Before WCS started, Europe was the healthiest scene with activity at every level of competition. They had small online cups like Zotac and Go4SC2. Beyond that Europe had national tournaments like Esports SM, EPS, Lantrek and the Copenhagen Games. Outside of Korea, Europe organized the two largest team leagues in ATC and Nationwars. Above that were the big LANs like Gfinity, Assembly, ASUS Rog, IEM and DreamHack.

      Not only that, but Europe has always been the true home of the foreigner hope. While NA has produced some of the strongest foreigners in the history of SC2 like Huk, Idra and Scarlett, it was Europe that consistently produced the most threats to Korean dominance. Players like Jinro, Naniwa, Thorzain, Stephano, Snute and Vortix offered hope that the rule of Seoul would be a relic of the BW era. Yet from 2010 to the end of 2013, there have only been a handful of foreigners that could play against the best and win at any given moment.

      With the creation of WCS EU came a huge influx of Koreans. Some were old champions like Mvp, MC and MMA. Others were lesser known Koreans like Duckdeok, Genius or First. Some moved permanently into Europe like ForGG, Jjakji and Stardust. While there was some resistance at first, they were all eventually welcomed and integrated into the scene. In the end, it wasn’t surprising that Korea came to dominate the foreign scene. Many of them were able to attend more tournaments due to proximity, the Kespa switch encouraged some to seek success elsewhere, and former frontliners like Naniwa and Stephano went into decline. All of this eventually culminated in the 2013 Korean All-Kill as they won every Premier tournament in 2013.



      And yet despite the lack of one super foreigner, the EU scene is arguably the strongest it has ever been. Maybe it was the influx of Korean players on the EU server, or the increased sense of cooperation among players, or just the natural competitiveness of pro players as they are forced to battle against players of a higher caliber and rise to the occasion. Whatever the case, the era of one foreigner holding the torch by himself is over. In its stead we have players from all across Europe getting progressively better. The forerunners right now are Snute, Vortix and Welmu who have each consistently reached the top 8 multiple times. Outside of that, all three have proven to be a threat to just about any Korean in the world.

      Yet just one year ago Snute was completely lost. After facing an early elimination in WCS AM, Snute wrote about coming to grips with his inner demons in his blog. He expressed severe doubts about himself, about how far he could go and whether he had finally hit his glass ceiling, one that could not be shattered by practice. Many people make the mistake of believing that getting better at SC2 is a linear scale. That the amount of time put in practicing will necessarily lead to results. At best, practicing long hours non stop just gives the highest correlation to victory. It takes mechanical skill, understanding of the races, the opponent, series planning, composure, mental fortitude, confidence, an understanding of one’s strengths and weaknesses and how to exploit them, and numerous other factors that can lead to either victory or defeat. And even if you have all of that, you can still easily lose. There are no tangible ways to know how good you actually are. You can win all of your practice games and fail the official matches. You can win your official matches, but lose all your ladder games. Snute’s story may be a personal one, but it is one that every SC2 player (except for probably MC) has gone through. Now one year later he is one of the few foreigners to have won a major and the only foreigner to have beaten TRUE and Stork in a group stage.



      While Snute’s struggle was a personal one, Vortix and Stardust faced a more outward fight. More maliciously known by their critics as PatchZerg and CheeseDust, these two players had little in common besides an obsessive compulsion to prove their haters wrong. Both players have taken those monikers and transformed them into their own purpose. What were once petty spiteful nicknames have become an ironic sobriquet as no one can doubt their newfound strength. Vortix has made it to the last 4 ro8’s, the only foreigner to accomplish this feat besides Lucifron. Meanwhile Stardust won the last WCS EU. No one can say anything anymore because nothing can be said. They have proven time and time again that they are two of the strongest players in Europe.



      Beyond them are a plethora of players like Elfi, Serral, Nerchio, TLO, Mana, Grubby, Dayshi, Harstem, ToD and many other clear and present threats. Some are making breakthroughs just now, like Bunny with his victory over Sacsri in Challenger and first place at Gfinity. Even players like Morrow and Demuslim are making resurrection runs after long periods of inactivity. Everyone in WCS Europe comes with their own story, their own struggle, their own failings and triumphs.

      Perhaps the most famous story of WCS EU comes from the most faceless player of all. Duckdeok spent an entire career practicing in Korea, showing nothing for his efforts besides one Code S appearance. Once WCS was made, Duckdeok bet it all on a change in scenery. He went into the qualifiers with cross server ping and kept playing till he won. He paid his own way to fly to Europe and win his first and only ever championship in SC2 before burning out at the Blizzcon 2013 ro8.



      Yet the story of WCS EU is not about any one player or race, it is not about the old champions or the new challengers, the local legends or the immigrated. It is all about all of them. No matter where they come from, what lives they’ve lived, here at WCS EU they have all united as one to play the game they love.

Back to Top

      Before WCS AM started, the American SC2 scene was in a sorry state. Whatever few small online cups were shortly canceled or terminated (though later brought back through the sheer the efforts of people like TotalBiscuit, Destiny, MLG and ToD). The major lans in NA eventually all went away. IPL pulled out; MLG quit after handling the early seasons of WCS AM; NASL could no longer run their online league format but took up WCS AM from MLG only to go bankrupt, leaving ESL to stop the WCS AM scene from crashing. This description barely touches on all the other problems that cropped up during that time. The retirements, the diaspora of the NA Ladder to either KR or EU, the numerous problems of the initial WCS AM qualifiers, visa issues, the lack of a central place for NA or Canadian players to meet and play/discuss/create content for NA...the NA scene in 2013 was a bleak thing.



      This is to say those that remained were too dedicated, passionate, competitive and stubborn to quit. Those few stragglers included the likes of Kane, Illusion, QXC, Puck, Catz, Suppy, Xenocider, Major, Hendralisk, Scarlett, Huk and a few others. Even some new blood came in from players such as Drunkenboi, Neeb and Arium. These were the core group left in NA and the ones that WCS AM was aimed for. Yet the region itself was just too important to everyone. WCS AM became the hub for the Australians, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Koreans that didn't want to stay in Korea. The region functioned as the inn at the crossroads, a place where all the disparate factions with nowhere else to go could congregate and play.

      Prior to the creation of WCS AM, China had remained a completely isolated region. At best they came out once a year to play at either Blizzcon or WCG. The same could be said of Taiwan as Sen was the only player to ever leave the country for foreigner tournaments. While SEA was a bit better in that they had streams to their locals, for the most part only Moonglade was able to travel abroad. But after WCS AM was made, the floodgates opened. Soon Chinese names like Jim, MacSed, Xigua and Toodming became household names. Other SEA players like Pig and Tilea. Iaguz and Petreaus joined ROOT and moved to America to pursue their dreams: Iaguz has become the first Australian to have made it to the Ro16 WCS AM since mOOnGLaDe in its inaugural season. Taiwanese players like Ian, Slam and Has have won amazing games against some of the best in the world.



      At the same time many players in Korea were chafing under the stress of staying in Korea. Who could blame them? Before Kespa ever joined SC2, the amount of SC2 players in the region was staggering. As Kespa transferred over, that number effectively doubled. There was too much talent in a small space that lacked the sponsors, tournaments, and incentive to support it. Even if they wanted to stay, it would be most likely under Kespa house rules as a majority of ESF teams were quickly closing shop. Could they do it again? Could they play under near inhuman training hours to almost never again go to another foreign tournament? Could they run the risk of never getting to play an official game if they couldn’t be one of the top four players on their team?

      Some, like Parting and Maru, decided to transfer over. But for players like Stardust, MC, Jaedong and Hyun it was time to travel to unknown countries, meet new people, and play the game they loved under their terms. For Polt, Violet and Balloon it was time to live the American dream. The three of them left for America at different times: Violet left in early WoL, Polt left right before the creation of WCS AM, and Balloon left just recently. Among all of the players assembled in WCS AM, Polt might be the most American. He left Korea to study and pursue his dreams in America. He learned English, ate steak and waved the American Jack in front of the entire MLG Audience to the chants of “USA! USA! USA!”



      All told, WCS AM became a vast melting pot of strange people and even stranger play styles. You had the Americans, the Canadians, the Chinese, the Taiwanese and the Australians. Sometimes you had Europeans like Demuslim and Snute. Other times someone from the Philippines showed up. And the Koreans were all just as eccentric as their foreigner counterparts.

      There’s Taeja, a player so confounding that when Coach Park met him his first thought was “The hell kind of player is this?” Revival and Oz played the best year of their careers in 2013 before leaving EG to spitefully get better results. Meanwhile Polt had possibly the hardest time of any player in 2014. He battled against Protoss pre-WM buff, pre-blink nerf on such famous maps as Yeonsu, Frost, Polar Night, Heavy Rain and Daedulus Point with a counter attack style all of his own inventing. Let's not even get into Polt’s incessant need to only win comeback games.



      There’s Bomber who spent just enough time in Korea to be called a “third rate Terran” by Tastosis, who assured us Bomber had no chance against “first rate” Terrans like Innovation and Flash. Bomber went on to smash both of them in WCS Season 2, reaching the semi-finals of the OSL and winning the WCS Season 2 Finals. Then he got onto a plane, flew over to America and sky dived to the WCS AM studios. And he did all of that with weird esoteric builds he never used again and builds so archaic that if you had told me Bomber had traveled from 2012 to the future, I would have believed it. It is telling that Heart, the patron saint of 1-1-1, is the most standard Korean Terran playing WCS AM.



      There are the anthropomorphizations like Hyun, who is basically a Roach, or Alicia, the embodiment of a Void Ray. You have Pigbaby and his 7 observer/2 base carrier/2 base Tempest build or whatever the hell he feels like doing on a particular day. And then there are the foreigners. Iaguz spent the majority of his career trapped in SEA killing Zerg after Zerg after Zerg like an exterminator trapped in a forest of wasp nests. Major and Scarlett are...well actually they’re pretty normal. Just ignore Major’s prophetic powers to predict the next greatest player and Scarlett’s desire to play PvZ in her ZvZs.

      Last, and by far the weirdest, are the Chinese and Taiwanese players. Having been locked up to play each other for three years with almost no outside contact, the isolation was bound to have some side effects. It turns out all the Terrans died, the Protosses became insane, and the zergs are mostly normal with a tinge of crazy. Jim and MacSed love to proxy the robo in their soul trains, use 2 base or 1 base all-ins against Zerg, and are currently addicted to phoenix collosus in TvP. Then we have players like Top and Shana. Beyond Top's insane 10 minute long all-in that beat Violet and Shana's insane 2 base all-in against Crank, I really have no clue how to describe them. Just listen to Iaguz's words of wisdom concerning Has:

“True story about Has.

      If he goes proxy oracle and you're going mine drop, he won't expand. He'll add gateways, and you'll scout his lack of expansion. You'll add tanks (void ray bust inc), and he'll make one or two. Then he won't bust. And you'll sit up your ramp and wonder what's taking him so long.

      Then you'll go to move out and you'll find the bottom of your ramp full of cannons. Cannons? But I have siege tanks! I can siege them! And then his tempests open fire.

      He'll expand to your low ground natural afterwards, when his main starts to run a bit dry.

      There's a vod on youtube of him killing MMA with this, I shit you not. I really hate Has. I fucking do.”

      Has then proceeded to eliminate Jaedong from WCS AM with 6 pylons.



      While nowhere near as crazy as their Protoss counterparts, the Chinese zergs have something distinct about them that separates them from the rest. Case in point: Toodming vs Scarlett. Scarlett has roaches so the natural answer is to get more roaches. Fair enough. Scarlett has makes roaches and hydras. In response Toodming gets more Roaches. Fine, that works sometimes. Scarlett maxes out on roach/hydra/infestor. Toodming...just moves his roaches around. Scarlett decides to attack with her superior composition. Then Toodming wins by re-enacting the Battle of Cannae as he gets a perfectly timed 360 surround on her army. There is Slam who just recently beat Puck using ultra/nfestor/queen/viper. And who can ever forget the insane Heart vs Xigua comeback? Down to 7 SCVs, Heart survives every onslaught and snatches victory through sheer willpower and skill. Bomber vs Toodming game was equally memorable: with 80% of the map covered in creep and on 6 bases, Toodming throws wave after wave of ling/bane/muta at Bomber until the zerg burns out.



      That's what WCS AM is about. Either through luck or sheer coincidence, WCS AM has produced some of the craziest games in the entirety of HotS. When you gather players from around the world and combine them with some of the weirdest and insane Koreans playing today you get some amazing games, some hilarious games, and some weird as fuck games. Let me leave you with a summary of the game I feel best exemplifies the WCS AM spirit: Byul vs Revival.



      That was like watching Revival cross the street and then a car is about to hit him. Then BAM, the car explodes, but the debris are flying everywhere, but Revival fucking dodges only to hit his head into a fire hydrant. He then gets up and is mugged by guys with guns and is about to get shot but then one of the thugs backstabs his friends and Revival gets the fuck out of there, but is then chased by a pack of ravenous dogs. He crashes through a butcher shop, throws the meat at the ravenous dogs to only have the butcher try to stab him, only to have the previous thugs start shooting up the butcher and the police coming in to shoot the thugs. After surviving all of that Revival walks home to only have a piano fall out of the sky and almost land on top of him until mutas swoop in from nowhere and die for him.

Back to Top

      What comes to mind when you think of the GSL? Is it the games? Certainly many of the best games were played there: Maru vs Dear, TRUE vs Fantasy, Soulkey vs Rain. Is it the rivalries? There are certainly a lot of those, perhaps too many to count: KT vs SKT, Zest vs SKT, TRUE vs Fantasy, soO vs Finals. But that’s not quite right. Is it the teams? They certainly have the best teams in the world with all the PL players participating. But in an individual league the team is secondary to the player, and no one can deny they have the best in that department.



      If you ask me it is the pursuit of the title, the scramble to be “The Strongest.” It is no accident that when Blizzard increased the GSL prize pool to the GSL for being the hardest region, the GSL funneled it all into first place. For the Koreans the victory is everything. Winning a championship, standing on that stage and saying “I am the best in the world”, is the quintessential dream. Yet every new champion that is crowned feels a bit underwhelming. Yes, Soulkey, Dear, Zest, and Classic are incredible players that fully deserve the admiration and applause that comes with a championship. But inevitably they feel lacking because all GSL champions must stand in the shadow of one man.

      Mvp’s strength (if you could call it that) is almost a tautological concept. When other players describe champions besides Mvp, they say they’re tough to play because of an ostensive reason: high mechanical skill, builds, understanding of the game, micro, matchups. But when they describe Mvp, it is in self-reflexive terms. Mvp will win because he is himself, a veritable voice from the burning bush. Some point out that Mvp had won most of his championships during an “easier” time. While this may be true in the overall sense, it also ignores the fact that Mvp had to invent the game from the ground up. During his struggle to deal with mass patches and strange maps, he laid the groundwork for terran in all matchups. Then take into account the fact that WoL alone had more premier tournaments than the entirety of BW, Mvp’s own injuries, and the fact that he won in spite of ever-shifting metas that rotated between all three races. Oh, and he somehow triumphed over broodlord/infestor.



      All told, he is the greatest champion SC2 has ever produced. Even now, years after he vacated his throne at the end of WoL, his presence still haunts the GSL. We have had four new champions crowned in Korea since the start of HotS (5 if you count Maru's victory from the last season of OSL). And yet the throne remains empty, not from lack of trying. Those who play in Korea want it. More than anything, they want to become the successors to that legacy. They want to be able to proclaim that they are not just the best in the world, but one of the best to have ever played. In a sense the whole machine is driven by pure systemic egotism, the widespread belief that being the absolute best is the only ideal that matters. There are many examples among the Korean players, but two stand out for exactly what this ideal means and what it costs: Yugioh and Stork.

      Yugioh was something special, the King of Code A, the only player to have reached Code A 15/16 times. When given the choice between staying in Korea or moving on to WCS AM/EU, he was the only one who chose to stay. No one quite knows why. Was it a sense of glory? Was he too stubborn to give up? Maybe his sense of sentiment got to him and he was unwilling to let go of his realm.



      Tastosis called Yugioh one of the scrappiest players to have ever played SC2 and I completely agree. Both inside and outside decisions paint a picture of a boy too recalcitrant, too contrary to give up his dream of being the best. He was someone who, when the chips were down, seemed to pull out some inner strength that did not allow him to give up. On the last night of Slayers, everyone else was busy saying goodbye and moving on. Every player that had built the team (Ryung, MMA, Taeja, Alicia, Ryung, Ganzi, Min, the list goes on forever) had left and it was all over but the crying. Only Yugioh stood against the entire world with his pain, his anger, and his loss, the star of his own Linkin Park music video. He took all of it and channeled all of it into an almost unstoppable rage as he knocked out player after player. But instead of celebrating what should have been his last hurrah, Yugioh was angry. Victory after victory, he would slam down his headphones on the keyboard, rip out his earplugs, slam the booth door behind him, go back to the bench and cover his head in his arms and wait for the next one to come up.

+ Show Spoiler +

      That moment, that essence was what Yugioh was. A player unwilling to back down against any challenges, no matter how nigh insurmountable. Maybe that was why he stayed. Because to do any less would be a betrayal of whom he was and what he believed in. But in the end it was too much. After a series of personal misfortunes and the dissolution of Code A into a gigantic Up/Down Group, Yugioh had nothing left to fight for. His dream beyond reach, his kingdom shattered, Yugioh finally retired. He’s a cautionary tale of the challenges Korean players face in the pursuit of greatness.

      Some would argue that it would have been the better move to leave. They would be right. But that isn’t what the GSL is about, and that isn't what its players are about. It is the everlasting pursuit of victory, of greatness and nobody quite exemplifies that in recent times as much as Stork.



      Among the ‘Taek Bang Lee Ssang’, Stork has earned my respect the most. Jaedong had the backing of EG to fly anywhere in the world; he got numerous second place finishes and had the adoration of fans everywhere. Flash started out as one of the best players in HotS and even though he never performed in individual leagues, he was always one of the best PL players. Despite having done okay in SC2, Bisu retired and returned to BW.



      By contrast Stork had an unequivocally terrible start to his new career. He dropped from one of the greatest Brood War veterans to one of the worst players on Samsung. He went from the most beloved esport in Korea to one that had waned in popularity to the point that the lack of fans convinced Bisu to retire. He went 0-13 in PL, went winless for 268 days. Unlike Jaedong, he never got the chance to do any mass traveling. Unlike Flash, he was never the ace for his team and had worse individual league performances. But unlike Bisu, he did not retire despite having every conceivable reason. But Stork, much like Yugioh, was too stubborn to quit. In his interview with Flash and DES, Stork stated numerous times that he thought of retiring every day. But in the end he stuck with it. He had that same inner fire, that desperate desire to win that drove him to BW glory and became evident during his recent games. It showed in his PL 7 game win streak and his GSL games even as he was eliminated by TRUE.

      That is the story of the GSL, the desperate scramble as the top players in the world fight to fulfill their dreams. It is the pursuit of victory in the shadow of Mvp. It is the insane drive against all odds. It is as much about the fall of Yugioh as it is about the comeback of Stork. It is the pursuit of the dream to be the champion. To be the best. Not just for one day. Not just for one tournament. But all time. Mvp left his throne and now it waits for the next successor.



Back to Top