progamer. Steady, efficient improvement had turned him into a championship contender, and all that remained was to maintain that level. Unfortunately for Trap, what came next was rather atypical: he suffered a slow, agonizing fall into extended mediocrity.

We've gone over Trap's Code S curse several times before, but it's worth re-stating it for emphasis. Between 2014 and 2018, Trap competed in ten GSL Code S tournaments and failed to get past the round-of-sixteen in each and every one (he straight-up failed to qualify for Code S on a handful of other occasions). You can almost forgive the GSL for conveniently 'forgetting' to acknowledge any of Trap's earlier success in their broadcast graphics or video packages, be it Proleague, MLG, or IEM—he's been the symbol of mediocrity for as long as most fans care to remember.

It wasn't all suffering for Trap. He occasionally played great games against top-tier players, with his full-set BO5 series against Dark and Serral during IEM Katowice 2018 come readily to mind. Those games best demonstrate Trap's rare, cursed quality as a challenger: he was good enough to bring the best out of his opponents, but rarely good enough to actually beat them. Sometimes it seemed like it was Trap choking away a situation due to nervousness and poor-decision making, sometimes it seemed like cosmically bad luck. One can only imagine how frustrating it must have been for Trap, having so much skill but finding disappointment at every turn.

And then, in 2019, everything changed again. After spending so much time as another merely 'good' player, Trap smashed his curse and immediate shot his way into the semifinals of the first Code S tournament of the year. If anyone thought it was a fluke, he followed it up by reaching back-to-back grand finals in the next two seasons.

It’s hard to pinpoint the cause of Trap's drastic turnaround. Perhaps his mechanics were slightly tighter and his builds were a bit more refined, but that not enough to explain such an abrupt change of fortune. Trap's own explanation that it was due to a change in mindset, that he overcame the jitters of playing in a major offline match, also seems too simplistic.

Whatever the case, Trap has become the epitome of a complete Protoss player, the fully realized version of his past self. Of course, this wouldn't be Trap's story if there wasn't some bitter alongside the sweet. He seems to be a belated inductee into the kong line (Korean fans will probably ret-con his MLG win away like soO's KeSPA cup), and some may still sneer at his two finals losses and say "same old Trap." But the fact that he managed to take 2nd place in the WCS Korea standings without a championship is a remarkable accomplishment, and those who pick Stats over Trap as the best Korean Protoss are making a risky bet on peak-performance over unwavering consistency. Code S might be easier than ever at the bottom, but the competition at the top is as brutal as ever. Trap wasn't gifted his place in the high heavens—he seized it with ruthless force.



Every late-bloomer tale has similar plot points, including the overcoming of complacency and self-doubt. But there's another element to Trap's tale to consider: the creeping, existential dread that exists in Korean StarCraft II as a whole.

It's not even a taboo topic anymore: Korean StarCraft II has been on the wane for a long time. Proleague and SSL are no more, while KeSPA maintains but a token pretense with Jin Air. Retirement announcements have long since become routine, and now we even see re-retirements. The scene still stands, but there's an air of finality that lingers everywhere.

Several pros have said the KeSPA Proleague days were when they worked the hardest, with corporate masters whipping them on to pursue ever improved results. But for all the stress involved in the intense practice regimens, one of the major upsides of the era (besides the paychecks) was that there was always next week's Proleague game to look forward to. After a loss, there was a clear 'next-time' for atonement. What happens when the future becomes uncertain, and there are ever-fewer 'next times' to prove oneself? Right now, a round-of-sixteen loss in Code S means you're sentenced to two months of purgatory, practicing without knowing if any of your efforts will ever pay off.

Most players remaining in StarCraft II are either previous champions or at least players who have had their moments in the sun. In Trap's case, his four-year slump coincided directly with the decline of StarCraft II in Korea. He's toiled year after year, climbing an endless mountain with little to nothing to tell him that he was on the right path. Is there any glory in making so long and arduous climb, if it only ends in a runner-up moment? Only Trap knows the answer. All we know is that Trap has refused to break.

So here we are: Trap is set to compete at the Global Finals for the first time in his career. Trap enters this tournament quiet as a mouse, the same way he entered the 2019 season. Over a year of GSL, it was revealed that Trap was the elephant in the room. It may be good that Trap doesn’t have as much hype behind him as other players, as it also means there's little weight of outside expectations upon him. So far this year, he has also been able to conquer whatever pressure comes from within, and it's crucial that he continue to do so as the stakes become higher than ever. One way or another, this climb is coming to an end.