the allegations of spades maphacking that popped up after his showmatch with lucifron has been all the rage the last days. replays surfaced with dubious decisions, mysterious movements and peculiar positioning. people on both sides of the argument hold nothing back and defend their side to the ban.
what if i told you there's another explanation for all of this... something unexpected, something out of this world. unfortunately noone can be simply told what this other explanation is, so i added a lot of pictures as well. welcome to the real world.
the precog
during a tvz versus goldenlight on dualsight, spades showcased some of his immense psychic abilities. after spawning bot left and pumping out a few hellions he approaches goldens natural from the west. here he's presented with 2 roaches, one spine, 6 morphing cocoons and some drones being pulled away from the hellions.
+ Show Spoiler [the hellions approach from the west] +
besides the spine, the roaches, 2 queens and some scouting lings spades is in the dark. golden's main is completely shrouded in the fog of war. what he has scouted didn't really provide any definitive answer to what his opponent was doing, but the contents of the cocoons at the natural might have. however spades doesn't stay long enough to check, he doesn't need to. wasting no time he quickly sends his hellions back to the northern watchtower and promptly asks golden why he is all-inning.
+ Show Spoiler [spades asking the hard questions] +
and indeed, golden was all-inning. there is no greater crime than all-inning in starcraft 2. spades used his precog powers, not mere scouting, to sniff it out before it even happened.
the chosen one
in the recent, much talked about series versus lucifron, spades found his hellions in an awkward position. at 16:40 a group of hellions at the empty 9 o'clock expansion were about to be in a world of hurt with an angry ball of marauders and medevacs approaching from behind the shrubberies.
+ Show Spoiler [crouching marauders, hidden hellions] +
sensing this, spades quickly lays out an escape plan for the unlucky hellions by issuing move commands hugging the egde of the southern chasm. all but one hellion escape to fight on.
+ Show Spoiler [spades dodging the marauders] +
in the heat of late game battle it's impossible to pay attention to every little detail, like a medevac or two changing direction at the edge of your minimap. when things heat up around spades he uses his chosen one powers to slow down time and easily dodge incoming attacks.
the cerebro chamber
playing a meching devil terran cross spawns on artifice is no simple task. being down on bases and down on supply with an inferior composition, spades is hard pressed to make something happen. using his custom built cerebro chamber, fine tuned on demuslims meching units, he stims in blindly at a perfect time to catch most of demuslims tanks unsieged and clears up a dangerous push.
+ Show Spoiler [leap of faith] +
after cleaning up the push spades preforms a sequence of manouvers so amazing that i had to include snapshots of the minimap to convey the scale of them. navigating across this vast map he forces a lift on demuslims 12 o'clock 5th.
+ Show Spoiler [12 o'clock in the air] +
shifting focus he avoids his opponents units and moves his army all the way to the other side of the map to stim in and pick off 3 lonely tanks and demuslims 9 o'clock 4th.
+ Show Spoiler [spades stimming in to kill the 3 tanks] +
moving south to dodge demuslims army he then turns around and goes north east towards the 12 o'clock again, only to catch a smaller task force on an intercept course.
+ Show Spoiler [flanking part of demuslims army] +
sniping a tech lab and juking around to the 12 o'clock again, he stims up a ramp to pick off a handfull of sieging tanks before moving back to the expansion to kill some scvs before he finally gets cleaned up.
+ Show Spoiler [cheeky tank snipes] +
this entire sequence of amazing moves was done using no scans at all, but who needs scans when you have a cerebro chamber.
closing words
this was mostly an excuse to put spades face on a precog. the thought popped up in my head when i was looking through spades vs goldenlight on dualsight trying to form an opinion about the hacking accusations. the examples used in the text are not necessarily evidence for or against that, and are portayed in a way that makes spades look like he has superhuman powers.
pointers on formatting, pictures, grammar, spelling, etc are welcomed. help me write better blog posts.
edits: bad wording, grammar and goldens name