by DarkLordOlli

Whenever one race enjoys a period of dominance, we're naturally forced to watch the best players of that race clash a lot in tournaments. That means one thing first and foremost: mirror matches. Lots of them. During the days of GomTvT that didn't seem to be a big deal. A lot of people seemed to enjoy TvT quite a lot. Its fights for positioning, flashy moves, as well as the rare opportunity to see people actually produce Battlecruisers (successfully even!) were appreciated by many.

When the Zergs' time to shine came, spectators were first confronted with the idea of free units vs free units. While lategame ZvZ quickly became everyone's least favorite thing in the world (perhaps due to the general public's inability to tell which infested terrans belonged to each player; same applies to broodlings), some people did find enjoyment in the buildup to it. Ling/baneling knife-fights, mutalisk and roach builds, as well as eventual transitions to infestors, hydralisks or even mass banelings were oftentimes interesting to watch.

Throughout all that, the Protoss mirror had always been the odd one out. The black sheep of the family, the coinflip matchup. Cannon rushes, proxy gates, the 4gate. Everything other races hated about Protoss was multiple times as common in PvP. No wonder people hated it.

But then, when Protoss' turn came to show off their mirror matchup... it turned out that it wasn't all that bad. During 2014's blink era, PvP may have been the most played matchup in tournaments. I don't have any stats for you but it sure felt like that. And while you may have hated the state of PvT and PvZ, there were a ton of amazing PvPs played during that time. So what exactly happened? Since when is PvP not mindless 4-gating anymore?

No other matchup divides opinions as much as the Protoss mirror. Some people would rather not watch anything at all than having to endure PvP. Others (such as myself) love watching it. PvP itself reflects that phenomenon - it can produce the most awful games through luck of the coin, and it can produce incredible, highly intelligent masterpieces. The spectrum is immense. It's like a magic hat. Sometimes you reach in and pull out a beautiful flower, another time there'll be an angry rat in there that bites off a finger or two. It's all due to the cutthroat nature of PvP.

It's difficult to understand the finesse of PvP and decisions players make. I imagine that, to the casual viewer, it will oftentimes look like bland massing of units, culminating in one big fight that usually ends in a landslide victory for either side. Losing your army is a death sentence in PvP, it's almost irrelevant what happened before. Naturally, players remain rather conservative with their army movements and willingness to take fights - a bad fight is the easiest way to lose. It's all about building the right army to take the correct fight at the correct time. A struggle for perfection that can punish the slightest missteps with immediate death.




Even PvPs between some of the best players in the world can look like your everyday ladder game in NA gold league. It's a matchup we can often relate to - but that's not usually a positive thing. Seeing professional players die to the same low ground cannon rush on Yeonsu that platinum leaguers used to lose to 24/7 does feel a little wrong, right? Maybe it does. But there's a certain familiarity to it at least. And I suppose it makes it easier to take that sort of loss if people who get paid to play SCII lose to the same damn thing. At least it's not just you. It's just a stupid matchup at times.




These types of games can often feel anticlimactic. One player gets a lead early through a build order advantage, runs with it and wins the game. Perhaps he even kills the other guy right away. At least the game ends quickly in that case.
But once you look past the surface, past the laser-firing blobs, there's an extremely intelligent and systematic matchup behind it. And, you know, the occasional cannon rush.

What's important to understand is that luck-dependent build order gambling is just one approach to PvP, albeit one that's always been popular. Once the 4-gate was nerfed out of the spotlight in WoL and maps began to make a little more sense, things started to branch out. Naturally, when a new world unfolds before people's eyes, there's a lot of confusion involved. The following build order flippery probably didn't help the reputation of PvP. DT rushes, gateway all ins, blink all ins, not an expansion in sight? Yeah, I don't miss early-mid WoL PvP either. Some of its core elements still exist in modern PvP, the coinflip is definitely still a viable option to play the mirror. InCa still consistently ferries victims across the styx in a cloaked boat.

But somewhere along the way, PvP found its inner peace... or something like that. Build order choices were more and more influenced by maps, streamlined standard builds emerged and bad builds were filtered out and abandoned. What had once been a 1-base only slugfest, became a much more demanding riddle. Expansions came into play. People began thinking about lategame army compositions. It's amazingly telling that the "perfect" lategame army in PvP was only discovered slightly before the end of WoL, by a player who hadn't played the game for most of its existence. PvP was a breathing, evolving matchup throughout all of WoL until Rain finally seemed to have figured it out entirely. And by that point we were already moving on to HotS.





And then suddenly we were in HotS. The MSC entered the fray. People were 1-gate expanding. There were no low ground -> high ground warpins anymore and the 4-gate died with them. Oracles were introduced. Void rays became even more skillful. But the MSC finally gave the matchup the stability it needed to evolve. It gave players the opportunity to tech quickly, expand safely, while still being susceptible to intelligent pressure builds and all ins. No more mindless 4-gating. Now you were forced to find ways to drain MSC energy before attacking. Detection on oracles gave stargate openings much needed depth. The increase in blink research time made it much harder (but far from impossible) to kill people with blink all ins. Timewarp allowed charge/archon/immortal compositions to rival colossus armies and offered a different way to play midgame PvP. Tempests could break mass colossus armies.

Every unit has its place in HotS PvP. I have seen every single protoss unit used to great effect in the matchup. You thought carriers would never be made ever again? Think again. Storm sucks in PvP? Not anymore it doesn't! Void rays are pretty terrible, right? Maybe they're not that bad after all.
This breadth of utilizable units in different scenarios makes the matchup very dynamic and complex. It does, however, also make it more unforgiving. There's a huge amount of possibilities to consider in PvP at any point in time, often with very limited scouting information, making it that much easier to make mistakes.

Oz' famous last words will forever linger over the matchup like a cloud dripping with irony. The wizard, at that point arguably the best PvPer in the world, got his fair punishment for rebelling against the coin, as he then went on to lose every single PvP he played for weeks, months even. The coin-god deemed him unworthy and stripped him of his powers. Why? Because Oz was wrong. PvP is not all skill. The very thought that it was made Oz weak and vulnerable. He believed to have found the perfect way to play the matchup, but he was wrong. There is no perfect way to approach PvP.

Stats has learned from Oz' mistakes. He does not speak in absolutes about the matchup, because it doesn't function that way. Sometimes, as he correctly states, you have to pray. Pray to InCa, the coin-god, pray to whatever god makes the other guy move command his army. Sometimes. That very word sums up what PvP is about. It's not drawn in black and white, it's like a modern art painting that has colors splattered all over the place. An obscurity you can't figure out what on earth you're supposed to make of.

And that's supposed to be a good thing? If you're looking for action, as most of you claim to be, yes. Every second of PvP is important to the eventual outcome of the game. Even the very first. Does a probe get sent out to proxy? Does someone open with an early gateway? Single gas, double gas? Single gate, double gate? Tech before units? MSC scout? This list continues forever and ever. Protoss is an extremely fragile race and in no other matchup does the house come tumbling down as fast as it does in PvP. Each split second decision can result in a great lead, a win even, or instant death. There might not always be units firing at each other or hectically running across the map, but there's relentless action going on inside the mind.

Here's an example. In a 3-gate blink vs 3-gate oracle opener, each player can come out significantly ahead. If the blink player has his stalkers out of position to defend the first oracle and is forced to use overcharge, the oracle player is in a great spot. The blink player is forced to leave 2-3 stalkers at home to defend his mineral line and no longer has enough units to put enough pressure on the opponent to cancel an expansion. This means that the oracle player now has map control, a faster robotics facility and an early and safe expansion.

Let's rewind this scenario. The blink player deflects the first oracle without having to use overcharge. He can now move across the map and leave his mineral line empty, knowing that there is at least one overcharge available to defend it from the oracle. The stargate player is going to have trouble holding a nexus. The blink player can expand and pressure at the same time. The stargate player may even be forced to build a void ray and immortals to hold his expansion, giving the blink player ample time to tech up in the meantime. The game can swing either way extremely quickly with just that one overcharge, that one click.

That's PvP in a nutshell.

Remember herO vs sOs at IEM Katowice 2014? Godawful final, wasn't it? And yet the very same player who cheesed out herO with proxy gates to win 100k, went on to play this fantastic game just weeks later. How is that possible? It's simple, really. sOs had herO figured out. He was inside his head from the very first second. There's a difference between his proxy gates in a huge final and your most recent ladder death after all. What made sOs such a successful PvPer is that he embraced the coin when he deemed it his best chance at winning. herO had to learn the truth the hard way. He was looking to beat sOs in skill, and he paid for his insolence. One player had a certain idea of how PvP was supposed to be played, the other had an idea of how to win. PvP takes no prisoners, and neither did sOs.





You may argue that flipping coins correctly is not a skill. I disagree. It's always existed, in every game ever played. Risks and rewards spice up life and make it fun. Few matchups are as spicy as PvP. There's always a risk to take, a corner to cut. Just an example: every tech path is viable as both a 1-base build and an expand -> tech build in PvP. Every tech can be proxied. Gateways can be proxied. Goddamn natural bases can be proxied. It's not often that you find this much variety in a game where two players have the exact same tools available to them.

But if luck plays that big a role in PvP and it's so volatile, how come some players have ridiculously high winrates in it?

The answer to that is quite straight forward. Most openings in PvP have the capability of dealing with most other builds, if adapted correctly. The very best PvPers are most likely to use these sort of openings. They're the way to go if you think yourself superior. And while every build has certain weaknesses in PvP and mindgames play a huge role in picking them, staying alive until the midgame is quite possible in most games. The best of the best will find ways to use every tool at their disposal and grind their way back into a game even from disadvantages. The fact that engagements are that important in PvP means that as long as you have a good army, there's hope.

So there we finally have it: the coin is not all-powerful. It is not the only god in this anarchic matchup. The skill god - let's call him Oz for giggles - is just as important a factor. The coin may lead you in the right direction, or to the occasional fluke-win, but it will not grant you greatness or the ability to win consistently. Some people are born with amazing talent to do better than others, but if they never learn to effectively put it to good use, their natural advantage will fade and the most refined will triumph over them in the end. Such is PvP. The coin can only get you so far. The rest is hard work, finesse and execution.

Nobody can win without the skill to play without the coin if needed. The best PvPers often seek to reduce the coin's influence by choosing flexible builds that require their finesse and brilliance to tick properly. Sometimes you get neither heads nor tails. And what then? You're on your own. All skill from there, as Oz would say. In mirror builds, or builds that transition into an equal game, the better player wins. It really is that simple.

Yet the one mistake that no top-PvPer dares to make is to disregard the coin, not anymore. The coin lives at the very center of PvP and all psychological skill revolves around it. It revolves around the ability to reduce its influence by playing "safely", and to capitalize on it when needed by taking the right risks at the right time. A truly great PvPer knows that the coin is omnipresent and can never be ignored. That's why PvP has developed its very own skillset, one that's as much about understanding how to play the opponent as it is about the game itself.

At the end of the day, it's true that PvP is a good matchup now. It's exciting to watch. It's crazy, it's wild, it's all over the place. There are sprinkles of early WoL and its cheesy shenanigans and numerous pressure or all in builds off one and two bases. There are also plenty of safe and solid macro oriented openings that came with HotS. And yet there's players who have managed 70%+ winrates in the matchup. That's what makes it fascinating. Despite all the volatility that is definitely evident in PvP, there are still ways to remain on the winning side. The art of succeeding in PvP is a craft of true masters. It is the ability to eliminate the tiniest error from one's thought process, to walk the razor-thin line between cutting corners and death. The art of punishing the smallest missteps, and the art of drilling your way into an opponent's mind. To become a truly great PvPer, one must abandon all pride and ideals and focus on what's most important: winning. Sometimes that means consulting the coin, other times you'd do best to keep your hands off it.

It is the good, the bad and the ugly all in one and it is about more than raw ability. Skill-purists may hate it for that exact reason but to me it makes PvP that much more intriguing.