Road to BlizzCon 2019: SpeCial (#4 WCS Circuit)

Made For This

by Wax

Around this time of year, we tend to take a step back and think about things in a historical context, wondering what the approaching Global Finals might mean for the sixteen participants' legacies. Obvious, our attention first goes to the title contenders, the players who might put a capstone on a storied career with a championship, or ones who might even enter the greatest-of-all-time race with a second BlizzCon title.

But even among the players whose realistic goals are more modest, those who are just looking to place as high as possible before they're forced to type their final GG, there are plenty of historical stakes. For the WCS Circuit players, a high Global Finals finish could be the highlight of their careers, bestowing more prestige and bragging rights than perhaps even a Circuit title. After all, when we think about who the best foreigners of all time are, we tend to base it on success in major tournaments against top Koreans. Well, tournaments don't get any more major than at the Global Finals, and the Koreans there are most definitely top-class.


In that regard, few foreigners have earned more respect through the Global Finals than SpeCial. His debut appearance in 2017 saw him defeat Stats (the #1 Korea seed) and mentor TY during the group stage, which might go down as the single biggest upset in Global Finals history (SpeCial would go on to defeat Elazer in the Ro8, then lose to soO in the semifinals). In 2018, SpeCial struck yet again, defeating Classic (#2 Korea seed) in a winner-take-all deathmatch to escape the group stage.

If SpeCial can advance from the group stage again (this time he faces Dark, ShoWTimE, and soO in the Ro16), even with the change to best-of-five's, he's sure to throw everyone's 'best foreigners of all time' rankings out of wack. From a historical record standpoint, the argument against SpeCial is that his best performances come at the Global Finals, and that his results in other mixed-region events are lacking in comparison. From a practical standpoint, that's a 'problem' that almost every other WCS Circuit player would love to have (mostly, it's a problem for obsessive SC2 fans like us who like to make lists).

Seriously, though, it is rather curious that SpeCial outperforms expectations so drastically at the Global Finals. The biggest reason could be preparation time, something that SpeCial has brought up on multiple occasions. Even if the effect of specially prepared strategies tend to get overblown in the community (like, who ISN'T preparing build orders?), SpeCial is one those players who's actually so good at it that it becomes a competitive advantage. The most notable recent example was his sweep of long-time Circuit nemesis Reynor at GSL vs. The World. On the Circuit, Reynor vs SpeCial matches generally saw Reynor beat up SpeCial with the macro stick. In GSL vs. The World, SpeCial played three different openers with unpredictable tech transitions, allowing him to win outright or gain enough of an advantage to overcome the 17-year-old mechanics monster (incidentally, SpeCial has 3-0'd his first round GSL vs. World match three years in a row).



In a recent interview with TL.net (coming soon!), SpeCial claimed that Terran is the race that benefits most from having time to plan out builds (while Zerg benefits most from playing off fundamentals/basics). There's an interesting wrinkle there, with this year's Global Finals being SpeCial's first where he isn't competing together with frequent collaborator TY (who finished #9 in the Korea standings). Perhaps that means SpeCial now gets to enjoy double the Terran tactical goodness, with TY sharing all of the ideas he might have kept for himself on another occasion.

Still, preparation alone can't possibly explain everything about SpeCial's Global Finals success. After all, if SpeCial was so great at preparation-style tournaments, then why did he spend the entirety of 2017 and 2018 stuck in the Ro32 of Code S? Even a handful of 'Circuit-only' visitors outperformed him in that period, with Reynor reaching the Ro16 while Neeb famously reached the Code S semifinals. Maybe that ties into another bit of unprovable StarCraft II mysticism: mentality.

It could be that even the most battle-hardened veterans can be rattled by playing in the Global Finals, but SpeCial finds himself able to keep his composure better than most. This idea does check out over our limited sample size. It wasn't just intelligent build order choices and incisive timing attacks that let SpeCial defeat the likes of Stats, TY, and Classic—he also managed to straight-up outplay and out-think them in hectic and tense situations. For example, against Classic, it seemed like SpeCial was losing the micro-battles on the aggregate, giving up tiny advantages across multiple skirmishes. But ultimately, it was Classic who committed the only micro mistake that would truly matter, losing a Warp Prism full of High Templars right before the series deciding battle.



Of course, one has to get a bit lucky to perform well at the Global Finals, and you can't discount the possibility that SpeCial simply rolled high in two consecutive years. But even if SpeCial's fortune normalizes, there's other reasons to believe he'll continue his run of good results at the Global Finals. Ever since SpeCial got a second chance to make Korea his adopted home in 2017, he's been steadily growing as a player. He was hard-stuck in the Code S Ro32 for two years, but in 2019 broke through to the Ro16 in consecutive tournaments (perhaps it could have been three times if not for the WCS rules kerfuffle in the Winter season). On the Circuit, WCS Spring saw SpeCial finally defeat one of his toughest opponents in Neeb (2-10 all-time before WCS Spring), taking him out 3-2 in the semifinal match to advance to his first ever WCS Circuit Finals.

There's shades of 2017 GuMiho in how SpeCial is succeeding now. No, it's not just the quirky strategies, affinity for mech, and the emergency supply drops (although all that's true, too). It's also in how a player who was sometimes a little too focused on frenetic multi-tasking learned to reign the chaos in, reduced the number of costly errors made, and for the lack of a more specific term, just became more solid all around. With a better foundation to work off of, combined with his history of vastly surpassing expectations at previous Global Finals, I'm starting to wonder why* I considered SpeCial an underdog at first—shouldn't he be one of the favorites to advance from his group?

Every year, during this preview series, some player ends up with the concluding line that goes something like 'underestimate him at your own peril.' We'll be changing it up this time around: Please, please underestimate SpeCial and get your ass-kicked. That'll be all.