Weekly Cups (March 31-April 6): herO Triples Up

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2024-25 ~~Off-season~~ Community Weekly Cups
Week of March 31 - April 6

by Wax

The past week in StarCraft II brought the bittersweet news that while EWC would be hosting StarCraft II once more, the ESL Pro Tour would also be coming to an end. In the wake of the news, community-driven competitions remained active as usual—it will need to maintain that energy in the post-ESL world.

herO ended up being the big winner of the week, capitalizing on some upsets and the newly created K-Cup to take a weekly triple.

*Partial brackets may be shown.

March 31: WardiTV Mondays #29

One of the criticisms of the weekly cups is that they're a bit too predictable, but last week's competitions started off with a surprise as ShoWTimE toppled Clem by a 2-0 score in the quarterfinals of WardiTV Mondays. Die Mauer hadn't been the most notable cup player in the past few months, but he reminded us of his skills in a big way by besting Clem in two protracted macro bouts (a trend of Clem struggling in longer TvP's might be emerging…).

ShoWTimE's momentum carried him through the semifinals, as he took down Solar 2-0 to book a finals match against herO. The German Protoss came excruciatingly close to scoring a third upset and completing his underdog run, as he forced herO to a fifth game in the BO5 finals. However, a well-placed Stasis Ward brought an end to ShowTimE's heroic performance, allowing herO to defend his fast expansion against ShoWTimE's Stalkers and take the series (VOD).

*****

March 31: Monday Night Weeklies #11

Clem washed off the shame of his RO8 elimination in WardiTV Mondays with a strong championship run in Monday Night Weeklies, going 12-1 in maps throughout the entire tournament (surprisingly, Rex gave him his only map loss).

However, for the first half of MNW, ShoWTimE remained the star, as he blazed through the upper bracket with wins against Gerald, MaxPax, and herO. Alas, he ran out of steam in his winners' final match against Clem, and ceded a 0-2 defeat after taking heavy early-game Probe losses in both games.

ByuN proceeded to eliminate ShoWTimE for good in the losers' final, setting up off-race Clem against ByuN in the grand finals. Clem made his recent cup losses to ByuN look like mere blips, playing rock-solid macro in a 2-0 finals victory (VOD).

*****

March 31: PiGosaur Cup #25

Following a familiar pattern, Clem took his win to bed while leaving herO and MaxPax as the prohibitive favorites to win the third and final Monday tournament. However, a PvP finals did not come to pass, as the OG cup-god Cure scored a minor upset by 2-0'ing MaxPax in the semifinals. While this could just have been your regular, run-of-the-mill upset, one had to wonder if it was the result of Korean players starting to lock-in after getting some advance notice about SC2's inclusion at EWC (if rumors and chat logs are to be believed).

In any case, Cure just didn't have another upset in him, as herO proceeded to take a routine 3-0 victory in the finals and take his second cup win of the week VOD).

*****

April 1: k-cup #kr

The post-EWC scene has already seen individual fans sponsor their own cup series with tournaments like Hupsaiya's HupCup, and last week we saw a similar competition kick off with Kanoya's K-Cup.

The tournament got off to an auspicious start, delivering a thrilling, seven-game finals between cup overlord herO and the fast-rising Solar. herO managed to barely eke out the 4-3 victory, with a well-timed Stalker attack pushing him over the line in game seven (VOD).

*****

April 5: Korean StarCraft League #72

The bi-weekly KSL took place under unusual circumstances, with herO's absence making it a free-for-all among the Korean server players. In the end, Cure was the player who survived the chaos, going through Creator (2-1), ByuN (2-0), and Rogue (3-1) to win his first weekly cup of 2025 (to his credit, he did win a bigger non-weekly in the TLMC Tournament).

This also happened to be one of the cheesiest cup-winning runs we've ever seen, with Cure going proxy-Reaper in both games against ByuN, and pulling out 3-Barracks Reapers + 2x proxy 3-Barracks Marine builds against Rogue in the finals proxy(VOD).

*****

April 2: Kung Fu Cup 2025 #6 - WC3 Evolution Mod

The week's Kung Fu Cup switched from the SC Evo mod to the WarCraft 3 Evo mod, which features races from WarCraft 3, StarCraft II, AND StarCraft Brood War (the tournament was played under modified Conquest rules from Hearthstone to force players to play races from all three games). As one might expect, matches in this mod are f***ing stupid, and I mean that in the best way possible.

In the end, YoungYakov made the most sense of this utterly ridiculous competition, piloting the unusual quartet of BW-Zerg/SC2-Zerg/Undead/Human to victory (VOD (Chinese)).

*****

April 5: StarCraft Evolution League #9

The week also featured some 'regular' StarCraft Evolution action, with the relatively more sane concept of StarCraft II races going up against Brood War races.

Modded SC2 continued to be one of the rare venues where Zerg can get a weekly cup win, and SEL #9 even featured an all-Zerg final between SHIN and Wayne. The final looked like it might be decided by who got to play SC2-Zerg in a given match (the format forces SC2 vs BW in each match), with both Zergs looking understandably sharper when playing their main game of SC2. However, SHIN managed to steal a critical map while playing BW-Zerg, turning theorycraft into reality by sniping Wayne's Overseers with Scourge while his Lurkers wreaked havoc below. That made all the difference, with SHIN going on to win 3-2 (VOD).