It's been a weird year for MC. In some ways he's come full circle. At the beginning of the GSL, he was well known as one of the strongest players in Korea. Coming straight from a promising BW career that had never taken off, he plunged straight into the free-for-all that was SC2 and GSL Season 1. In the opening round, he drew a terran player whose time had been divided between school and SC2. Here, MC had a chance to show his promise.

Except not everything panned out as you’d expect; in his first game on the GSL stage, MC was wrecked on Scrap Station by PoltPrime's innovative combination of terran bio and banshees. It was to be an inauspicious beginning for a protoss who had always known he had what it took, but whose confidence and skill had yet to materialize on screen. In GSL Season 2, MC cleared the first round, only to lose to a washed-up old BW player who had played poorly in the opening season. Yet NesTea would go on to gain his second wind that month, winning the GSL, while MC was left wanting.

Of course, we all know that MC broke through on his third try. With an arsenal of early timing attacks that papered over the fragility of late game PvT, MC conquered his infamous nerves and his opponents. Suddenly MC's swagger and confidence seemed an asset. When he won his second GSL against the new hyper-aggression of July, he seemed ascendant; the world's greatest player taking his due in the world's greatest tournament. His game knowledge, mechanics, and (of course) confidence combined to render him untouchable.

They call MC the 'Protoss President,' but he now finds himself at the lowest point in his career since GSL2. Having been unceremoniously dumped down into Code-A, he is far from inspiring confidence. When he won his championships, there was a feeling that whenever MC engaged, he would win the battle. His sense of when and where to fight was possibly his greatest asset of all, and it brought him victory time and time again. MC did not lose battles.

Contrast this with the MC we saw in the finals of IEM Cologne this past month. MC didn't just lose; he didn't just get swept; he absolutely lost his fucking mind. Against PuMa, a better BW pro but a worse SC2 player, MC rightly expected to face the Frankenstein child of Polt's old build that he lost his first GSL games against. In that three games series, MC faced the 1/1/1 twice with two different strategies, and was rendered utterly helpless in each game. Never in a year had MC looked so lost. Great players—and MC is a great SC2 player—are used to an unprecedented level of control over their games. When you watch a Brood War virtuoso like Flash play, he may be momentarily surprised by a tech switch or strategy. Despite that surprise, it soon becomes clear that he has nonetheless considered that tech switch or strategy, and is able to adapt to meet the new challenge. Even if great players are caught unawares, they're always prepared to some extent.

At IEM, MC was prepared. Yet he still lost badly. That, more than anything else, even Puma's victory, was what we took away from IEM Cologne. MC had lost control of his game.



It's really difficult to understand just how things could have gone so wrong for MC. Looking at the bigger picture, IEM was in fact the latest in a series of defeats and disappointments for Min Chul. Five months and five championships have gone by since MC last reached a GSL final. His last semi-final appearance was in the April World Championships. He failed to make it out his Code-S group twice, and was eliminated in the first round of the Super Tournament. His GSTL record since May is 6-4, and he has only once won an ace match for oGs, losing three. He has attended multiple foreign tournaments against player pools he could be expected to crush, and has only won a couple. That MC is a good player is beyond argument, but it's an open question right now as to whether he's an elite one.

One possible explanation is that MC, as progamers are wont to do, has simply entered a slump period. This happens to the best of players. Memorably, Flash once fell out of the BW Power Rank. Bisu was once demoted to the B-team to receive special training, while Nada has had countless peaks and valleys over his ten-year career. Most players recover, whether through the help of a new strategy, taking a break to recharge their batteries, or taking new inspiration from an outside event. MC may do the same. That said, an observer of MC's basic play would be hard pressed to find real signs of slumping. He still wins a good portion of his games, and it shouldn't be omitted that his IEM loss did indeed come in the final, after all.

Another thought is that MC was never really that good to begin with; that he relied mostly on one and two base cheeses, or on having the luck to meet players in their worst match-ups at crucial times. While there is some truth to the point about MC's opponents, his first two GSL appearances were as tremendously unlucky as subsequent runs have been lucky. Luck is often confused for skill, and skill often for luck. The truth is that they are very similar beasts. Great players make their own luck, and MC has done that in the past.

A third possibility is that MC has been left behind by the current trends in gameplay. This would be substantial news, as the oGs house has essentially led the direction of protoss play since the release of the game. There's really little reason to think that has changed, or that this argument holds any water. Recently, MC has been credited with re-introducing the shuttle storm drop technique from BW into SC2. He is one of the few protoss in the game able to execute this well, let alone use it at all. Surely MC is not far removed from the brain trust that develops protoss strategy, if not the outright leader for his race.

MC is still playing well; he's still at the forefront of protoss innovation, and he's obviously a good player. Still, he isn't doing as well as he, and we, expect. None of the more common theories present a comprehensive picture of just why MC has fallen so precipitously from grace. Of course, he still gets a good deal of credit and attention because he is still the best protoss. Perhaps that’s the crux of the issue. The most persuasive line of argument is that, from the beginning, things actually went way better for MC than they should have.

In his heyday, and even during his slumps, MC was a massive anomaly. Any casual observer of his play in the GSL could make that observation, yet statistics bear this out. MC's Korean winning percentage is 66%. The second best winning percentage from any protoss is Puzzle, who has a 62% win rate, a substantial part of it in weekly foreigner-run tournaments against vastly inferior competition. Alicia notches 54%. HongUn has a 51% win rate. San boasts the same. Look at MC's protoss contemporaries for yourself. There's no one even close to MC's winning percentages.

When MC won his second championship in GSL March, San and Anypro followed him into the semi-finals. As certain writers adamantly insisted, these two were really awful players. Now they're where they belong, in Code B. The only other protoss finalist was InCa. Where is he now? Code B. It is no secret now that protoss is underpowered at the highest current level of play, but studying MC's record suggests that protoss has actually never been competitive in the entire history of Sc2. Little remembered now is the fact that no protoss reached the final four of the first two GSLs. Only two protoss players have reached GSL finals. Only two protoss have ever made a second appearance in the final four. These are tricky facts to work with, because zerg's deep tournament runs may be even scarcer. Yet, when zergs make the later rounds of the GSL, they almost always do better than protoss. The success of players like NesTea, LosirA, and July leaves open the possibility that zerg does in fact have a fighting chance in SC2. The utter failure of the protoss pool seems proof of the polar opposite.

MC then, is slumping because he is supposed to slump. While protoss and zerg have occasionally traded places at the bottom of the balance pile, protoss has borne the brunt of the damage over time, and has indisputably been terrible recently. The only reason that some gaping flaws in the protoss design have now been uncovered is because MC is no longer successful enough to cover them up. He was the first player to really discover the power of early game sentry attacks as protoss. As his fellow protoss mimicked his play, and as terran and zerg became more adept at defending these attacks, MC, and protoss in general, have lost what appears to be their only good set of timing windows. This is the natural evolution of the game – the give and take between current trends and past ones. Yet it seems that protoss has hit a brick wall, and MC along with it.

If you haven't noticed that protoss sucks against terran, and has profound cost-efficiency difficulties against zerg, it’s because you're blind. It has taken imbalance on such an appalling scale as the 1/1/1 family of builds to cast MC down, to make him look mortal and prove once and for all that protoss is absolutely trash at the highest level of competition.



All of which brings this article full circle, with MC falling once more to the unholy marine-banshee union. In his first game against PuMa on Xel'Naga Caverns, MC 1 gate FE'd and then rushed to gateway/immortal tech. Against PuMa's first 1/1/1 attack, MC wisely sacked his expansion and held the attack surprisingly comfortably. Yet he knew he could not breach PuMa's main, and retook his expo, racing for charge. It didn't come soon enough. PuMa's next and final all-in had more stuff. MC this time was not patient enough. Having invested in charge, he needed to wait for it. He could have sacked his expansion again, but chose instead to attack, and lost his entire army because of it, losing the game. Colossi would likely not have helped, as banshees shred colossi. Charge was an inspired option, because it would severely weaken the marines and the quick closing time of the zealots would lower tank effectiveness, allowing the stalkers to deal with the banshees in their usual inefficient way. Yet charge takes so long to complete that MC was left stranded when PuMa's second "all-in" came in.

In the third game, MC went insane. His brain exploded within his head and oozed out his ears onto the keyboard. Going phoenix/blink, he somehow decided it was a good idea to force a basetrade against a terran player, apparently assuming that two or three phoenix stood a chance of killing several scattered floating buildings faster than PuMa's terran imba-ball killed the immobile protoss structures. And that's the best-case scenario. The other scenarios looked a lot more like what actually happened, which was PuMa surviving, re-building a base, and slowly killing MC's remaining buildings along the way. All the while, MC's stalkers flailed about with all the efficacy of hitting a charging rhinoceros with a fly swatter. So much for that. Utter and total failure.

MC is good enough to be in Code S. It is still possible for protoss to stay in Code S, but you have to sympathize with him in big tournaments. He cannot win, nor can HongUn, nor Puzzle, nor HuK. It's ridiculous. MC has been quoted on occasion as having said that, if he played terran, he'd have won five championships. After watching him out-micro his opponent at IEM and still lose, out-multitask his opponent at IEM and still lose, and then go absolutely nuts and use a strategy whose gaping flaws a platinum player could identify in the third game, I believe him.


They call MC the ‘Protoss President,’ but you can't be President of a country that doesn't exist.