Road to BlizzCon 2019: Stats (#8 WCS Korea)

Settling the Score

by Wax

In our preview for Dark, we mentioned how Dark brought an outsize amount of attention to his 'rivalry' with Serral, making it all the more delightful for the foreign community on the multiple occasions when he got crushed. Stats is about as close as you're going to get to Dark's diametric opposite without his ID being "Light." He's always been a 'good manner' player in public, speaking respectfully and diplomatically about any future opponent. He doesn't have a gaudy streak of wins against foreigners or a foreigner-killer narrative—in the pre-Serral era, he was often the Korean player giving the foreign community their feel-good upset of a major tournament ([1], [2], [3]). Dark is the #1 seed from Korea, while Stats is lowest seeded Korean player at this Global Finals. Oh, and unlike Dark, Stats has actually won an offline best-of-five against the awakened Serral.


That point is particularly important in this year's WCS Global Finals, where all of the group stage matches will be played as best-of-fives, and where Stats has drawn Serral as his very first opponent in the Ro16 group of death (Serral, Stats, Maru, TIME). It's the most cursed draw any player could have received, but Stats may be the one with the best chance of surviving it.

Since Serral's BlizzCon championship in 2018, only four players have managed to beat him in an offline BO5+: Reynor, INnoVation, soO, and Stats. Reynor, despite being the only Circuit player who can beat Serral with any regularity, has been surprisingly poor in mixed Circuit+Korea events. While both INnoVation (WESG) and soO (IEM Katowice) beat Serral on their way to $100,000+ first-place prizes earlier in the year, they seem to have checked out ever since (INnoVation didn't even make the Global Finals). One can imagine that Stats looks at his $10,000 check from ASUS ROG Summer and sighs, wondering where his $100,000 reward for beating Serral is. But if it's kept him hungry up until his upcoming fifth clash with Serral, then maybe it was all for the best.


Stats' first ever match against Serral came at GSL vs. The World 2018, the landmark tournament that forced even the staunchest GSL elitists to realize "oh s***, this Serral kid is for real." After Serral bulldozed INnoVation and Dark with surprising ease in the earlier rounds, he was set to take on Stats in the final, Protoss leg of this GSL triathlon. Stats, who had won Super Tournament 1 and finished runner-up in Code S earlier that year, proved to be a much sterner test.



The series isn't necessarily instructive for the upcoming Global Finals match, given the current state of the PvZ match-up. But the 2018 meta gave us some entertainment that seems to be missing now, with Serral and Zergs preferring a swarming style where waves of Hydralisks and Banelings looked to overwhelm Protoss from all angles. While Stats got totally swamped in a couple of games, this style of play also produced the fantastic game five (TL.net's fourth best game of 2018, where Stats' defense was able to match and ultimate surpass Serral's fierce offense.

Stats also picked up two more wins through some evergreen, Protoss mainstays: a boatload of Chargelots and Archons attacking before the Zerg defenses were completely set, and map-specific cannon rush Serral did not have the answer for.

With the series tied 3-3, everything came to a rather poetic end on Dreamcatcher. Serral, playing against his reputation for standard play, cut Drones for a mid-game all-in attack with Roaches, Ravagers and Queens. Stats, often called the 'Shield of Aiur,' would have been Korea's #1 pick to sniff out and halt this attack. Only, Korea's Aegis ended up cracking under the pressure, ushering in the age of Serral.

What ensued was one of the most hyped pre-BlizzCon build-ups ever. Circuit fans were excited that they actually had a player who was among the title favorites, while Korean fans wondered who might restore the GSL's honor. Maru seemed to be the obvious candidate, mirroring Serral with an unprecedented Code S sweep on the year. But by the time of the finals, it was Stats who had once more earned the privilege—or bore the cross—of defending his country's pride.



Yet, even with the double stakes of getting vengeance for himself and his country, the rematch ended in another loss for Stats. Again, the series had a few period-specific quirks. Swarm Hosts played a part, but without the current-edition Nydus Worms, Serral opted to use them as a somewhat clumsy, immobile artillery. Stats brought out two-Stargate Phoenixes as his 'surprise' build for the series, using them to mixed effect (interestingly, both Trap and herO tried to pull this strat out in recent matches against Rogue…).

The most portentous moment of the series came in the closing game six, where we got a glimpse of PvZ's future. Even though Serral did not rely heavily on Infestors, the Finnish Phenom deployed a Brood Lord-Viper-Corruptor-mass Spore Crawler comp that felt conceptually similar to today's late game armies.

Eight months and one major design patch later, the two players would finally face again in the group stage of HomeStory Cup 19. While Stats got his first win on the books with a clean 2-0 victory (fending off a Roach-Ravager all-in in game one and holding off Nydus-Swarm Host tactics in game two), it ultimately felt like a footnote when Serral ended up going on to win the entire tournament while Stats finished in the top six after losing to soO.

No, Stats' true revenge would come later, almost a year to the date from his loss to Serral at GSL vs. The World 2018.

Serral's success inspired the return of Finland's Assembly Summer as a full-fledged major tournament on the WCS Circuit, breaking its lengthy spell as a smaller, local LAN. Though not initially invited, Stats earned a belated invitation to Serral's homecoming party when SpeCial forfeited at the last minute. In retrospect, one can see why Stats wasn't invited in the initial round—no one likes a party-crasher.



Stats' 3-2 victory over Serral in the semifinals sucked the air out of the Helsinki arena, but it breathed new life into the rivalry and into the Global Finals race.

While one must be cautious not to look too deeply into a months old series, Stats' game two loss seems like it's still resonating months later. Having not faced Serral in a late-game situation since the post-BlizzCon design patch, Stats laid down the challenge on Acropolis. Serral accepted, and what ensued was a sad, shield-your-kids'-eyes, late-game beatdown from Zerg that perfectly encapsulated what's wrong with StarCraft II. I imagine Serral's more regular victims on the WCS Circuit were watching that match and thinking "I knew this was gonna happen, and I feel stupid for thinking Stats was going to make a difference."

However, the loss gave Stats the important realization that he couldn't dare to take games late against a Zerg of Serral's caliber. He pivoted into a 1 Phoenix-3 Oracle opener for the next three games, and committed hard to getting enough economic damage done to set up a finishing blow. Stats' Oracle micro had been noticeably sloppy in his prior series against Serral from 2018, but this time around he was able to do significant damage three games in a row, allowing him to complete a reverse sweep.

In retrospect, Stats' game two against Serral is paralleled by other, come-to-Jesus moments experienced by top players in Korea. A month later in Code S, Maru would admit that he had practiced a lot of late-game mech TvZ, but instantly NOPED out of that plan after a particularly brutal loss to Solar on Thunderbird. Not surprisingly, the brainy Classic was the player who opted out of late-game PvZ the earliest, having learned his lesson during a Code S match against Rogue in March.

On Serral's end, he may have had his own learning moment at Assembly as well. He blew a lead against TIME by trying to close a game out with his initial Hive-tech army, instead of playing for a slower, more methodical victory over time. But Serral might feel enticed when he sees Dark and Rogue continue to pick up 'free' wins with their early-mid game shenanigans in the GSL, and one has to wonder how he will balance out his mix of strategies at the Global Finals.

The 1 Phoenix-3 Oracle build and its variants have long since been 'figured out,' even if Stats still pulls it out every now and then. But it won't unlock Serral's Queen-Spore defenses as easily as it did before, and the pressure is on Stats to craft new openers that will gain him significant early game advantages (cannon-rushes seem to be becoming a regular feature in his series, much like a Maru proxy-rax). This kind of situation may not make for the most entertaining StarCraft II in terms of in-game action, but it will be an intriguing strategic battle to watch unfold.

It might seem a bit odd to focus so much on this one match-up for Stats when he's coming into the tournament as the #8 seed for good reason. He was extremely inconsistent on the year, suffering Ro32 elimination in the Code S of the year, finishing runner-up at IEM Katowice immediately after, and then losing in the Ro16 of both proceeding Code S tournaments. But what else are we to do when the conversation around international StarCraft II has become so Serral-centric? Everyone knows the road to the title goes through Serral. The main reason fans and progamers alike rate Stats so highly in spite of his poor Code S showings is precisely because he's the last Protoss player to beat Serral in a meaningful BO5.

Moreover, for once, the dream-match is actually guaranteed. As of now, Stats and Serral are perfectly tied in at 2-2 in matches and 10-10 in games. Should Stats win once at the Global Finals, he'll take the lead in this rivalry. And if it so happens that they meet again later in the tournament, and Stats wins once more... Well, it would be a fitting for the player who began the age of Serral to bring it to an end.