by stuchiu

Jjakji vs. Maru

The rise, fall, and revival of the class of 2011

The end of 2011 was marked by two of the greatest finals Starcraft 2 had ever witnessed. One was the culmination of an entire year. MMA and DRG, the two crown jewels of GSTL and two players that Boxer pointed out as players he believed were the future of SC2, had their fated duel on the grand stage of the Blizzard Cup Finals. While the first six games were all one-sided, the seventh game was everything we wanted and more. DRG’s impeccable mechanics clashed against against MMA’s blinding speed and aggression, resulting an edge-of-your-seat game that was close until the very end.

The second final was very different. Despite not commanding anywhere near the same amount of attention or emotional investment of DRG vs. MMA, it proved that all you need to have a great finals is two great players playing at the highest level. The stories didn’t matter, neither did the names of players didn’t matter—only the quality of the games. jjakji vs. Leenock was predicted to be a one-sided stomp, another boring finals in GSL’s long and storied history of getting bad finals. After Leenock’s stunning performance at MLG Providence, everyone from the fans to the players to the casters hyped him as the de facto best player in the world. He had done the unthinkable by defeating Mvp in the semi-finals in one of the greatest series of all time (the only series to date that made you almost believe that a 40 minute 3 marine push could possibly win the game) and did the impossible by winning MLG Providence from the open bracket.

Jjakji's chances of winning? In Artosis’ immortal words, "Never ever gonna happen." Jjakji barely beat Supernova in his first group in a dual proxy marauder game. In his ro16 group, he barely got by after Coca was DQ’d out. He surprised Puzzle with odd TvP builds and barely scraped a win against Oz so no one gave him even a sliver of a chance. When he said before his finals that he was "quite good in TvZ," most people could only laugh. How good could "quite good" be? As it turned out, it meant he had better TvZ than everyone else in the world. A blockbuster game one had Jjakji reveal that he was the real deal, and we were given the highest quality series a GSL had ever produced. Other finals had more interesting players, other finals had better storylines, but game for game, Jjakji vs. Leenock produced the 6 best games.

But what must go up must eventually come down. MMA slowly and surely fell off the map as SlayerS broke up due to internal strife, while his gameplay was broken by brood lord-infestor. DRG survived the longest, but once HotS hit he was left to burn in Code B purgatory for months. Jjakji had it the worst of all, falling out of Code S for a year and a half while his team wallowed at the bottom of the GSTL table.

Call it coincidence or call it fate, but all three of these champions have all made their return to the highest stage of competition in the last month. MMA made a strong run in the hardest Dreamhack ever, getting 3rd/4th and just barely losing to Innovation in the semis. DRG became the first Zerg to tarnish Innovation’s reputation as the unbeatable TvZ monster, taking him to the late game three times and struck him down twice. Jjakji went under the radar during his Code A run, but has declared his triumphant return upon reaching Code S. In the Ro32, he killed First, considered to be one of the best PvT players in the world twice. In the Ro16 group nominations, Innovation chose Jjakji as top 3 weakest player he wanted to play in his group and Innovation got his wish. Only, it should have been Jjakji saying those words. Instead of crushing Jjakji, INnoVation was the one who got crushed and booted from the tournament.

Jjakji Unchained

Following his GSL victory in 2011, mYi.jjakji was put into a position of immense burden. He was a young champion who was desperate to show the world he wasn’t a fluke. He was the ace of a weak team, directly responsible for its success or failure. For months at a time, Jjakji was the only player from NS HoSeo to even be in the GSL, only rarely finding useful support from a Sculp or a Freaky before they ended up retiring or departing to another team.

After the dissolution of NSHS, Jjakji was stuck in the Up & Down matches for GSL. At the time of this announcement he made it clear that if he didn't make Code S, he would move to Europe and join WCS EU. But Jjakji for the first time in a long time in his career was in a position where he did not have to worry about his next move or paycheck. Myinsanity may be one of the smaller teams, but they guaranteed him a chance to play in foreigner events and a chance to have a real career in Europe. Even better, his success in the GSL did not mean the life or death of his team as it did when he was in NSHS. With a chance to finally breathe and focus on the game, Jjakji played some of the best Starcraft of his career and will now face the youngest royal roader to ever win the OSL, Maru.

Not too dissimilar.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. A team is in the worst shape it's even been in, constantly surrounded by rumors of financial trouble and disbanding. A young Terran player on said team reaches the finals of a major tournament against all odds, gets written off by Artosis and countless other SC2 fans, and proves them all wrong by winning it all. He immediately follows this by doing poorly in the next tournament, making people wonder if they were right to doubt him after all.

That is where the similarities end and MaruPrime’s story begins. Prime, even at its worst, is at least no NSH. Even when Maru wasn’t doing well, they still had and retained other strong players in MKP, Byun and Creator. And while Maru might have been annoyed by having to model for the team's newest clothing line, he doesn't yet have to contend with the pressure of carrying the team on his young shoulders. Maybe it is because of that steady environment (or Maru's stoic demeanor) that Maru was so easily able to bounce back from his abysmal season 2 finals showing with a quick return to the Ro8 in GSL.

Maru is the youngest OSL royal roader and second youngest champion had. At the same time, he is also one of the oldest veterans of SC2 as he is one of the few surviving participants from the first ever GSL Open. In an age where KeSPA has transferred over, he is one of the many players (in KeSPA or eSF) proving that the school of mass laddering is a championship-level method of practice. It certainly worked out against Rain and SKT's famously regimented system.

Maru says he doesn't prepare specifically for his opponents, yet time and time again he has pulled out the right build for the right time in the right place. He beat Innovation with a cloak banshee rush. Then did a proxy hellion marine medivac build to counter Innovation’s blind counter to cloaked banshee. He then followed it up with a 11/11 proxy on a map known for cc first and by the time the 4th game started Innovation was too mentally broken to continue. Maru is aggressive and known for being cheesy. But at the same time he is much stronger than you’d expect at macro games often catching his opponents off guard like Rain and Flash. At the same time he can also play extremely greedy, but busting him is a nigh impossible thing to do. Just ask Rain, Flash and Effort. All three went for extremely strong 1-2 base all-ins against him and all three failed. Maru is insanely dangerous. His micro is probably the best in the world for a Terran and he often drags his opponents in battles that favor his own expertise and wins from there. In many ways Maru is the single most dangerous player in the entire ro8 and I wouldn’t be surprised if Maru makes another finals appearance this season.

Maru 3-2 Jjakji

PartinG vs. soO

A house divided

Soo Good

The problem with being on a big team with a lot of larger than life personalities is that you often get overlooked despite whatever skill you may possess. So it came as a bit of a surprise to people when SKT_soO qualified for ro8 GSL over Innovation's vaunted TvZ. Despite losing to both DRG and Curious, Innovation’s TvZ was still considered the best in the world and at that point in time only three players had ever beaten him in a macro game that went past the early stages. But after his Ro16 group, Soo now joins that elite group of players, and may very well have closed membership forever.

But the signs were all there if you were looking for them. Since the inception of HotS, Soo has consistently been getting into the top 16 each season. And each time he has gotten further than the last time. His previously weak ZvT is now strong enough that he can legitimately beat any Terran left in the tournament. His ZvP is varied enough that he can not be pinned to any one kind of style, and he is solid at each of those styles. He may not be the most interesting player, but his macro is good, his micro is clean, and his strategies well balanced between risky and safe. Sometimes he even looks better than Soulkey, able to work himself into a better mid-game position against Terran and Protoss. But if there is one thing he lacks that the other top Zergs have, it is consistency.

Soo Bad

Yes, he is consistent in a tournament results sense, making it to the Ro16 several seasons in a row. But it's the game to game swings that are worrisome. Soo playing at his best is a strong contender to beat anyone left in the tournament. The problem with him is that he has large hiccups that destroy his play (known to some as Jaedong-itis). One such example was his a game from the previous Ro16 against Symbol. In that ZvZ, Soo got a huge lead on Symbol with mass mutas and total map control, but eventually lost after bashing his head against a perfect anti-mutalisk composition too many times.

An even more extreme example is his last Code A game against Gumiho. With the series 1-1, Soo pulled out a perfectly timed 1 base bane bust against Gumiho. With a bungled 2 rax and a canceled cc on the low ground and 6 banelings morphing, Soo had to do only one thing to win the game. He had to right click his banes on the supply depot and open a path for his lings to finish the game. Instead Soo went up the ramp and somehow blew up the banelings on the supply depot one-by-one, giving Gumiho’s repairing SCV's just enough time to keep the depot alive between each hit. Needless to say, things went downhill for soO after that.

While the question of whether or not soO can beat PartinG is important, the question of whether or not he will beat himself is equally as important. Will we see the Soo who forced INnoVation to surrender his immortality, or will it be the confused Code A soO who is the butt of all jokes?

In short: Soo Good, or Soo bad?

Soo Ugly

The last and possibly the most important aspect of this match is the teamkill. Teamkills are in general horrendous matches that lead to bad games. Just think about Mvp vs. Nestea, Nestea vs. Losira, Fantasy vs. Rain, MC vs. Seed (both were staying at the IM house during their finals), or most recently Soulkey vs sOs, a series so devastatingly bad that everyone's only real recollection of it was that at some point sOs cannon rushed Soulkey... ...Uhh, you can stop crying in the corner now, there's still a few more paragraphs left.

Of course not all teamkills are bad. SlayerS players typically played great games against each other, and the very first Mvp vs. Nestea showdown in GSL was decent as well. But for the most part, good matchups with teamkills are fairly rare. This match doesn't seem like it will be an exception, as the last time these two played against each other Parting played the two worst PvZ matches of his entire life.

ST_Soul vs SKT_Soulless

When Parting left ST he was the Soul Conductor. A man who ran the Soul Train over countless Zerg players around the world. He was feared, respected, and most of all near unstoppable. His Soul Train became so infamous that he told his entire competition that this was the one build he would use and he still won. ST_Parting was a man of fervor, a man of belief, a train of soul.

But after going corporate, he's lost his soul. Maybe there was a clause in his contract that forced him to surrender in exchange for a rich salary. Maybe he accidentally left his soul back at the StarTale house where it was quickly trapped by Avenge. From the first HotS GSL up to now, PartinG has gone 3 - 13 in ZvP series. His overall map score 13 - 25.

Even worse than the stats is that he has left behind the strategy that gave him all his success. The last time he even attempted to do a Soul Train was against Soo and it was the largest disaster of his life. For a larger than life personality like PartinG, the only thing worse than losing your skill is losing your identity.

The only good news is that 5 of his last 13 wins have come recently in the SWL where he beat Sen 3-0 and Nestea 2-0. He was one of the players to help Dear escape the group of Zergs and Dear did use his infamous Soul Train once. Parting even swore that his ZvP has gotten better and that he will prove it in this coming match. Will the Soul Train ride again or will it be decommissioned for good?

Soo 3 - 1 Parting