Master's Coliseum #8

RO16 Group A Preview: Serral, SHIN, Astrea, Cure

Saturday, Dec 14 12:00pm GMT (GMT+00:00) & Sunday, Dec 15 12:00pm GMT (GMT+00:00)

by Wax

ESL has yet to announce what the future holds for competitive StarCraft II, but the rest of the community continues to march on and fill the calendar with high-level events. The next one up on the schedule is SCBOY's Master's Coliseum #8, putting up $15,000 in prize money in an all-online extravaganza. Nearly all of the top contenders will be in the mix, as well as some dangerous underdogs and intriguing military returnees. The action begins with Group A in the round-robin RO16, headlined by reigning Master's Coliseum champion Serral.



Despite being mostly inactive since September, Serral showed barely any signs of rust at HomeStory Cup 26 where he put in several dominating performances. He did have to settle for a third place finish, but such a 'disappointing' result was excused by the fact that Clem was the only one to beat him in the entire tournament. I don't mean in series, I mean in maps—Serral went 16-0 against players not-named Clément Desplanches at HSC 26. This included another unwatchable brutal beatdown of Maru, reminding us once more that Serral is virtually invincible against everyone except the French prodigy.

With Clem also participating in Master' Coliseum #8, it's almost inevitable that Serral will have to confront this problematic match-up somewhere down the line. But that's a dilemma for another day—he shouldn't have any problems advancing through a group of heavily outmatched opponents. The only question here is if Serral will continue to go perfect against non-Clem players, or if his Group A opponents will have enough tricks up their sleeves to make him drop a a map or two.

The player I'm giving the most upset potential to is SHIN. This is a weird time to bring up Zerg vs Zerg as a potential weakness for Serral, as he's currently on a 20-match winning streak in the mirror with an absurd 88% map win-rate. However, you still have to give some consideration to the guys who have exploited the volatility of ZvZ against Serral in the past, and SHIN has yet to exhaust all the credit built up from his monumental 3-2 upset victory over Serral at IEM Katowice 2023.

Also, now happens to be a particularly good time to get back on board the SHIN train. The notoriously streaky Zerg is currently running hot after a very strong 'PTR season' where he was the best Zerg throughout various online events. Granted, the other top Zergs were much less during that time, but SHIN did win a couple of events over the likes of online monsters MaxPax and ByuN. Not only is he playing well in an all-around sense, but I think the new patch might be suited to his strengths. SHIN excels at 'Zergy' play where he can slam opponents with waves of units, but struggles to unlock defenses if his opponents can slow the games down. The new maps and patch changes seem to have made it slightly harder for Terran and Protoss to turtle up, which gives SHIN more time to shine. All this has earned SHIN tenth place on the Aligulac.com rankings, and is presumably why he scored a direct invite to Master's Coliseum over more decorated players. Historic macro-shinconomic cycles tell me he's bound to come back down to earth eventually, but in his current form, he should advance in second place.

The two Zerg players in Group A were invited to the tournament, but our next pair of players had to fight their way in through the preliminaries. The first of them is Astrea, who booked his ticket through the North America & Europe qualifier. With the big four of Serral/Reynor/Clem/MaxPax already seeded, you might have expected players like HeroMarine or ShoWTimE to be next in line to claim the two qualifying spots. However, Astrea and Spirit's advancement from the qualifier served as a reminder that the competition between all of the 'tier two' NA/EU players is very close, with everyone capable of taking a BO3 off each other. That said, Astrea did benefit from a bit of bracket luck, going through a path of Azura, Nicoract, SKillous, and MaNa (who scored a 2-0 knockout on ShoWTimE in the previous round).

It's hard for me to get a feel for Astrea's level right now. While the last impression he gave most fans will be his first round exit from the Esports World Cup, he's been fairly active in online events since then and has put up some respectable results. My impression from limited review of his online cup games is that he's succeeding with solid all-around play, rather than cheeses or innovative strategies like his reputation for creativity might point to in a new patch (maybe he's like 10% more annoying with Stasis Ward spam in PvZ?). While he does seem pegged for fourth place on paper, I'm intrigued to see if he can surprise us.

Finally, there's Cure, who advanced through the Korean qualifier with wins over Ryung, Rogue, and Zoun. While they weren't the biggest names to take down at their current strength, I thought it was a positive sign from Cure after his somewhat lackluster results during the off-season. While the original online cup king has long since been outshone by players like MaxPax, Clem, and herO, he was even surpassed by players like SHIN and ByuN in the last couple of months. Thus, it was encouraging to see him take care of business when the stakes were raised in the MC qualifier.

Cure's a tricky player to rate in this group, because I have no idea how he's going to treat this GSL-adjacent tournament. While everyone prepared tailored strategies for the GSL, Cure always struck me as being especially good at using the threat of his macro play to set up all-ins, or vice versa. He showed off this ability in September's WTL playoffs as well, where he was sent out against Serral in Liquid's opening match against BASILISK. There, he managed to steal a 1-1 tie off of the Finnish Phenom with a map-specific Bunker rush all-in, knowing he was guaranteed to play the map due to winners' map choice. I don't think this is me reading too deeply into a single game—Cure has too good of a track record with cheese in big matches.

In any case, with little else to focus on for the time being, I have reason to believe that Cure will take this as seriously as any Code S group. Even better for him, the Master's Coliseum format is actually more preparation-friendly than the GSL itself, being played as a round-robin that's split into two separate days. The best version of Cure would be a lock to advance from this group, and might even make Serral bleed along the way.

Predictions

Aligulac.com projects Serral to be a massive favorite to advance in first place, with SHIN having a moderate advantage over Cure in the race for second. That's no surprise since it basically tracks with their tournament performances in the last few months. As mentioned above, the big variable here is whether or not Cure can play at an elevated, big tournament level. Considering how hard everyone played in the previous Master's Coliseum #7, I'm going to put my faith in Cure and say he advances alongside Serral.

Serral and Cure to advance.

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