Group D in Review
By: Waxangel
Group D: MVPDongRaeGu, IMNesTea, MarineKingPrime, MVPGenius
Match One: DongRaeGu vs Nestea
Game One –
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The first game opened up without too much aggression on either side, so both players were able to take their naturals. DRG slipped a zergling inside Nestea's main and managed to keep it alive for quite a long time, giving him the information needed to skip a baneling nest and transition straight into roaches.
DRG decided that he would try to hit a pre-lair timing with his roaches, but it turned out to be a poor move. Nestea had built several spine crawlers as he teched up to lair and mutalisks, and survived the attack from DRG easily. Instead of trying to make anti air and play the game out normally, DRG gathered himself for huge roach-bane all-in attack.
DRG did a decent amount of damage, but it wasn't enough. Nestea cleaned up the attack with mutalisks and went to counter attack, and there was nothing left for DRG to do but GG.
Winner: Nestea
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Some early ling-bane aggression on both sides failed to have a big effect, so the game went onto the mid-game with DRG choosing to control the map with mutalisks while Nestea preferred to stay on the ground. DongRaeGu's mutalisk choice allowed him to get a faster third base, and he would stay up an expansion for most of the game. Despite this, Nestea never seemed to be limited by his resource gathering; it was his lack of finesse that lost him the game. Throughout the game, DRG and Nestea clashed with roach-infestor multiple times, but Nestea always seemed to be the player who was being less efficient. This stacked up for a while, until it produced a DRG victory.
Winner: DRG
Game Three – 4.5/5
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Well, this game was awesome. For the sake of thoroughness, here's a brief run through, but it really doesn't do it justice.
Nestea looked completely dead after his 10 pool speedling all-in failed, but somehow reversed the position by doing a second ling-bane all-in that killed DRG's main hatchery.
Move a few minutes ahead, and it looked like DRG was totally dead to Nestea's mutalisk+roach attack that denied his third and left him a base down... but then he came back with a suicide burrow infestor attack on Nestea's third that somehow ended up being worth it, despite the loss of six or so infestors.
A few more minutes forward, the two players were taking central expansions opposite of each other, settling in for a huge roach infestor battle. However, Nestea ends up making a crucial mistake, and...
Winner: DRG
Match Two: Genius vs MarineKing
Game One – 2/5
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MKP threw his opponent a curveball to open the set, doing a reactor-FE into a rarely seen TvP mech build. As for Genius, he played fairly standard, but made the choice to skip his robo to go for faster upgrades and twilight tech.
This left him in the dark until MKP made his first push with marines, tanks, and hellions – but Genius didn't have to worry. At least, not at first. Genius attacked the mech ball at the perfect timing, while hellions were too far out ahead, and marines were in prime positions to be force-fielded. The attack was crushed and it looked like Genius was in the lead.
However, MKP did one crucial thing during the battle, which was the rally four hellions straight into Genius' main. Genius didn't bother to attend to his mineral line during the battle, and as a result, lost 22 probes.
Things went downhill from there for Genius. MKP had but to keep the pressure on Genius as he expanded more and more, and there was nothing Genius could do about it. He was barely had the economy to squeeze out new armies to stop the waves of mech troops, and couldn't expand or stop any expansions. Eventually MKP just got too big, and Genius GG'd out.
Winner: MKP
Game Two – 2/5
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MKP got away with a greedy triple orbital build, while Genius was left doing a very standard FE into 3-gate robo. The advantage materialized for MKP in a bigger army, which he used to stay safe and continue to expand with almost complete impunity.
With a massive income, MKP was able to fight at will, drop at will, and pretty much do anything without fear of being unable to replace any troops he lost. In the meanwhile, Genius was in the business of preserving his army and trying to build a deathball, which led him to avoid risky engagements and prevented him from putting any pressure on his opponent.
The game eventually ended with Genius having done barely anything but stay on his side of the map, with MKP wearing him down with attacks and drops until he forced a desperation battle towards the end, which MKP inevitably won.
Winner: MKP
Game Three – 3.5/5
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Winners' Match:
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Game One – 2.5/5
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MKP decided he would do a mech build, but with an added twist. Instead of just poking around with blue-flame hellions to see if there were free drone kills to be had, he added two tank-mode tanks and hit a very cute hellion+tank timing to pressure DRG's front. Fortunately for DRG, he lived up to his reputation as the master of defense and used his queens and zerglings to hold off the attack.
Back at home, MKP had finished a third command center and was settling in to turtle and mass up troops again. However, DRG was able to hit a timing while MKP had spread his troops too thinly across three bases, and disrupted MKP's army and economy with scattered mutalisk and zergling attacks. This gave DongRaeGu the breathing space he needed to secure five bases on his side of the map, and complete his infrastructure for pumping non-stop zerglings, roaches, and banelings in anticipation of the upcoming battle.
MKP moved out with a large group of thors and hellions once he was near maxed, initiating a battle that would decide the game. However, even before the battle started, DRG left MKP a gift by rolling banelings into his unprotected third and wiping out a ton of SCVs.
In the main battle, DongRaeGu's forces crushed through MKP's mech army and was able to immediately give chase. With the core of his army destroyed and his economy hurt, MKP could not rebuild fast enough to stop the continuing onslaught of roaches that kept streaming towards his base, and GG'd out.
Winner: DRG
Game Two – 3.5/5
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With not much of interest happening in the early game, the game went almost straight to a late game showdown.
Seeing MKP take his third base quickly, DRG looked a step ahead and decided to prepare for the next phase of the game. While he swatted away MKP's occasional attempts to drop, DRG got busy securing additional bases for himself while preparing to deny MKP's eventual attempt to take a center base.
In a way, DRG was trying to turn the tables of TvZ on Antiga, making it the Terran's struggle to hold a fourth base, not the Zerg's. DRG spread his creep all the way past the center, and even set up crawlers on the central hill overlooking MKP's future base.
An intense tug of war ensued over the center of the map, with MKP successfully getting down a planetary fortress. However, his mining was disrupted constantly, with brood lords continuing to fire down from above. In the end, MKP could not get the right combination of vikings, tanks, and marines together to push DRG back. DRG surged forward with an army of brood lords, infestors, zerglings, and banelings, controlling each separate component skillfully to dislodge MKP from the center and swarm over the Terran army.
Winner: DRG
Game Three – 4.5/5
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Losers' Match:
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Game One – 1.5/5
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Genius decided to simplify ZvP to its simplest for Nestea in the first game: defend or die. A strong gateway + void ray timing came after a forge FE, and Nestea needed all his wiles to stop it. In the end, Nestea had just enough units, good positioning, and a clutch burrow upgrade, which allowed him to hold off Genius' attack. Genius was doomed after his failed all-in timing, and fell to waves of Nestea's units soon after.
Winner: Nestea
Game Two – 2/5
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Nestea opened up with a 6-pool build, which quickly put an end to Genius' plan to forge FE. However, Genius did manage to scout Nestea early enough to prepare – building a cannon in his main and proceeding to do standard one base play. The game played out with Genius going for a safe 3-gate expansion, while Nestea droned up and took his natural.
From there, Nestea's plan was to go for a mass mutalisk build off two bases, even getting two spires for upgrades. However, Genius caught drift of the plan through good stargate unit aggression, which stopped Nestea from taking his third while scouting out the two building spires.
Knowing Nestea's gameplan, Genius adjusted brilliantly. He stayed on two base, massed gateway units, and continued to pump phoenixes from one stargate. Instead of taking any risks, Genius simply stayed on two bases while constantly denying Nestea from taking his third base, happy to stay in a two base vs two base situation.
The crucial moment of the game came when Nestea tried to backdoor Genius with mutalisks before he had noticed Genius' heavy commitment to phoenixes, which ended in a mutalisk massacre. Nestea had no ability to pressure Genius after that, and ended up being holed in his base.
With both players on two base, it wasn't hard for Genius to eventaully build up a force that allowed him to crash into Nestea's natural head on and take the game.
Winner: Genius
Game Three – 3.5/5
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Genius decided to play Bel'Shir winter safe and slow, going for a forge FE with stargate pressure, while building enough troops to safely move out to his third base. Nestea played a fairly normal game as well, taking his three bases and pumping out a large ground army while teching up to mutalisks.
The first big aggressive move of the game came as Genius' third nexus was about to complete. Nestea had a large force of roaches and lings at the ready, and decided to try and deny the expansion. He did not have the army to defeat Genius head-on, however, and he ended up having to sacrifice a considerable number of his roaches in a diversionary, suicide engagement while a different part of his army went and destroyed the Nexus.
In the aftermath, Nestea opened himself up to a massive counter-attack by Genius' combined forces, which forced him to yield his third base. Nestea tried to backdoor with his newly produced mutalisks in the meanwhile, but Genius simply returned his phoenixes to help defend.
The game turned into one similar to the second game, where both players sat on two bases, but Genius had high DPSs, high tech troops against Nestea's more fragile army. The game only favored Genius the more they progressed in that state, and he was eventually able to overpower Nestea and take the game.
Winner: Genius
Final Match:
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Game One – 1.5/5
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Genius opened with a 4-gate opener, which he managed to disguise as a 1-gate FE. On the other hand, MKP went for a reactor-tech lab 2-rax build.
By luck or design, MKP pushed out at just the right time to catch Genius' forward warp-in pylon, and the four canceled warp-ins alerted him to Genius' plan. After killing the pylon, MKP pulled a ton of his SCVs and decided he would punish Genius with an all-in of his own. The attack went according to plan for MKP, and he took the first game with ease.
Winner: MKP
Game Two – 2/5
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MKP followed his FE with a 5-rax marine follow-up, but with decent defense on Genius' side it ended up being a wash. In the aftermath, MKP stayed infantry heavy while taking a fast third base, while Genius stayed on two base and focused on building a stronger army.
Genius found a great timing to attack once he had four colossi and blink stalkers, as MKP had yet to fully get his three-base war machine working. MKP made the mistake of engaging too early, and too close to the Protoss base, when waiting for more vikings might have been a better choice. Instead, Genius was able to easily shoot down the few vikings on the field, while the colossi made short work for the Terran infantry. Having lost barely anything, Genius rolled all the way to MKP's base and finished his opponent off.
Winner: Genius
Game Three – 3.5/5
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MKP dug up an old build for the game on Dual Sight, following his FE with a 3-rax ghost timing. Genius managed to catch whiff of it with his observer, however, and showed the kind of good unit spreading that made the EMP rush go out of fashion.
Genius followed his good defense by teching for colossi, going for a similar colossi based deathball play from the first game. This time around, MKP did not get into any bad engagements in the field, and conservatively set about amassing a large army as well.
The match resembled a stare-down after that point, with both players hauling giant armies around the map, unwilling to risk a bad engagement that would be a one way ticket to Code A. Expansions were taken with the utmost care, as overextension could easily mean one's downfall.
In the end, Genius' correct evaluation of the deathball engagement as the single most important part of the game allowed him to emerge victorious. MKP walked in to attack Genius' third base, which Genius had the choice of trying to defend. However, Genius saw the the terrain of his base was slightly disadvantageous, and simply let MKP raze a base for free. While MKP was attacking his base, Genius repositioned his army so it could fight at a slightly better position, and decided to initiate combat there,
Everything worked out perfectly for Genius, and he was able to bring his full firepower to bear in an optimal way. He won the battle by a huge margin, continued into MKP's main, and received the GG.
Winner: Genius
Notes and Comments
4
With Genius getting through in the final game, we now have four Protoss players in the round of eight. The last time that happened was during the GSL World Championship in April, back when warp-gate upgrade came free with your cybernetics core, and psi storm could be cast directly onto the map for the cost of 50/150.
Balance has been a hot topic in the Korean community as of late, with players claiming that Protoss is just too strong. So far, Protoss players have been able to fight back by asking when the last time anyone's seen a Protoss player in a GSL final. They may need a new excuse, very soon.
3
Three players were the faces of their races in 2011: Mvp, Nestea, and MC. By the second month of 2012, two of them have been replaced. Only MC remains, and his position is in tremendous danger as well. He already averted a crisis in the second half of 2011, where he went through a terrible slump. Then, no challenger emerged to take MC's place, and he survived. Though MC has fought his way back into relevance in 2012, he is facing three real challengers to the Protoss crown in this GSL. Come the round of eight, we'll see who's the real Protoss President of 2012.
2
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new #2 player in the world. I'm not exactly sure who it was before (MVP?), but that doesn't really matter. DongRaeGu defeated Nestea in an amazing duel, making Starcraft II's elder stateman look like he was just a mental step too slow to keep up with the new generation. Then, DRG went to outclass the TvZ icon MKP in an outstanding display of skill (wouldn't have been a surprise to most people if King of Kongs hadn't been a pay only event). In recent months, no one else has shown the combined ability to dominate so many opponents of different races and styles. No one, except MMA. Look at the brackets, Starcraft II fans. You know where this is headed.
1
In November of 2010, Nestea became the best Zerg player in the world. A year and two months later, his era has finally come to a close. Arguably, DRG had already been the better player for a few months – he was beating better opponents in a more convincing fashion, while Nestea was living off the benefit of the doubt. You could see that Nestea just wasn't the same. He didn't have the same sense of control over the game as he had before, and that his mechanics were just not as good as some of the newer players.
However, he had been such a storied champion, and such a loved one that we could not bear to see him go. We removed doubt from our minds, and prayed that he would come back the way we remembered him. He could not have stepped down peacefully, not even if he had tried. We wouldn't have let him.
Perhaps it was his final act of benevolence unto his Zerg subjects, that Nestea invited DongRaeGu into his group. Times had changed, and Zerg needed a new hero – one not weary from over a decade of fighting, one who had yet to feel the first touch of complacency – to carry it forward. But Zerg demanded that its champion be chosen through a trial by blood...
DongRaeGu, take your crown.
Art by Fishuu
Following Losira-Cat's elimination from Code A, we are looking for a suitable replacement.
Writer: Waxangel.
Graphics and Art: Meko and Pony Tales (disciple and Lip the Pencilboy).
Editor: Waxangel