ZeNEX made a horrific showing in this season's first GSTL match, getting 4-0d by their former teammate Taeja. Taeja played solidly, but in every single set the ZeNEX player made a critical blunder that no professional gamer should ever make.

On Xel'Naga Caverns, Puzzle has his entire army on one hotkey and gets it divided around a destructible rock, then packed into a tiny corner. Appalling.

CoCa shows some initial indecision before doing a huge baneling all-in. It is microed terribly and kills nothing but bunkers. Stupid game.

The TvT with Byun gets to a balanced midgame before Byun suicides 3 tanks and a full medivac for nothing. FUCK.

Kyrix comes out as ZeNEX’s last hope (lol). His scouting overlord finds Taeja early and immediately sees gas before rax. Taeja makes only 4 hellions and annoys Kyrix with them while switching to marine/tank/banshee. Kyrix loses 12 drones to the same 4 hellions that he has known about since the beginning of the game despite having speedlings, roaches and spine crawlers and then gets rolled.

If I cried any more it would all be blood. I'm never watching a game by a ZeNEX player again.

All games - 0/5. If you insist go to the end of game 4 to watch this reenactment:

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Titillate (verb) - to excite or arouse agreeably. TSL vs. Fou did not titillate.

Game one is Lucky vs. Puma, you've probably heard of them. Bad roach micro against bad blue flame hellion micro, and then both players max, Puma engages late and then loses. I was: not titillated

Fou decides to send out GuMiho next. GuMio does a cute little mass tank blue flame hellion build. I would like to see how this works against a better terran, but alas it was clever. I was: minorly titillated.

TSL sends out Fruitdealer, I assume he is the snipe player for GuMiho, because otherwise it would be weird to send him out so early. GuMiho does a mass hellion opening but Fruitdealer doesn't get roaches until really late, letting the hellions do a lot of damage. GuMiho was able to 1a with siege tanks and marines to beat what little army FruitDealer has defending. He way overdroned while being attacked by hellions. FruitDealer really reacted incorrectly to seeing so many hellions and just kept droning instead of ever building units to help defend. GuMiho's build: minorly titillated me.

Now it's Tester's turn to take on GuMiho. In one of the biggest "what" moments I've seen in Starcraft 2, Trickster scouts a two rax, scouts the marauder, and then decides to send his zealot cross map to die to concussive shells. Later Trickster moves his whole army back to kill a single drop, allowing an attack at the front to get into good position and take out a lot of probes and units. GuMio uses some great positioning play to pick off colossus and attack at the right time for the win. I was: titillated.

Alive is the final hope of TSL! Can TSL use Alive to stay Alive? Ha! Alive does a neat one base, marine, tank, cloak banshee attack and does a lot of damage, enough to win the game playing standard. GuMiho also forgot stim, that helped Alive win. I was: pretty titillated.

Leenock learned his lesson from FruitDealer's defeat and immediately gets roaches out against the reactor hellion opening of Alive. Alive does a big one base marine tank attack and it does enough damage to let him coast into victory. Leenock takes a long time to die though, barely surviving attacks. I wasn't titillated, to say the least.

Blue flame hellion drop from sC closes out the series! Yipee! No titillation to be found.

The first two games of this series lacked anything very exciting. In the first game Tails waited for his opponent to make the ill fated move of expanding first in PvP and attacked before the expansion could compensate for its investment. He lost his next game in a lack lustre fashion, investing in a voidray-phoenix harass strategy that lands him no damage.

Game 3 was truly hilarious if you wish to watch back and forth action entirely because the players themselves appear to be clueless. Noblesse attempts a bunker push that makes little sense, and consequently fails. Following this he sends a large portion of his mining SCVs to attack, WHILE building another command center? He loses all of these for almost nothing. However the zerg responds heartily by attempting a baneling bust into entrenched sieged tanks. Greeeen goooo! Then Nobelesse allows himself to be caught of of position multiple times, flanked, and countered repeatedly. Then failing to build a single thor until the massive muta ball has done to much damage he has to leave the game.

GuineaPig demonstrated some trademark random play, going for one dimensional builds that are designed to work immediately and win him the game. In his first match he takes the game easily with some really nice blink stalker usage; then in his following games as zerg executes a baneling bust successfully against Maka. His final game was genuinely entertaining, though it was clear throughout that MKP was the superior player. Some cute play with DTs gain Guineapig solid map control and a sizable lead, and even though he has some macro to his name, MKP has the micro. Slowly chipping away at his opponent from all sides until he's able to force a crack MKP's micro and Houdini himself out of what looked like a terrible situation.

Yes! A close series, and a chance for MVP to bust out their potential new ace. This guy lived up to the hype in his premier match. Watching someone outplay MKP in the way he did was truly amazing, Dongraegu showed that he is going to be a real threat to anyone in the GSL or GSTL from this day forward. This guy's sense of timings and gameflow was absolutely amazing, always knowing best when to engage and how to position whatever he was doing. Clearly a fan of banelings from this game as they nearly greened out the earth before bringing an end to Prime and putting MVP on to the next round.

If you're going to watch any games from this series most definitely check out the last two, so good!

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Game One: Wait a Minute, Did I Just Witness a PvP Revolution?
+ Show Spoiler [Recap] +

Game Two: Zenio is good at ZvP, and the new map is very pretty

Game Three: Ace makes a kissy face while he plays, and that's not even the most awkward part of this game.

Game Four: Huh, They Picked MC

Game Five: Is this a Code S finals?

Game Six: You really did get your Code S finals in my Team League!

The series as a whole was actually most notable for its opening game in my opinion, perhaps introducing the future of PvP now that the 4 gate is dissipating. A lot of viewers I feel came into this matchup looking to see just how good MC is, unfortunately, this is not the place to see that. MC executed a pretty standard blink stalker build, held a weird all in, and won a base trade. By far the only note worthy games were brought by Squirtle/Hero and Zenio/Squirtle, other than that this series was much less then I was expecting going into it. All of these top level players were playing really awkward games. The nunchucks were probably the highlight of the whole thing.

Both teams in this matchup opted to open up with a protoss player, and I believe that this is the best decision you can make in a team league with the meta game how it is right now. All of the teams with solid protoss, (oGs, ST, MVP, and Prime) opened up with protoss players. I believe that the line of thinking with this is that at worst, the player will have a coin flippy, underdeveloped match up of PvP and be able to play standard against other races if needed.

Another benefit of opening with a protoss is that there are so many valid cheeses, from 3 gate void ray, to Anypro style 7 gate 1 robo 2 forge, that if the other team opens with a strong player, you can have a valid chance of cheesing them out in any matchup. Right now, Protoss probably has the most confidence going into every matchup, and so they're a great opening race in a team league.

Also worth noting, both teams chose their unestablished players to start with. This negates any snipe players from being deployed until it is too late to deploy them. I guarantee you, both of these teams have players set up to snipe July or MC, but if all of a sudden oGsWhat'sHisName ends up taking out multiple players in a row, you're going to be in the tough spot of having to use a snipe player out of what they've been training to snipe. Opening with a Protoss, and at that a relatively unknown one, is without a doubt the right play by both teams here.

Wow was I hyped up for this match, these teams have some of my personal favourite players in the entire league. MMA and sC in the same match?! Christmas so soon?

With Taeja rolling off an all kill in the first round he no doubt came into this game with plenty of confidence behind him. However, Leenock did not care for this and he wanted to show him just what he can do with his favourite unit. I have never seen infestors used so extensively and beautifully. Leenock played amazing with his infestors this game, he made it seem like there were 100 on the map when in reality there were only 6. The fungals forced the terran into remaining on his half of the map much longer than he would have liked. Throwing down that green goop at every opportunity allowed Leenock to amass a monster economy, and some equally monstrous units his ultralisk pack. After this it was a-move (and little dance jig) to victory. Why so good Leenock?

Unfortunately Leenock falls in his second game to a creative speed reaper strategy from GanZi. The Terran's micro faulters at many points, where the zerg matches him by faultering with macro. Leenock invests far too much into mutas that aren't able to accomplish anything substantial and eventually banks a ton of money, into a supply block, while marines are stimming all over his mutas.

Ganzi continues rolling on, right through Choya. The fOu coach simply played too passive in this game, leaving plenty of room for Ganzi to sneak an extra base and employ his sick drop usage and emps to make his lead too great. Ganzi then runs into the wall that is Gumiho, taking significant damage from Gumiho's cloaked banshee opening. Once Gumiho takes control of the game he uses this control masterfully, and once Ganzi entrenches his army in the middle of the map, Gumiho merely circumvents the ground force all together and destroys his opponents main.

Gumiho shows us he's not a one game wonder plowing through the fearsome Protoss Alicia. Some fantastic multi tasked harass in combination with great EMPs won this game. It appeared as though Gumiho was going to keep rolling right on through SlayerS clutch player MMA. However this man does not go down without a fight, one hell] of a fight. Drastically down from some awesome early game harass in the form of blue flame hellions from Gumiho, MMA finds himself in a difficult position. But using some of the best multi pronged harass I have ever seen MMA claws himself back into the game. Striking at every location and every opening possible MMA wants to show why he's the Slayer's ace. The never ending abuse of Gumiho's immobile tank army is enough for MMA to somehow make a sick comeback.

All I can say is this game did not disappoint. These guys are so evenly matched, and so very very good. It just so happened that MMA was better. They both traded blows and army exchanges, using sick diversion drops and marine bombs to break enemy tank lines. Eventually MMA catches sC out of position when all his units are in their drop ships and manages to stop the drop, break sC's army, and destroy his 3rd all in one fluid motion. Wow.

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Again both teams decide to open with their Protoss. MVP decides on putting Genius out first, incredibly questionable. When your team is so light on high caliber Code S players, there is no reason to have such a powerhouse lose in the first set.

Genius goes for a standard colossus + stuff army composition while Hero uses blink stalkers to delay Genius' attack. Good blinks on top of Genius' colossus allows them to be sniped out, so that when the big engagement happens it will be easier to deal with. Genius is up food with colossus as he pushes and Hero just rolls over it with blink stalkers and charge lots. Hero transitions into colossus afterwards to 1a for the win. This transition into colossus can be compared to Squirtle's transition into archon immortal from the round of 8, either way, the PvP revolution is here.

MVP then sends out the player that they really should have opened with, GuineaPig, the high level protoss turned random. Liquid'Tyler once commented, when discussing Liquid'TLO's play as random, how difficult it is to play PvP as a random player. It is the most technical of matchups, where one or two probes makes the difference between one sided victories and humiliating defeats. Guinea Pig makes the smart decision and four gates, winning with what's probably the only build he knows for PvP. GuineaPig's "taunt" is a really, really, awkward camera wave: if I was rating taunts I'd give it an zero out of five. Oh, and the match too.

oGs decides to throw Nada at the problem. Other top players on oGs such as Inca and Zenio both have weak matchups, and they don't want to send out their ace player MC right away, so Nada was a good choice. Nada plays super safe, and is able to 1a with stim timing and crush through GuineaPig's macro Protoss, really showing that he is not ready for big macro games against the Code S players quite yet. But in other news, from this point forward, no one is ever allowed to poke fun at the observer ever again.



DongRaeGu is really smart. There is something beautiful and subtle that happens in his game versus Nada that Zergs need to experiment with. As Zergs take their third they want to drone like fiends while it is building, hence why a lot of terran timings hit as the third goes up. RaeGu waits for the timing he knows is coming (marine hellion) and after holding it, instead of putting 300 minerals into drones and the other 300 into the third base, he double expands to a risky gold and his safe third. The gold allows for saturation with less drones, making up for the opportunity cost of the fast fourth. He then mines only gas from his fourth base. This combination allows for a near equal amount of minerals and gas to be mined. And what costs equal minerals and gas for Zerg? Banelings and mutalisks, both of which are pretty good against Terran. Nada was also seconds late on the marine/hellion timing, allowing for banelings to be out in time, so the timing didn't do anything near the damage it needs to. Both of those plays combine for Nada's loss, and DongRaeGu plays a really good ZvT.

The most interesting part of the match between DongRaeGu and Supernova is Supernova's opening. Supernova goes for a one barracks bunker rush and then follows it up with reactor hellions, a pretty cool way to apply pressure. But after this is shut down by DongRaeGu's smart roach opening, Supernova just doesn't catch back up. He goes for a marine maurader timing, probably not the best move on a map like Crossfire, where tanks and positioning reign king; it gets shut down very well by DongRaeGu. After this, DongRaeGu shows the strength of roach baneling as well as his double expansion fanciness from last game.

Well. MC gets hit by a roach speedling attack and loses to the guy that didn't even prepare for PvZ because of it. And that's the series.

Post Game Thoughts / The Importance of Preperation in a Team League:

This series was decided by the coach's decision making rather than the player's. MVP could have lost it when they put GuineaPig against Hero. MVP got really lucky that GuineaPig's four gate worked, putting him out there as a random player in any spot but the first one is a huge risk. Had he not worked out against Hero, then going into the rest of the series oGs would have been able to play extremely confidently and not been so hesitant to use MC.

oGs needs to be better prepared next time, in a team league their line up is very predictable and some of their players have hugely flawed play in particular matchups. If oGs wants to ever win one of these, they need to take the competition seriously and plan their lineup with snipe players, not just wing it and hope MC and Nada can carry them.

This week saw the introduction of Bel’Shir Beach to the GSTL map pool, throwing a new map-type in alongside the ash-worlds, cave-networks and megacities we’ve come to know so well. Bel’Shir Beach takes place on one of the few maps worth fighting for – a resort planet, ripe for holiday goers of any race, no matter how many limbs. Given the fact that we have gone through all of Brood War and SC2 so far without seeing anything quite so picturesque, Bel’Shir Beach is a rare gem indeed.

Sadly, this perennial pleasure is not without its pick of potential problems.

Coral Atoll or Volcanic Caldera?

The biggest question raised by Bel’Shir beach is, of course, one of geology. In a perfect world, we would have some clear source of information, perhaps a geological survey. In the absence of such a survey we must use deduction. Fear not, however, for we can determine much from the geology of the map itself and hopefully shed some light on the map’s structure.

Evidence for both the coral atoll and caldera theories presents itself in the shape of the map, which the diagram above outlines quite neatly.



The sand across Bel’Shir’s centre archipelago clearly shows a light enough colour to be composed of the calcite bodies of decomposed coral polyps, which also flies in the face of the volcanic caldera theory insofar as volcanic soil would likely be darker in colour and sustain a plentiful variety of plants. Of course, in making this assumption we presume that alien polyps would leave calcite husks, but given the general morphic regularity of animals in SC2, that doesn’t seem too great a stretch.



In favour of the volcanic caldera argument there is the fact that there are islands at the core of the ring, which would be in line with a mid-peak nearer the volcano’s cone. Moreover, those islands are more densely forested, suggesting that the soil there is richer in nutrients, as it might be if it had been covered in volcanic ash years previous.

+ Show Spoiler +

Wildlife:

We may well be able to deduce a healthy amount about the environment by learning about the indigenous fauna that inhabit it. These crustacean-styled animals are equally at home on land or in water, and, as everyone knows, amphibious creatures aren’t to be trusted, having not committed yet to life on land or at sea, like all right-minded animals.



In the interest of science we dispatched a probe to perform a dissection of the animal in question, a “scantipede:”



What have we learned from this exercise?

One: a probe’s particle beam is singularly unsuited to the delicate processes of forensic science.

Two: in opposition to our expectations the humble scantipede bleeds red. Usually, in crustaceans we’d expect the “blood” (or haemolymph) to be a bluish color (owing to its copper-enriched haemocyanin-based circulatory system).

What does this teach us about Bel’Shir beach? Likely that there’s a lot more iron about than expected, or that there isn't water deep enough for that kind of circulatory system to be successful (it being more likely to tire an animal out than the iron-based system so clearly espoused by our indigenous friend up there). The idea of there being an abundance of iron on Bel’Shir tallies well with the lack of Xel’Naga watchtowers, which we might surmise suffer from electromagnetic interference.

Zerg, of course, have black blood – a substance whose composition I daren’t guess at.

+ Show Spoiler [Balance Issues] +

Thanks to both previous season finals becoming rather drawn out slug-fests, expectations were high coming into this series. This time around the finals began with a relatively slow start, but ramped up quickly and finished with the kind of bang you hope to see when a strangely ornate trophy is involved.

MVP decided to start off with Genius again, who 'did his thing'. Meaning he fumbled around with some void rays for a while but was left untouched long enough to upgrade things like storm, and win from there.

The second game was completely without note, Genius tried a forge FE and lost to burrow. Game 3 was relatively low econ with zerg units throwing themselves at a mech army for a while and eventually running out of steam.

After there things got interestnig, Frozen had a cute blink build on Tal'Darim, running stalkers into the back of Keen's base and then blinking to the front to kill empty bunkers and overpower the Terran. Highly entertaining, especially during the parts where Moletrap and DOA argued about whether or not he had vision to the high ground. It turned out that he did, and we all learned something valuable.

Game 5 felt very unusual, like taking a sip of milk that doesn't quite taste right but isn't at the expiration date yet which makes you think its still good. Frozen opened with void rays and did a lot of damage, but took a really long time to expo and viOlet looked briefly like he might stabilize. Then he died. Fun but awkward.

Frozen attempted the same trick in a PvZ against GuineaPig but didn't have nearly the same success, and then it was GuineaPig up against a Jaedong killer. GanZi did a cool tank/marine pressure build and chokes out the Zerg, slowly inching forward and restricting Guinea's options.

A single game away from victory GanZi plays Dual Sight in an odd manner, proxying a barracks and factory and going for a heavy one base mech all-in. The game is tense with DongRaeGu holding just barely when he pulls drones, two separate times. The kind of defense reminiscent of NaNiwa and ThorZaIN's TSL Finals game 6.

Amazingly this brings the series to a 9th game, coming down to the wire as with finals before it. SlayerS tags in MMA, the man who earned them the same trophy just a month ago, to battle GSTL gosu DongRaeGu. It is difficult to express in words how awesome this game is for a deciding battle, the lead swings back and forth several times with MMA dropping constantly and holding the gold just long enough to take it home. Excellent play by both, the voices of the commentators begin to crack after shouting through it which is typically the mark of a finals worth watching.

SkyCrawler has a good series of battle reports ready to read if you're interested in actual analysis, the latter games of this series were really fantastic and make the GSTL feel incredibly promising as a format.

Final final note: stream bonjwa SlayerS_Cella continues to improve his appearance and now looks like a serious badass in a suit.

Besides being the captain of a now two time GSTL championship team, MMA has undeniably become the greatest high pressure player in the entire league. He has always been one of if not the best player on SlayerS and in perhaps all of the GSTL. His humble beginnings in this league were no different from where he is now; being played as the last line of defense again ZeNEX in the Ro8, though back then he was known as Jjob. Once three of his team mates had fallen to HyeJun it was MMA’s turn to attempt for the reverse all kill, but winning 4 games in a row for any person is extremely difficult at the highest levels of competition. Even under these conditions, in his first GSTL appearance, MMA only fell short of the reverse all kill by one game. These were the markings and the beginnings of an amazing team player.

In the next season the team decided to deploy this young man’s talents in a situation where the entire match was not assuredly riding on his every win. Yet again MMA managed to win 3 games in a row, knocking out notable players like ST_July and ST_Squirtle before allowing Ryung to clean up the final win to put Slayers on to the next round. This little experiment in changing MMA’s position in the lineup proved successful, and no doubt reinforced his ability to beat the best under these high pressure settings.

In the finals of the GSTL2 MMA was decidedly switched back into the anchor position, allowing his teammates to perform the brunt of the damage against the opposition of IM. When MVP seemed like he might win 3 straight sets and secure a championship for IM, he met MMA who would begin to prove that he is the greatest match point player of all time. This game was one for the ages, and a very fitting one for the final point of the GSTL 2, putting Slayers a top the league upon the shoulders of their Michael Jordan in MMA. Slayers had won their first championship when viewed as the extreme underdogs the heavy weights of IM. Highlighting MMA’s performance is not meant to dwarf the contributions of his team mates, but no one is better suited as a last line of defense than MMA.

Jump ahead to our most recently completed GSTL 3 we see MMA is all too familiar position of having the fate of Slayer’s in the team league yet again resting on him. With his team down 3-2, and Gumiho coming in with plenty of momentum, MMA was forced into nothing less than his best. He was even put drastically behind in this game by some excellent early game harass from his Terran opponent. But the artist formerly known as Jjob showed us that he never brings his B game only his MMA game! Clawing his way back with some of the most amazing multi-pronged harass and relentless aggression I’ve ever seen in this team league. If you haven’t watched this match please do, MMA does not disappoint. After that game, not only did MMA have his teams every breath inhaling from his unit losses and exhaling in relief from his brilliant moves, but now he had to face the powerhouse in sC.

SC really does not get enough credit for just how good he is, as of late this guy has been playing phenomenally and demonstrating he can be the best in a very clean fashion. This came out in the game against MMA, these two were so evenly matched for most of the game it was beyond impressive. Trading blow for blow, and brilliant tactical strikes for siege line breaks. MMA was eventually able to find the perfect timing to catch sC’s army out of its position and blast on through the terran lines to take the series for Slayers yet again. Two high pressure, extremely close games for MMA, two extremely beautiful victories.

To the finals against the dark horse of the tournament MVP, MMA finds himself in the familiar position against the teams ace Dongreagu. Up to this point the guy was a Zerg beast, looking like an unstoppable force for his team. Using the nerd tears garnered from victory to water his Zerg plants, an act only engaged in for embarrassment as we all known Zergs are carnivores. MMA couldn’t seem to shake the déjà vu of last round, finding himself behind economically and rather intensely so in supply. But let’s take a look at how MMA deals with this.










That was one of many examples where MMA obtains maximum efficiency from his units. Sure there are opportunities like there where the zerg could have picked better angle or time to attack, but it is also the mark of a great player when he can make his opponent THINK it's a good idea to attack into his army. In reality we saw how good of an idea it was there. MMA is a relentless player, if you give him room to breath he will simply suffocate you. There have always been stories told of players who have unbelievable skill in the practice room, able to roll team mate one after the other, but when these people get on TV it all falls apart. MMA is as far from that image as a player can get, he THRIVES on the adrenaline. He lives for the chance to win under the highest pressure settings against the best opponents. MMA seems unbeatable when his team needs him most, good luck to the teams next series trying to get through this guy.