Road to BlizzCon 2019: Serral (#1 WCS Circuit)

Déjà Vu

by Wax

One year after Serral went on his historic championship run at the 2018 WCS Global Finals, he heads into the 2019 edition of the tournament as the favorite to achieve an even more historic repeat. No player has ever won back-to-back Global Finals, much less a non-Korean. But all the indicators suggest that he's actually going to do it.

Serral's fellow pros, Koreans and foreigners alike, speak of him as if he's some sort of final boss, the player all roads to the championship must go through. He's been #1 on Aligulac.com's modified Glicko ranking system for god knows how many months. At the time of writing, 63% of TL.net users had picked Serral to win the championship over the entire fifteen player field. Those rating Serral the most harshly seem to be gamblers, with betting sites currently giving him a 'mere' 40%-ish chance of going all the way.

How on Earth did we arrive here?


Three months ago, after the conclusion ASUS ROG/Assembly Summer, it seemed like the height of Serral-mania had finally passed. His loss to Stats in the semifinals made it three major internationals in a row (not counting HomeStoryCup 19) where he had been eliminated by a player from Korea. The first retaliatory strike for BlizzCon 2018 came at IEM Katowice, where soO prevailed over Serral with a 3-2 victory in the quarterfinals. Then, weeks later, INnoVation had defeated Serral 4-3 in the finals of WESG, another big-money event. It wasn't just Koreans hitting back—control of the Circuit had also slipped through Serrals' fingers. After completing a perfect, four-for-four Circuit grand slam in 2018, he had ceded two of 2019's Circuit titles to Reynor.

Of course, many fans and progamers at that time would still have picked Serral as their #1 player in the world. Just, not to the ridiculous degree where they'd pick him to win over the entire field of top players at a major, mixed-region tournament. Whether you breathed a sigh of relief or sadness, the totally dominant, basically invincible Serral of May-November 2018 looked like he was gone.

Which is what's supposed to happen to normal people, by the way. The apex, macro-everyone-to-death version of INnoVation from early Heart of the Swarm only really existed for about half a year. Even the uber-dominant period that earned Flash the moniker of "God" was just ten months long, and those ten months still felt like an eternity in Brood War time. For whatever reason—whether it's self-burnout or opponents picking apart your game—these things just aren't meant to last.

In a sense, peak Serral didn't last either. What we didn't expect was for peak Serral 2.0 to start so soon.

Just a few weeks after being eliminated by Stats in Helsinki, Serral headed to Seoul to compete in GSL vs. The World 2019. The 2018 version of that tournament was where Serral-mania really picked up, with Serral living up to and exceeding all of his Circuit hype by defeating INnoVation, Dark, and Stats in a row. This year, GSL vs. The World served as a similarly important turning point, as Serral got all of his thunder back.



Even if Maru once again flubbed his lines and denied us a dream-match, the gauntlet of Koreans Serral had to face was brutal nevertheless: TY, a player with so-so results in 2019, but of unimpeachable reputation; Trap, a finalist in the most recent Code S; and Classic, a finalist in the other Code S before that (Serral also took a 4-2 victory against Elazer just good measure). Serral then punctuated his GSL vs. The World victory by taking back his Circuit crown, defeating Reynor 4-1 in the finals of WCS Fall to end the 2019 Circuit with an even 2-2 title split (or even slightly uneven in the favor of Serral, depending on how you rate WCS Winter: Europe) and the #1 WCS Circuit seed on the year.

If you thought INnoVation fans or Maru fans were quick to say "[Player] is BACK!", then Serral fans are here, demanding their new world record. That's not even a criticism of fickle fans. That's just the righteous due for players who've built their reputation up to such a high level: one convincing tournament run is all you need for the hype-train to accelerate up from "recklessly fast" back to its usual speed of "flying into orbit."

There's another major factor that has people feeling confident about Serral's chances at the Global Finals. We all know how to translate progamer speak by now. If a Zerg player says "Zerg is balanced," what that really means is that Zerg is a bit strong. Going one step further, if a Zerg player essentially says "Zerg is actually overpowered," then that means the house of balance is on f***ing fire.

Sure, Zerg might not be a problem across all levels of StarCraft II. It might not even be a problem in pro-StarCraft II, broadly speaking. But it does now appear to be a problem at the BlizzCon level where ALL the Zerg players in attendance are of the 'top' variety (don't be that guy who well-actually's soO or Elazer in the comments). If Zerg is overpowered, and Serral has proven himself to be the top ZvP, ZvT, AND ZvZ player, then there appears to be only one logical conclusion to reach.



It's easy to get caught up in the Serral buzz. Serral vs. The World is a kind of story we've never seen before in StarCraft II, and we're not ready to quit it yet. And, of course, the idea that any faction is imbalanced is going to receive a lot of support from the other two-thirds of the player-base.

But it's worth thinking back to those tournaments earlier in the year when Serral was indeed having his moments of mortality, and wonder what vulnerability may still lie hidden underneath this recent round of success and hype.

The WESG series vs INnoVation is the toughest one to get a takeaway from. I'd like to say that it teaches us to go for two-base marine-tank pushes every game, but that doesn't seem tenable on the current maps. Still, it was revealing to see Serral perhaps overthink his plan, going for broke on several cheeses to mixed success.

The loss to soO reminded us that Zerg vs Zerg, at the end of the day, is still Zerg vs Zerg—a volatile match-up that gives the underdog an outsize chance of winning. It wouldn't have been surprising if Serral's Circuit streak ended at WCS Montreal 2018, where he miraculously survived a series of close calls in a ZvZ gauntlet. At IEM Katowice, soO just happened to be the player who finally cashed in on Serral's long overdue ZvZ debt.

Serral's loss to Stats reminded us of another quirk of StarCraft II—sometimes Protoss just kills all your Drones. Stats, who had been unusually sloppy with his Oracles when facing Serral in 2018, apparently went to medical school over the winter as he killed Drones with absolutely surgical precision during the Winter rematch. A few moments of inspired execution from Protoss can make a huge difference in a match.

Who knows, maybe this kind of thinking is merely grasping at straws, trying to add a bit of suspense to a tournament that feels more like a foregone conclusion than any previous year. The best version of Serral was remarkable because he could cut through all the randomness, chaos, and noise to achieve what the best player often fails to do in StarCraft—turn 'supposed to happen' into what actually happened. A bet against Serral is a bet that the best version of Serral hasn't truly returned, and he's still vulnerable to the same human foibles as everyone else. Headed into the Global Finals, it seems like it's a bet few of us are willing to make.