PiG Sty Festival #5 - Group Stage Preview

by Wax

As the StarCraft 2 scene continues to wait patiently for news on the game's future, another community organizer has stepped up to hold a major event. PiG is back with the fifth installment of his PiG Sty tournament, with up to $10,000 of prize money on the line.

This tournament offers us a welcome reprieve from the trio of Clem-MaxPax-herO destroying everyone—now we get to see Clem, MaxPax, herO, AND Serral crushing everyone's souls! Jokes aside, it's great to see almost the full contingent of top players competing in this event. The high end of the scene hasn't been this competitive and interesting in a while, with the last three major tournaments of HomeStory Cup, Master's Coliseum, and the LiuLi Cup all being won by different players. It's hard to single out any one player as the favorite, with many contenders having a legitimate chance to win if the bracket breaks their way.

Schedule and Players

Schedule:

• Feb 27 - Mar 1: RO16 group stage (GSL-style) - 08:00 GMT (+00:00) start times
  
• Mar 14-16: RO8 Playoffs (semi-double elim) - 09:00 GMT (+00:00) start times

Streams: Twitch (main English stream)

Players and Initial Groups:

Group Stage Preview

Group A: Serral, trigger, SHIN, Cure

It's fitting that a GSL-like tournament format has produced a GSL-like Group A—one top dog is virtually assured to go through, while the remaining three players are thrust into a fierce battle for second place.

Of course, the alpha in question is Serral, the winner of the last $10,000+ tier tournament of Master's Coliseum #8. Quizzically, Serral's championship run in January actually left him looking much more vulnerable than we're used to. The Finnish Phenom suffered a high-profile loss to MaxPax in the upper side of the double-elimination bracket, stoking already heated debates about the state of PvZ balance. Ultimately, Serral made the appropriate adjustments to his ZvP and came back to win the championship (beating MaxPax and herO in the final rounds), but concerns resurfaced just a week later in the LiuLi Cup playoffs. This smaller Chinese event featured largely the same cast of players as Master's Coliseum, and here, MaxPax was able to send Serral packing in the lower bracket finals. Fortunately for Serral, any potential ZvP issues aren't likely to bother him until the playoffs. He's clearly a cut above trigger in PvZ, and we have no reason to question his ZvZ and ZvT (when Clem isn't involved, anyway).

While there shouldn't be much drama in the fight for first, the squabble for second should be very interesting. The dominance of the MaxPax-herO-Clem trinity in weekly cups has overshadowed the rest of the SC2 field, but quietly SHIN has been one of the best players in the tier right below them. He's stolen a couple of cup titles away from the trinity, and even defeated them in head to heads on a handful of occasions.

To a lesser extent, Trigger has also thrived during this off-season period. The Canadian Protoss has continued to level up during the 5.0.14 patch, and he's been one of the few players who has threatened to upset the trio of cup kings. He even scored a shocking 3-1 over Clem during one of January's Monday Night Weeklies—albeit, his first win after 25 consecutive defeats—a sign of his growing abilities.

Finally, we have an old stalwart in Cure. Unfortunately, he's the one player in the group who doesn't have much momentum, having been in a bit of a funk ever since EWC concluded in August. Still, he's a player with championship pedigree, and I think he's still the safest bet to squeeze into the playoffs alongside Serral.

Prediction: Serral and Cure to advance.

Group B: Clem, Bunny, Zoun, Solar

Group B has a similar outline to Group A, with the mighty Clem looming over the other three players in the group.

On paper, it should be a slight knock on Clem's credentials that he wasn't able to win any of HomeStory Cup, LiuLi Cup, or Master's Coliseum—the three biggest events in recent months. In fact, he had an especially bad performance in Master's Coliseum, where he was eliminated in the group stages (losing a map-score tiebreaker to Spirit and Zoun). However, you can't really hold that against him when he's been utterly annihilating his competition in all other competitions, racking up dozens of wins in weeklies and smaller online events. While I still have some reservations about his decision to off-race against Terrans, I'll table those doubts for the playoffs.

Zoun is the wild card to look out for in this group. Other than ByuN in 2020 or herO in 2022, he's been showing us one of the fastest returns to form for a military returnee. The high point so far has been a top six finish in Master's Coliseum, where he was narrowly eliminated by Reynor after a protracted, seven-game brawl. While his current Aligulac ranking of #15 isn't anything to get excited about, he's clearly on the fastest upward trajectory of anyone in the scene right now. The official PiG tournament graphics even gave him the tagline of "Zest 2.0"—they're getting ahead of themselves, but I can see where they're coming from.

Of all the tournament participants, Bunny is the player I'm least sure about. He had a long period of inactivity following the Esports World Cup, and only started to really ramp up his touranment participation in the last few weeks. Still, the organizers saw fit to give him an invited spot, which I have to presume was due to his top four finish in the last PiG Sty event. I can't argue with rewarding players from your previous tournaments, so I can only hope that Bunny's recent cramming pays off.

Solar rounds out Group B, filling in the tried-and-true champion spot like Cure does in Group A. Alas, much like Cure, Solar hasn't been playing inspiring StarCraft since EWC, and it really feels like the two are just treading water until they figure out what's up with the future of StarCraft II. Maybe a relatively well-prized event like PiG Sty can bring the best out of Solar, but realistically, I'm favoring the players who have shown more verve in recent months.

Prediction: Clem and Zoun advance.

Group C: herO, Rogue, SKillous, ByuN

Among the championship contenders, herO is the one who seems the most vulnerable to an early upset. Now, that's a bit unfair to herO considering he wasn't the one that was eliminated in the group stages of Master's Coliseum. However, when you watch herO's games, his game-to-game form just doesn't seem as steady as the other top players. While he still cooks with jet fuel when he's on, catch him on an off day and you'll notice his reaction speed and micro are noticeably lacking.

Even so, I can't project any serious issues for him in this group. Rogue is a palatable draw as a first opponent, despite his illustrious reputation. His post-military career hasn't gone nearly as well as fans would have hoped, and he seems to have plateaued as a middle-of-the-pack Zerg. Occasionally he'll show glimmers of his world champion class, but those performances are far and few in between. It's starting to feel like we might never see the old Rogue again, unless a potential six-figure payday reactivates his clutch gene.

Have we reached the point where we have to stop using terms like "dark horse" or "underrated" when talking about SKillous? The TL player has had quite the StarCraft glow up over the last couple of years, rising from the morass of EU Protosses to become a semi-regular in tournament playoffs (it feels like we're often seeing him in places where ShoWTimE might have been in the past). His consistency is still a concern, but he's shown much improvement in that department. I'm going to go out on a reasonably sturdy limb and say SKillous takes second place here.

The fourth and final member of the group is ByuN, who's giving me very similar vibes to Cure and Solar before him. Heck, maybe that's just the vibes from the majority of the Korean scene at the moment—many players seem to be in standby mode, waiting for a major announcement before they go into hardcore tryhard mode. ByuN definitely has a chance to advance here with his baseline play, but I'd rather give the nod to a player on the rise.

Prediction: herO and SKillous advance.

Group D: MaxPax, Classic, Dark, Maru

With five top-tier contenders in the tournament, one group was bound to get stuck with two of them and become the group of death.

There's no doubt that Maru and MaxPax are the top-tier contenders in question, but in a startling recent development, I have to put MaxPax above Maru as the favorite in this group. I've long scrutinized the mysterious Dane's penchant for underperforming in big online events, but he's won me over with two fantastic showings in January. Master's Coliseum #8 saw him finish in the top 3, where he took a huge 3-2 win over Serral along the way (even though Serral won the lower bracket rematch). Then, a week later, MaxPax one-upped that performance by winning the LiuLi Cup, taking down Reynor, Serral, and Clem in his title run. Granted, the LiuLi Cup wasn't monied as generously as Master's Coliseum (about $7000 total prize money), but given the strength of the players involved, I'm giving him close to full credit. It's been a long time since the scene welcomed a new top-tier contender, and it's great to see MaxPax start to realize his full potential.

On the other hand, Maru has had a pretty terrible off-season, suffering another brutal beatdown at the hands of Serral at HomeStory Cup and going 0-3 in the group stage of Master's Coliseum (losses to herO, GuMiho, and Lancer). Still, if I'm willing to give Clem a pass for a similarly anemic showing in the same tournament, then it's only fair that I cut the eight-time Code S champion some slack as well. After all, getting the tar beat out of him by Serral is just business as usual—it doesn't necessarily signal a downturn in form. And, as GSL fans are familiar with, he's due for a group stage dud every 4~5 tournaments or so. I'm still fully confident in Maru's ability to get out of this group stage, but much more realistic concerns lie ahead in the playoffs.

The remaining two players of Classic and Dark push this into group of death territory, but just barely. Both are great champions from the past, but neither is really playing at their top level right now.

Dark is entering the 2020 Zest zone, where we keep hearing about his impending military service but don't have any idea when it's actually going to happen. Maybe that knowledge has colored my perception, but it really feels like he's just going through the motions these days and is getting by through a decade's worth of accrued skills. Even so, no one has a better instinct for stealing games with random all-ins (which should be completely predictable, but somehow aren't), which still makes him deadly in a BO3 format group stage.

I haven't been particularly enthused with Classic's recent play either. You would think that a supposed Protoss patch would favor Classic, whose preferred style of playing is to find a macro build that works and spam it over and over (which is sad, because Classic has shown he CAN be a great trickster/all-in player when he wants to be). Alas, he's made very little noise in the past few months (minus one good run to the Olimoleague finals), and it's hard to see that changing in a group as difficult as this one. I'd be very happy if he defied my expectations and played some more strategically diverse games, but I'm not crossing my fingers.

Prediction: MaxPax and Maru advance.

---