Greatest Rivalries of All Time: Life vs Dream - Total War

This will be the start of an ongoing series of articles that will detail the greatest rivalries in the SC2 scene. What makes a rivalry is fairly subjective, but for the most part it is two players whose stories, careers or games intersect in an incredibly interesting way whether it be parallel stories, conflicting personalities, competing ideologies or incredible gameplay. While there have been many classical rivalries like MMA vs DRG, Thorzain vs Naniwa, Polt vs Stephano, for the first part I will focus on the most recent rivalry to have come onto the scene: Life vs Dream.

Back in the Greatest Players of All Time I posited that we were entering a new era of SC2. That we were entering an era where Life no longer had rivals. Mvp had succumbed to his injuries years ago. Leenock could never find his form to challenge Life again. Taeja had essentially gone dormant since his last outing at Blizzcon. I posited that it would be Life vs the world, Life against the greatest players of this era. Players like: Maru, Flash, Innovation, soO, Zest, herO, Parting. Yet strangely the man who has given Life the most trouble in 2015 is not on that list. He is not a champion. He is not a God. He is not fighting to be the indisputable best in the world, much less a spot on the List of Greatest Players ever. Yet among all the rival clamoring to tear Life down, he has been the only one to do it twice. In SSL Season 1 he took Life to the brink and clutched out a bo7 victory over the Best Player on Earth. In SSL Season 2 he once more clutched a bo5 against Life. He is Dream.

Yet this is not a battle of ego. This is not a battle for glory. This is not a battle to see who is the best player on Earth (because despite his losses to Dream, Life is still very much the best bar none). This is a battle of ideologies, a battle on what it means to play TvZ, a battle for the soul of TvZ, a matchup that is one of the pillars of SC2. It is a battle between two players who as of this moment epitomize the greatest ZvT and the greatest TvZ in SC2.

How Life Finds a Way

The phrase “Life finds a way” is often used as a comment as to Life’s seemingly inexplicable ability to win any match off of a counter-attack that looks to have blind-sided his opponent at the best possible moment (for Life) and the worst possible moment for his enemy. Yet counter-attacking is not something new and even after the advent of Life, multiple players have included it in their repertoire of weapons to use in any given match. So what makes Life different, what makes him special, what makes him better than the rest?

To understand what Life is doing, first you need to understand what modern ZvT boils down to. Zerg tries to defend off early game harass to get to the 4 base economy. Terran wants to deny this 4 base economy and have a choice to either parade push off of 3 or 4 bases. If Zerg defends, they overrun the Terran. If Terran breaks the fourth without significant losses, he will continually grind down the Zerg to death.

Now then, take a look at these three games:

Life vs Taeja (Blizzcon g2) + Show Spoiler +
Life vs Innovation (GSL S1 2015 ro8) + Show Spoiler +
Life vs Maru (Taipei Finals g6) + Show Spoiler +

All three Terrans were near the top of their game. All three are stylistically very different. Taeja is the defensive Terran who does not take an engagement he cannot win (unless he has no other choice). He uses his superior game sense and decision making to find holes in his opponent's plays and attacks any weakness he can see. Innovation is the best standard mechanical Terran of the three and was the best at doing the massive parade push styles. Maru is the most similar to Life. They both often do weird openers that later turn into a standard game if things go wrong. Where they differ is that Life can do this because of game sense, map awareness and micro. Maru can get by on weird openers because he has the best sense of aggressive engagement of anyone in the world combined with micro and an insane decisiveness that no other player can match.

Yet in these three games, Life outdoes them all in a surprisingly similar way despite how completely different all three games were. All three games were decided by Life’s constant counter attacks against all three players. The player that fared best was Taeja, but when Taeja was forced to multitask too much, he collapsed. Against Innovation, Life was able to make it back into the game off of Innovation’s propensity to always push. After crushing that push, Life picked Innovation apart as he hit from multiple angles, killing transfering scvs, killing his army, then counter attacking while half of Innovation’s forces are out on the map dropping. Against Maru, Life held on with his ground forces while his Mutas ravaged Maru’ economy leaving Maru with no choice but to micro or die. And even with the best micro of the Terran race, it wasn’t enough and he too was swept in the way of Life.

Looking at these three games gives you a clear understanding of what “Life finds a way” means. Life can (and has) normally crushed his Terran opponents with standard Zerg play where they just swarm over the first push and run it all the way home. However what makes Life so scary is the fact that he has the best sense of where and when to counter attack or fly in with Mutas for harassment. All of his counter-attacks are directly correlated with what I call links in the game. It is those split seconds where you are transitioning from point to point in game. Where you move scvs to the third, your army to the map, where your eyes are looking at your army and he attacks your natural, where your eyes go back to the natural and he's in your main, where you look at your main and your army is dead. Many Zergs have tried to copy this kind of mass counter-attack style and some have had some good success with it, but none can emulate the refinement that Life has with his army movements and constant harassment attacks. That is what makes Life special. And combined with his incredible composure, adaptability, varied and wild build orders and strategies and you start to see why he has become the best player in SC2.

What a Dream is Made of

It would be a mistake to think of Dream as an overnight success story. He has been playing this game since nearly the beginning when he joined Team MVP in 2010. Much like Maru, he spent almost his entire WoL career and just as how Maru has been inexplicably influenced by Prime, Dream has been inexplicably influenced by his time in MVP.
To understand what exactly it is Dream does, you have to look at his game as a whole, just as any player. Yet Dream has been for most of his career, a complete non-factor. In fact before 2015 you could count the number of series where he played at this level in 2015 on one hand. So for now, I’ve chosen exactly three games to show you what Dream’s version of SC2 is:

Dream vs Parting IEM Katowice Semi-finals 2013 + Show Spoiler +
Dream vs Flash g3 + Show Spoiler +
Dream vs Scarlett ATC + Show Spoiler +

Despite being in three different matchups (and the first being in the first expansion), if you watch all three games, Dream’s style starts to become very clear. He isn’t doing wild builds like Maru, he isn’t doing this perfectly refined mechanical style of Terran like Innovation. Who he resembles most among the Terran elites is actually Taeja. Dream has this incredible style where he spreads his army to its very limits to the point where they can cover the most area possible, but still collapse and fight together if the other player takes a head-on engagement. He is constantly aware of the enemy's army, what they can do, what they can’t and how that impacts the entire map.

Take for example this Dream vs Parting game. In that game Dream is constantly scanning ahead of his army and around his army for potential backstabs and flanking HTs (something Parting was notorious for in WoL, but died out because of the death of chargelot/archon and the induction of the speedivac). Parting was able to get an expo top left without contestation. Dream accidentally scouts it when he scans the high ground for HTs. He realizes instantly that he cannot do anything about it. If he send 1-2 drops, a zealot warp-in and the HTs will clean it up. If he send more, he cedes map presence and Parting get the choice of either cleaning up a large chunk of his army that committed there or counter attack and possibly win the game. Instead what Dream does is cut off all chance of Parting accessing this base with his probes by cutting off his probe transfer. At the same time he pressures Parting’s natural 4th while constantly taking fights that slowly chip away at Parting’s army. Eventually the hidden expo that should have benefitted Parting has become a liability as he slowly runs out of chargelots and Dream closes the game with his multitask and control.

He does that in a similar fashion to Flash. In their recent game Flash turtled heavy on mech on 2 base. Dream in turn takes the entire map creating a 270 degree blockade on Flash’s territory. He sends a large faction of his army to the natural 3rd of Flash knowing that is the area Flash wants to expand. Flash scans this, realizes he cannot break and is forced to take the upper 3rd. This is exactly what Dream wants. He regroups hi army, spreads them into a massive concave and wins the game.

The most telling of Dream’s style was his game against Scarlett at ATC. Both were on from that tournament and both put on a slug fest on Red City. In that game there a few things to note. First is Dream’s constant scanning ahead. He makes sure his army is never out of position (and simultaneously clears out possible baneling mines). Second was his incredible positional play. Dream used his multitasking to constantly drop Scarlett. What makes his drop play amazing is that almost every drop he used serves a double or triple purpose. It either pulls Scarlett back from dealing a possible death blow to his army, creates another drop oppurtunity on the opposite side of the map and allows Dream the time to run forward with his army unopposed and kill the creep and Scarlett’s attempts to respread the creep.

Looking at his games as a whole, you start to see a clear vision of what Dream thinks is the optimal way to play SC2. Backed by his mechanics, multitask and reactions, Dream uses his micro, macro and map awareness to take control of the map. For Dream SC2 is a fight on every front. It is a battle between the units, a battle of production, a battle of multitask, a battle for every economics and a battle of position.

Bonus Game: The Origin of Dream - Dream vs Rain + Show Spoiler +

Head-to-Head: Life vs Dream

So what happens when a player that fights everywhere goes head to head with a player that sees everything? You end up with some of the most explosive games of SC2 in 2015. You see games where the utmost limit of their skills is put the very test as even the smallest details can mean the difference between victory and defeat.

In 2015, Life and Dream have faced off three times total. Once in the SSL Season 1 Semi-finals, once in Kespa Cup and once in S2SL quarters. Each of the series were littered with a lot of mind-games, reactions, adaptations and build order wins or losses on each side. Yet despite that there were a few games between them that went beyond the normal. That went straight into some of the greatest games played in 2015 so far. In these games, their ideologies, their skills, their very selves clashed in a battle that left both grasping for every ounce of skill, thought and tenacity. They were:

Life vs Dream g6 SSL Season 1 Semi-Finals + Show Spoiler +
Life vs Dream g5 S2SL Quarter Finals + Show Spoiler +

In game 6, Dream was down three to two. While he had put up some fight, he had yet to prove to anyone that he was truly on the level of Life. After failing with some marine medivac hellbat pressure, Life counterattacked and nearly won the game. The rest of the game was an uphill battle and a raw display of Dream’s micro as he perfectly burrowed and unburrowed mines to make sure they didn’t go off on his own units. No medviac was left unattended. His marine splits were so good that the largest group of marines he lost this entire game was 3. In a game where he was down to 2 marines and a viking, if he had split any worse he’d have instantly lost.

Yet the most amazing thing wasn’t Dream’s micro (which at this point was possibly the best ever seen in TvZ), but what he did after. He bluffed Life into not attacking. He lifted 8 of his 10 marines in a medivac and flew them across the map. Life was getting ready to bust him again, but decided after multiple attempts at killing Dream, that Dream could hold and decided to clean up the drop. This drop did almost nothing, but it literally kept Dream alive. Even crazier, on the verge of death, Dream had the composure to upgrade +2 with a massive army at his front door realizing that should he survive with his bluff, he would eventually need the upgrade advantage if he wanted any chance to win this game.

The most amazing thing about this game was that Life after multiple unsuccessful busts eventually reverted back to his style of mass counter attacking, yet Dream was completely unfazed. His units are always in the perfect position to ward off his mutas, he already has units in position to stop any ling counter runbys (which did happen) while at the same time Dream attacks with the rest of his force abusing the fact that Life completely skipped creep spread (probably in the assumption he had already won the game). By the time the attack hits, Life is forced to bring the Mutas back to defend, his counter-attack lings are dead and while he holds, the rest of the units that were defending the weak positions of Life area nearly on his doorstep. Dream in this game (and in his future games) against Life always reacts to the situation at hand depending on when and where the units are and can instantly switch between defence and offence at a drop of a hat. Dream eventually won the series with another stellar performance where Life looked even less able to deal with Dream’s incredible deflection of his constant harassment.

Their latest and greatest encounter was in g5 of the S2SL quarter-finals. In that game, Life was no longer under any illusions as to what the supposed skill level of his opponent was. So going into the game, Life in a rare show of respect went for the safe roach opener into a standard 4 base build. After a massive 4 base attack that Dream barely holds with micro and his incredible reaction speed to bring back his drop of 4 widow mines to flank the attack, the game truly begins.
It is then that we see the eternal fight of Life and Dream. When Life is on form, when Life is at his best, his units are everywhere swarming the Terran and attacking at every weak spot of his defence. A Terran moves out and lings attack the 4th, the mutas go into the natural, the main, into the third, back into the main, and at the same time he attacks the third with lings while the army is surrounded and he wins the game. But this time Life met his match as Dream. Dream moved out and lings attack the 3rd, but Dream’s units are already back, lings attack the fourth, but Dream had already left behind units to deflect this possibility, Life’s mutas go into the natural and main but are chased down by a small squad of marines and a thorship. He tries to kill Dream’s 3rd with lings and mutas, but Dream lifts the cc, repairs it with scvs and gets his army there in time to kill the lings and force off the mutas.

And a second before all of the defense is over, Dream is already moving onto the offence. There is a drop on the left side of the map, all of Dream’s units that were in positions to defend Life’s counters all go down to attack, and again they have an insane fight that leaves Life defending. This dance, this fight, this constant counter attack and defence and drop and attack and defense and attack and counter and drop continued for the rest of the game as every time it looked like Life may have finally found a weak spot to exploit, Dream was already there either defending, moving in with a thordrop, or emergency repairing his orbitals with scvs, evacuating scvs before the lings even had the chance to kill one. Every time Life was deflected, Dream took that chance to move all troops forward to attack. Life would pull everything together and use every trick he had to beat back Dream and the dance would start anew. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of Dream’s play was that he almost never moved his army as a deathball. He has always in some way tried to keep his army spread out in a large concave, even when moving from side to side on the map, which naturally zones much more area and was critical in numerous engagements that denied Life the chance to counter attack and win the game.

It is in games like these that you can so the real beauty of SC2. Tournament production is important. Crowds are important. History is important. Personality is important. Storylines are important. But every once in a while you get a game a series a battle of two players that can make you forget everything. EternalEnvy once said that the greatest moments in his career were when he forgot everything. When he was in a zone where he was doing everything he could to win a game. Where the outside world ceased to exist. The tournament, the audience, the pressure of winning or losing, his team, whoever he was playing, nothing but the game itself. And when you win in that moment, the world comes crashing back in, that is the greatest moment. For Dream, this was such a moment. After winning in the greatest game of his life against the greatest player in the world, he took off his headphones and walked out of his booth and let the Korean crowds chants wash over him as they chanted his name “Cho Joong Hyuk! Cho Joong Hyuk!Cho Joong Hyuk!”

The Great Rivalry of 2015

Games likes this are rare not just in SC2, but in any game. There are sloppy back and forth slobber knockers. There are games where the players take turns throwing the lead or advantage. There are games with incredible execution and games where a player is forced to create an insane comeback. There are games that are decided by either an insane build order or an insane mind game. And then there are games like this. Games where the full potential and skill of both players are on display only because they are playing each other. If Life is playing any other player, his insane counter attack style eventually finds a way to win the game. If Dream is playing any other player, his initial parades pushes and micro crush the other Zerg. It is only when these two play against each other that you see the full potential of not just both players, but the potential of TvZ. When these two play at their best, when they are forced to take it to the long game, you see the epitome of everything that has come before them. Life is an amalgamation of every Zerg before him combined with his own style. He has the mechanics of DRG, the defense of Soulkey, the reactiveness of soO mixed in with his insane counter-attack style, decisiveness and killer instinct. Dream is the final form of Bio TvZ. He has the strategic vision of Ryung, the incredible defense and game sense of Taeja, the micro of a prime MarineKing, the incredible offence of a 2013 Innovation. When these two fight, we are seeing the final evolution of TvZ. The combinations and skills of all the strategy and skill of 5 years of play in one game. Where they fight no every front, on every side of the map, in both offense and defense, in large deathball fights and multiple fronts, in every individual skirmish and every economical decision.

I posited earlier that I believed we were entering a phase of SC2 where Life’s rival was the world itself. That it would be him against the greatest Champions or players of the dy, Players like Maru, herO, Flash, Innovation, Parting, Zest and soO. Yet the player who came to challenge Life in the domain was none of them. It was Dream. And it was not for the dominion of the world, the victory or a championship, or the desire to be the greatest on Earth. It was from the desire of two players to play the best possible Starcraft in their best possible styles, in the perfect expression of who they were as players in one perfect game. In this one moment, in this one matchup, Life and Dream may have found their strongest rivals in each other. Only Dream can push Life to his limits and show you how Godly Life really is. Only Life can push Dream so far and show you how amazing a player Dream truly is.

Life may always finds a way, but sometimes a Dream can be larger than Life itself.

Photo Credits: R1ch, Silverfire, GOM
Writer: stuchiu
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