In the mind of a Pro Protoss player : StarCraft goes online edition
Special thanks to my team RaiseYourEdge, whose support can’t be understated
The last time I did one of these in 2019 ( VINTAGE MEMES ) it was fairly well received and now is the time to do another one because I somehow had ok result this year and I felt like doing a personnal recap to a weird and unique competitive year of Starcraft.
I will go over what how my year went like, what went inside my head before and during my matches, and how Protoss evolved over the year.
Hope you guys enjoy !
You guys remember offline events ? I ‘member
Let’s go back all the way to the beginning of the year. Covid “happened” right in the middle of IEM, with a last minute decision of no live audience allowed, which funnily enough was pretty unpopular back then, it was still just a virus from China after all, and that’s very far away !
Before IEM I spent a month in Korea, practiced really hard against queen march all-ins, 2–0ed dark in the qualifier of the GSL super tournament to get crushed again in the rematch by a12 pool and a queen march all-in. I then didn’t get the result I wanted in IEM, losing to Bunny and Harstem, but it’s not my fault all I did in korea was practice against queen All-ins !
It then became quickly clear that nothing would happen for the next few months, as ESL; and the world; was trying to figure out how to adapt to Covid spreading trough Europe. I remember being very sad that DreamHack Valencia got canceled, they know how to party there.
So I practiced really hard everyday because I knew how important the first tournament of the year is, and I knew that those who stayed true to the path would reap the rewards.
Ahah just kidding, I spent two months playing an MMO with friends and got a girlfriend, not the most sc2 results oriented actions, but looking it was by far my favorite time of the year. It was a very good MMO.
Eventually our lord and Savior Apollo cooked up something real good, big online Dreamhacks, eight players groups, tons of games, double elimination bracket. Oh boy was it exciting ! You have to remember, a progamer favorite activity is to complain about bracket luck, with eight men group surely it would be much easier and less stressful right ?
I love Summer, there’s no Zerg in Summer
This group would have been absolutely incredible if I wasn’t horrible at PvT, so I actually wasn’t that confident. I had one good thing going for me tho, I was playing the weaker opponents first, so I had time to prepare and learn PvT AND also to adapt to a PvP metagame that wasn’t figured out, since it was right after the battery overcharge change. Looking back, both were actually pretty interesting.
Something that I vividly remember is that Protoss really overperformed in PvT at IEM katowice. With Cybercore first being the tip of the spear of great book of Protoss Bullshit, it was the lesser known innovation of that tournament, overshadowed by the adept build in PvZ. In europe we knew korean liked core first but we just didn’t believe in it until then.
I never was a big fan but I knew I had to learn, and on top of that we had the nuclear battery ! Making 66 probes and hiding behind a battery was already my bread and butter back then, and I was very excited at the idea of being even greedier.
All I needed was a direction, and I fell in love with how Stats approached Blink in PvT.
If you go way back, when the raven could disable for 50 energy, you might remember Blink into colossus being a thing that was tried back then, I recall studying Stats but good god was the build the opposite of appealing. You needed the game to go absolutely perfect for you to survive, especially in a meta that was back then all about small maps and raven tank pushes.
The way you would hold the push with blink was making exactly 4 stalkers, pick off a LOT of marines on the way and you should would rush gates and exactly one templar on a low probe count and you better believe that this templar needed to get that feedback off. Then if you macroed and microed perfect and got the feedback, MAYBE you could hold.
But then, Vs the exact same push, the method completely changed overnight thanks to a nice little trick that was discovered and a *small* balance change
It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s SUPAAAA BATTERY
You guessed it, you knew it was coming, after all is said and done, the SINGLE most important change to Protoss in 2020 was the Super Battery. Initially made to change PvP for the better (Proxy robo was the ennemy number 1), this new feature of the protoss nexus drastically changed how you play all stages of both PvP and PvT (and surprinsingly little in PvZ, all it did was kill diversity a bit since some really early zerg all-ins just died, but good riddance)
So to go back to PvT (we’ll talk about PvP later), the supa battery just made blink so incredibly attractive. Back in the old metagame that was a lot more 2 base centric from Terran, I gravitated towards robo, way worse vs harass and multitask, but vs that tank push I just mentionned, you had so many more units it wasn’t even funny.
But it became very clear after a couple of practice game that the battery could overpower the difference of fire power of any kind of one dimensional pushes from Terran that was trying to kill you on the spot.
AND THAT NOT ALL, because Stats, the genius that he is, realised that you could build a battery in your MINERAL LINE at the beginning of the game so that the reaper DOESNT KILL YOUR PROBES. But wait a minute, why would spending 100 mineral so early in the game be good ?
Here’s what we learned from IEM Katowice, adept fast = delayed command center. So then the Terran really worked on getting their command center as fast as possible.
Terran wants it at 1:40, Protoss wants to delay it with his probe for as long as possible, depending on the map, even a 5 second delay can mean that the adept will arrive in time to threaten to kill the scv building the command center right before it finishes. However that is only true if the adept leaves immediately after coming out of the gate ! And what happens until the 2nd gateway units comes out ? The reaper kills all your probes, unless you have, you guessed it, a battery.
So yea, the battery in the mineral line made the early game incredibly consistent and scarier for Terran since they needed to always assume there could be a battery with their reaper, so the standard play became going BACK with the reaper and somewhat kiting the adept while it’s on its way, because otherwise the CC just gets delayed too easily, as we’ve seen happen many times in Katowice.
The only downside of this is you’re easy to scout, since you can’t wall if the pylon is in the mineral line, but for a while, it seemed like blink was the god given opening that I could spam everygame until the end of time, an opening that could perfectly defend harass, punish it, and smoothly go into a macro game with an economic lead.
Since I was playing the two weakest Terran first, the plan was to only play Robo in my first two matches against Ziggy and Bratok to then surprise Heromarine and uThermal with my newly learned blink build. It wasn’t that great of a plan, since robo and passive blink is pretty much the same thing for Terran as far as they’re concerned, but hey it was better than nothing !
Better than nothing turned out to be not so great, I lost to Gabe 1–2 and uThermal; in typical uThermal fashion; killed me before I could do what I wanted to do.
It looked like to advance I would need to be smarter in the other match-up, PvP. We’ll come back to PvT later don’t worry, but before that we have to talk about the match where the other guy also has a super battery.
NUCLEAR BATTERY X 2 = COLD WAR TIME BABY
Boy oh Boy do I find how PvP changed fascinating. Let’s go all the way back and remember what it was like before the change. Just like rock paper scissor you pretty much had 3 options : Going proxy robo, going anti proxy robo strat, and pretending proxy robo didn’t exist.
To my own surprise I actually was pretty confident near the end of this metagame, I felt very solid in macro, macro as in games that weren’t proxy robo and usually ended with the one that had the better early game A moving with +2 attack. I was very good at that, especially with robo macro where I felt like I had the early game mapped out very well vs stargate, blink, and especially the mirror. I just had to mix in my favorite build of all time in PvP, the 3 gate stalker presure, to deal with any weird stuff that wasn’t a safe expand, proxy robo included (back in the days in 2016 you did this off 2 gate and I called it the anti bullshit build).
My first experience with PvP and the nuclear battery was during an online tournament, where I played Zest (and Serral ) in PvP twice in bo5 barely after the change went live and it was very clear we both had very little idea how to adapt, so we had to think on the fly.
Funnily enough that last game on deathaura was a proxy robo by Zest that killed me really quickly.
However, it wasn’t that game that caught my interest, it was the one on pillars of gold in the second bo5. Zest played a blink opener while taking an early third on 3 gases, and dealt very well with my 2 base attack. I was convinced that this was the future. Blink was always on the brink of being viable, but it just lacked the firepower to deal with dedicated all-ins, and now that it wasn’t the case I was confident (and very sad) that I should abandon literaly everything I played in PvP to learn blink again. It turned out to be a great decision, and I feel like I was ahead on the metagame compared to my pears in practice since I was winning a lot, so I was feeling fairly confident in my matches. My first opponent was Shadown, a rather tricky player.
I wanted to hide my newly found discoveries so in the first game I went for a Stalker/Sentry opening like everygame I played in 2019. After losing to a prepared counter to what I showed and NOT what I was hiding I decided to wisen up and play proper for the next two games. I failed to do so in game 3 after a fake canon rush fried my brain and made me think going adept speed presure was a good idea but I got lucky and it worked, phew.
Next up was gerald, I was the clear favorite back then as gerald was still an up and comer and I was fairly confident he would open stargate in the first game and decided to go 3 gate stalker even tho in was a “dead” build and wrap this up quick. It worked perfectly, I patted myself in the back for being such a genius and thought I could just confidently kill him next game if I was a bit aggressive.
Here’s the kicker, if I feel like I played a good early game, I will try to kill you. Remember all I said about the super battery ? Yea, you can still very easily allin in 3 bases vs 3 bases situations. In practice I realised very quickly that the proper way to go into a macro game wasn’t figured out by everybody and people tended to play overly greedy thinking the battery would keep them safe. The truth is that its very easy on most map to posture yourself in between the natural and third and just fight where the battery doesn’t protect anything. I won a LOT of games back then in practice, so I was feeling like the king of the world right before these matches.
But wait a minute drogo, you said to go between the natural and third to fight where the batteries are not, so why are you still doing this on Eternal Empire, a map where said entrance to that space is protected by one forcefield above a ramp ?
Because I thought it would work anyway, which is the answer to the many times people have asked me why I did the things I did.
Anyway I lost that game badly then in the next game some adepts shenanigans happened and I made charge instead of blink ggs.
One last PvP opponent and a must win was the captain Harstem, I always want to win against Harstem for some reason. We’re very much good friends, but we seem to never agree on anything on how you should play the game, especially back then, and really the only way to really prove your point in Starcraft is to be winning.
And the funny thing is, I did everything that I fought were the best strategies in the very first game. Starting with an 8 adepts opening to presure a passive opponent into securing the early lead with a 3 base semi all-in of blinkers and chargelots. When it didn’t quite kill him, transition to colossus and kill the guy like its 2013.
I’m gonna hold on for a bit on explaning why all of these strategies were viable back then and aren’t now to instead focus on the most important aspect of PvP : Getting Lucky.
I can’t really describe the rest of my PvPs for this DreamHack any other ways. The game started with two players going one gate expand on pillars of gold, but I just wanted to block his expo with a probe and really didn’t have any plan after that. You gotta understand that it took a very long time (the VR buff actually) for people to reliably go one gate expand in PvP so this situation was very much not figured out. Nonetheless the games went on to be fairly normal and I even get ahead catching his hidden Dt in the middle of the map !
Except I didn’t realise that I killed it in game, I moved my screen too late and only saw the xp gain you see after killing an unit, so I thought I killed an hallucination. The second Dt completely wrecked my economy.
After taking way too long to clean it up, I move accross the map for one desperate attack, my opponent has already 3 disruptors, 3 shield batteries, a canon, 67 probes, +1 on the way and the same army supply as me.
An unfortunate move command later by Harstem that allows me to blink on top of all the disruptors then to go into the natural where there is no static defense, I win the second map and avande to the playoff.
Afraid of losing
I was pretty confident against Sortof despite the complete lack of practice in PvZ (I always have a blind confidence I can win PvZ if things go right), even tho by now you should know what happens when I’m confident. Despite that; after a fairly funny game 1 where I lose nothing to a ling flood and play a game with 12 more workers and somehow manages to lose the game; the rest of the series was pretty smooth in my favor. Sometime testing the water with solid play is the best you can do. I was going to need a bit more than solid play vs the Wall tho.
One aspect of PvP I didn’t mention was that we were still very much in a 2nd pylon metagame. If you had it proxied, your opponent had to worry about potential really aggressive builds, while you really could just be chilling at home with an expo. This was the essence of how I liked to play, always hide my 2nd pylons, sometimes many adepts, sometimes an expo right after 2, Sometimes 3 gate stalker woohoo. With a pylon above the main ramp that allowed you to build a super battery on the lowground directly, I felt like I didn’t need the complete scouting of a stalker sentry opening anymore since the battery made me safe vs a lot of stuff.
The problem with that reasonning is when people study you and know your lack of 2nd pylon really doesn’t mean anything too aggressive, and ShoWTime was very well aware of that. He went into this series with great prep, making a wall at his natural fairly quickly to avoid getting memed by 8 adepts to then exploit my lack of scouting with some hidden Dark Shrine. I just got completely destroyed in the 2nd game.
That was his preparation tho, I had mine too ! I knew exactly what his reaction was to people going Nexus first, so I practiced a nexus first build that had a follow up that would blindly counter his reactive proxy robo. It worked like a charm too ! I killed his first immortal for free with my very fast phoenix. The problem is that I just kinda hoped that he would leave the game after losing his immortal ? I sat there waiting for him to leave while he kept trying to win, and eventually he did.
I went into the third game, to be honest, completely mentally destroyed. I was just waiting for him to win the third game and be done with it. This was the unintended consequence of me becoming extremely calm.
In said calmess, I played an extremely stupid game full of Dts, adept with speed and 2 base stalker colossus. Nothing that I ever did in practice, so I was just waiting for him to kill me. To my surprise, he actually tried to, and attacked into a battery.
In game 4, my early game was even more terrible than game 3, like actual game losing disasdvantage after I completely failed at dealing with 2 adepts and an oracle.
I tried to focus on doing the right build order and strategy so I could at least have one game where I somewhat played like in practice. Then came the time where ShoWTime showed up at my frontdoor with a way bigger army than mine. But this time, he didn’t attack, not wanting to repeat the mistake of last game I suppose, except he 100% could have killed . You be the judge.
Here’s the thing. Back then, we were still under the impression that chargelot archon immortal was the most powerful composition you could get in the midgame. If you wanted to attack, or to be safe, thats what people were doing, 3 bases, 6 gases, we get this army, then maybe we transition to something else.
It was in such a mindset that colossus were kind of viable, in a mirror situation, if one player gets colossus and the other disruptor, the disruptor player is 100% winning it easily. But in a situation where one player feels like he has to be safe and doesn’t really tech up, the blowback is considerable.
It happened vs Harstem, and it happened here again, except here he could have used his low tech army to kill me, but I guess he was afraid of losing.
Game 5 was the only good early game for me. ShoWTime tried to do a bit too many different things at once and just died to some adepts like half in the games in any PvP series. It was a reverse sweep and I couldn’t really believe how lucky I got at the end of the day. Next up was the other German.
Starcraft II is a game about early game until it isn’t .
This screenshot is taken from game 3 of the bo5 against HeroMarine, and it term of performance, it is my favorite game I’ve played in 2020. Everything I pictured when theorizing and practicing the build happened in that game. It ended up with a clean A move that wasn’t close just like everygame in Sc2 should be.
This wasn’t the story of that series tho, I’ve played an Heromarine that lost the 2 games he played aggressive and won the 3 games he was passive in. This is one of the major flaw of playing to always improve the early mid, if you always end the game on your advantage, you won’t be that great of a player if the game goes on longer, even if you have a pretty big advantage thanks to said practice.
I remember watching Day9 dailys as a young teenager and that sentence always stuck with me “if you wanna improve, look for the earliest mistake in the game and ignore everything else that happens after”.
This is all your fault Day9 I’m canceling my sub !!!!! Or maybe not, because this was top 8 after all, not a bad result at all considering how lucky I got. And if I did a good result for the next Dreamhack I could maybe dream of Katowice.
Oh Right there’s Zerg in this game
DreamHack fall was here and even tho this screenshot is a bit spoilery, I like how it tells a wrong story. I had 4 zergs in my group and terrans and protoss I was supposed to be favored against. In theory this was a very nice group, but it ended up being very hardand I got lucky at a couple of key moments.
It all started nicely with me dying against cars being dropped in my mineral line by Arctur and being helpless against it, while this was a bad loss, I was sure it was only a one time thing (narrator : it wasn’t).
The PvZ metagame back then was kinda weird. You have to realize, Adepts build eventually got figured out, But it took a long time for zerg to properly defend it consistently. For several months, some protosses would only play variations of the adept build and be very succesful with it. To quote a polish zerg that player that shall remain anonymous
“it’s so sick how any protoss can win with one strategy”
Personally, I got on the adept train pretty late, and decided to only really use it against zerg players without world class mechanics. I was more than happy to play predictable with oracle into third for the rest of my games, hey if it works sometimes vs Serral why wouldn’t it work against anybody else ?
Anyway Reynor proxy hatched me twice in a row and killed me in like 20 minutes.
Surely stephano wouldn’t be as hard ?
I got owned really hard in the first game, don’t be fooled by the worker count this isn’t an amazing position at all, and he played a solid lurker game after that, I remember being almost panicked after that game, like jesus christ how am I supposed to win again.
There’s something beautiful about just playing your build order that’s supposed to make the game easy for you and it actually does, playing passive until a storm push is always the strategy that surprises me in PvZ, simple but effective. So it was time to do it again in the third game.
Ahah just kidding it was Ever Dream, I just went adept and collected my free win, this map was great.
Lambo forgot to get lucky
Against Lambo, I had two very powerful weapon at my side, blind faith and luck.
When I go for a pylon block against zerg, for the past year before that I went for a twilight or robo build every single time. I know by now that Lambo really likes to prepare and if he thinks your way of playing has holes in it you better be sure he will try to exploit them. So I just went for a pylon block into stargate to throw him off into whatever he would try to do. Did it win any games in practice ? Not really. Did it work into the tournament ?
The second game is actually a crime against Starcraft 2. Picture this, we are on Eternal empire, both players have their macro well set up, but the zerg players suddenly makes a lot of mutalisks ! How will the protoss deal with this ? By F2ing like a madman and panicking completely. And how did it work out ?
Not pictured on stream, and barely told by the minimap, 3 of the archons that I recalled into my main, and that stayed stuck here in my F2 frenzy, somehow found themselves right below the flock of mutalisks and killed half of them. Because of course Lambo didn’t look, who would have 3 archons right here ? A bad player thats whos, but a lucky one.
The rest of the game was actually quite close and epic, but I can’t really look past that one very funny interaction that if it didn’t happened, none of this would have happened. I genuily think I would have lost if it went to game 3. Oh well a W is a W
The MaxPax Question
I am a big Maxpax fanboy. I love how you can clearly tell he doesn’t copy anyone and think of his own stuff. The thing is, when you do stuff that only you do, you can run into the problem of doing some proper dumb shit. And back then, Maxpax was doing some dumb shit, he stopped doing the strats he did back then and is now a much better player because of it.
But who says I don’t lose to dumb shit ?
I actually prepared so hard vs maxpax, I knew all the tricks and prepared a special scout timing against him. You have to understand I was playing vs someone who’s favorite strategy was to proxy his first gateway accross the map, make a zealot, go Stargate robo and nexus behind it.
I theorized that I could just pylon block his expansion and full wall the zealot until my adepts come out and he would have no way ever of expanding.
The problem was, I had nobody to practice with that would play like Maxpax, so I just played against my good friend the very easy ai until I had something that I thought was good in my head.
I still won that game because the part where I build a pylon to delay his nexus still worked like a charm and pure immortal/phoenix only works on Rotterdam stream.
For the next two games tho, to my greatest surprise, Maxpax played some solid strategy and completely destroyed me. Proxy oracle into Dt in the 2nd game, despite me finding the proxy stargate and being able to do what I want, completely got me, and in the third game I was completely blind to the immortal timing that was coming because I was so used to play against a greedy passive maxpax.
At this point everything could happen, so it was a must win against Bly. Historically against Bly I had moments where I felt very confident against him and moments where I would actually lose every single game, so I wasn’t sure where I was standing.
Winning for the wrong reasons is still winning
Bly used to beat me all the time with proxy hatch, but with the lovely battery overcharge that one particular build that only he was good at got nerfed to the ground, so I had that going for me which was nice.
I really wanted to be on the offensive, I find myself finding better success with aggressive things against Bly for some reason, so when I panicked and auto piloted to Stargate on Ever dream without even realizing it, that was not a good situation. I knew for sure I would never ever hold a queen march, and I knew from previous online cups it was his favorite build, especially with a foward hatchery. So I came up with a creative, never practiced solution to defend my third base.
The 2nd game is just very funny at how scared I was, Bly went for a proxy hatch on my third to attack with a lot of ravagers, but thanks to going stargate (because that map was doodoo for adepts) I held pretty well. I was pretty far ahead after that, but here’s the thing. I lost so many times to Bly by trying to counter attack that I just didn’t want it to happen this time, so that’s why you had this happen.
The game lasted for a while, streching the ability of wardi to hype a game that was very over, but after some time it was, and it was an important victory not only because it meant advancing, but also because it was a 2:0 victory.
I somehow managed to sneak into the 2nd place of the group thanks to some map scores math magic. That put directly into the winner bracket against none other than big Gabe again. I felt like this was one of the better opponent I could face and I was eager to take my revenge.
So I did what anybody would have done in that situation.
The definition of Insanity
BLINK STALKER INTO COLOSSUS BABYYYYYYYYYYYYYY Everygame everyday wooohoooooooo. Well not really, the first two games I went DT drop and Oracle, not bad builds by any mean, but when my back was against the wall you better believe we made some blinkers everygame.
I really believed in that build what can I say, maybe in my mind everygame could be like the deathaura game, and only smooth victory was waiting for me.
In preparation for this game I actually got some quality practice compared to before, I played plenty vs Clem and Marinelord, I felt much better overall and didn’t really feel the need to do anything too special.
To my surprise, the one that felt like he had to do something was Heromarine.
After losing this series, Heromarine said he lost mostly because he prepared wrong, and honestly, I agree with him. He has always consistently won the longer games and direct pushes that rely more on a good early game are something that I felt way more comfortable with. Perhaps he trained with Showtime and was winning more doing these attacks than the longer games ? I don’t know, what I do know is that I lost a lot of games practicing with him later on to prepare against my next opponent, Clem.
You guys don’t even have driving licenses stop making cars.
In practice, Clem was winning 75% of the games, was playing a very passive style to abuse an overdefensive ShoWTime, and was overall a pain in the ass to play against. I needed to give myself an edge to at least bring it back to a 50/50 game, a part of the plan was to assume Clem wouldn’t try anything too aggressive since it wasn’t the main thing he was practicing and my default play was ok against it.
Anyway, I got everything wrong and got destroyed 3–0 in half an hour, a better opponent with better builds can make you look very silly. I will just leave you with one picture.
Marinelord, after a very sick lower bracket run defeating Mana and Gerald, was my next opponent. This match was very important, winning here meant a top 4 finish that would give me so many EPT points I would be pretty much garuanted a spot in IEM katowice. I also was winning a lot against Marinelord in practice, especially whenever the game went macro. The thing is, I practiced with him a lot, and the situation was kind of the reverse of me against clem, with Marinelord being the one having to switch it up.
2 rax, 4 hellions into macro,Ebay block into hellion drop, CC in main hidden into normal play would be all of the build Mlord used, and when I almost threw game 1 even after finding the 2 rax immediately, I knew I was in trouble. In practice we talked a lot about hellion dropped and how powerful it was when correctly used. My own problem was that *in case* Mlord wasn’t doing that I really wanted to play normal since it was working so well in practice, add to that a shit ton of nerves and I ended up playing some middle of the road builds that just put me behind trying to defend everything. It usually is a bad play to do that but I thought I could get away with it, remember earlier !
Online cups, and the stories we tell to ourselves.
I think now is a good time to talk about the evolution of my mental state throughout 2020, and how it very much affected my performance and my enjoyment of competitive starcraft.
Because here’s the thing, after I lost to Marinelord, I expected to be extremely upset. I just had lost to someone I was very confident against 2 days prior and lost a lot of money and the prospect of playing in IEM. But I wasn’t, all I could feel was relief that it was finally over.
Let’s go back to the beginning, the way I functionned during my entire progaming career was very much like the shonen mangas I still read too much. You know, the big event is coming up, you practice everyday very hard in your own little personnal montage, then when it’s time you fly to another country, you give it your best during an intense week-end (being too emotionally invested on a single week-end going well to prove your worth isn’t actually the best way to perform at your best there, and even if I learned that years ago I still commit that mistake from time to time). After you lose (this is not a Serral/Reynor article) you party with your previous opponents that are now your friends, drink away your sorrow and talk all night about how much better next time will be because you will be prepared for whatever stupid stuff killed you the previous day. Overall, I always look back fondly on events no matter the result, whichs allows me to give it my best for the next one.
Online Dreamhack, spread over 3 to 4 weeks, is different than that. At first, it was fine, I practiced a lot and had the same motivation as if the tournament was a week-end one. It became very clear very fast that the I couldn’t keep up the intensity I used during 2 days over 3 weeks. Everytime you are done with a match, the next one is in 2 or 3 days, and you feel like you shouldn’t do anything except prepare for that new opponent. Which is what I did, for DreamHack Summer and DreamHack Fall.
However, this had the side effect of making me having a not so good time during these time periods, and between every events I would play less and less Starcraft II. I have always been pretty weak willed and followed the path of least resistance, but it usually wasn’t a problem for me, it’s deeply ingrained in me that I want to win and be the best. But when Starcraft II tournaments went from a positive experience to a negative one, I just kept delaying the time I would start practicing again, because who wouldn’t wanna delay something that makes them feel bad.
To my surprise I wasn’t the only one feeling that way, a lot of pros share some aspects of this mindset and would rather play the groups one after another instead of all at the same time (every group starts and ends at the same time, ence the 3 weeks competition). Especially when I feel like the main feedback I get from this format is “we like how many games are being played, but it’s confusing to follow”. Oh well .
You get the idea of where I was mentally going into Dreamhack Winter, I wanted to play some ok games and be done with it and maybe we would have a good run randomly. For the first time in years I put a mandatory rule of minimum of practice games per days because otherwise I wouldn’t play them. The good thing going for me is that I didn’t wanna have regrets and that’s what powered me trough the entire group stage. But looking back, even in my play, it was painfully obvious I just wanted to be done with it.
Planes are cooler than cars.
In PvT I was pretty traumatized by hellions, and decided that I was going to learn phoenix colossus since Stats (by now you should have figured I’m a Stats fanboy) used it a lot. I usually swore off playing phoenixs in PvT after the 2017 fiasco of the chargelot phoenix meta, where I had to accept that I would never in my lifetime understand how it won any games. But this build made colossus very fast AND had phoenix to not die to stuff, it was simple and elegant like every stats build and I liked it very much.
Plus you could like A move on 66 probes if your opponent made tanks and that’s a big selling point.
My big two opponents to beat were uThermal and Soul, if I could beat them I would most likely make it out of this group, so I mainly focused on that since my energy was limited.
To be honest if I just defended that I was in a pretty unlosable position both games, but with “if” we would put Paris in a bottle as they say in France.
I don’t have that much to say about this group compared to the two previous ones, since beside the PvT practice I wasn’t into trying to learn new things too much since my head wasn’t 100% in the game. I won pretty good games vs Milkycow and Souleer at least, two young players that are very promising I think and are probably gonna kick my old ass in two years. I played almost a replica of my last series against Stephano too, losing the adept game and winning convincingly with passive macro, adepts are such a bait man can’t believe they used to be so feared.
I lost 2:0 to Serral and 2:1 to Rail. I had one closish game vs Serral which was nice of him to let me have and Rail did the most nonsensical all-ins I had ever seen so of course I played in the worst way possible. It will always be funny to me that the thought “oh my god he has so many units, he must also have the same amount of economy as my games in practice because that makes perfect sense” happens super often in tournaments. Overestimation is one hell of a drug.
I still could make it out of the group if I won 2:0 against uThermal, and honestly I could have done it.
Despite the worker damage and uThermal dramatically putting his hand on top of his head, he wins this game two minutes later. I was out of Dreamhack in group stage and while the next game didn’t matter, losing 2:0 after being ahead in the second game and just being clueless from here kinda hurt.
2020, in conclusion, was not the best year ever.
It is hard not to compare my 2020 to 2019. In 2019 I was just one step short of making it to Blizzcon after a year of one top 4, followed by three top 16. I think my level was actually pretty good back then, and I could have done better than three top 16 if my level was better playing offline.
Because yea, I do believe I was a overall worse in 2020 compared to the competition, and while I really dislike playing online tournaments, my level in competitions was actually pretty close to the one I had in practice. The irony of being better in something I dislike more will always make me laugh. I also got quite lucky vs ShowTime and Gabe all things considered.
However, one harsh truth, that is true for not only myself but almost all pros, is that I made way less money in 2020 compared to 2019. It is due to a lot of factor with some of them very unfortunate that weren’t supposed to be like this (corona forcing regional tournaments again). But it’s not like it will become that much better when Corona will go away since there are less tournaments overall. I feel like my performance was similar/barely worse than last year and I made half the money, the good thing is that because I stayed at home all day I spent very little in 2020 so I still had a good year, but it was also due to the amazing support of Raise your edge, you guys are the best.
I don’t really mind the money aspect too much, I am not struggling one bit and I am only lazy when I can afford it.
Mental Stuff is not important until it is.
What worries me way more, and the reason you may have not seen too much of me for the past few months, is just that I don’t want to repeat the experience I had playing competitive Starcraft II tournaments this year ever again, which was the worst time I had in the entirety of 2020.
Obviously, when you dread doing what you previously loved, you tell yourself you gotta change some stuff.
In 2020, I became a much more anxious person, and it sucks.
I still love Starcraft II, love playing it, love practicing it, and I love everybody in the scene. I want more than ever to have an healthy dynamic with competition again, and I believe I will be able to, but I would be lying if I said I was 100% certain things aren’t just gonna repeat in 2021, but personally I think they won’t !
In conclusion, Zest is best and so are you
I can’t help but have hopes for 2021 EPT season, I’m not gonna lie, as somewhat of a famous balance whiner, Protoss is currently not bad.
And honestly I feel like I know what to expect now, the challenges of online competition can’t be worse this year than 2020. IEM was super duper amazing, Zest played amazing, Parting blew my mind with his PvT and the french scene is making me quite proud.
Once again I wanna Thank Raise your Edge for their Support and wish them the best of luck in their future endeavors.
So yea, Idk how to end this, I’m teamless now if you are a team owner, hello !
Maybe I’ll stream at some point to fulfill my dream of being a slightly shittier Harstem : https://www.twitch.tv/ptitdrogo
Also sorry for the lack of good memes recently I will come back stronger.
