With the beginning of day two everyone is expecting some fantastic games especially with players such as MVP, Taeja, Stephano, and MC.
The old dogs triumph
The start of day two gave way to a very unorthodox PvP between hero and MC. MC looked fantastic and by proxying a stargate he was able to catch hero by surprise with a group of oracles and take game one. In game two it came down to an amazing battle of void rays vs. high templars, in the end MC's amazing micro with his archon/high templar ball was just too much, making the series 2:0. In game three both players went for a dark templar build and found themselves in an awkward base racewith MC coming out on top. MC was able to take the series 3:0 over hero.
In what many thought would be a 3-0 landslide for Mvp, Feast was able to show some incredibly good control of his blink stalkers and mothership core in the early game to put himself in great positions. MVP in his post-game winner interview even mentioned that he thought Feast was a great player and that he would drop at least one game, and that’s what happened. In the first game, Feast showed great blink stalker and mothership core control to put MVP on the defensive, but ultimately held on well enough and crushed Feast before his tech was realized. However, in the second game and one of the best games of the tournament, Feast once again opens up blink stalker 4-gate, and it is essentially all-in because he was in a position where he had to deal huge damage to MVP.
And that’s exactly what he did. Once again Feast showed great control and was able to force MVP into a very heavy marauder composition. He contained MVP in his main base using great forcefield control until his natural was saturated and he had his tech well underway. With MVP’s marauder composition, Feast responded with a strong chargelot/archon force with +2 armor and was able to crush to the finish line in MVP’s natural. The next two games were nothing to scoff at, with great play from both sides once again. The games were tight, but MVP showed greater macro, poise, scouting, and decision-making throughout and was able to seal up the series 3-1.
The foreign struggles continue
With Minigun saying he was going to sweep Life, everyone was excited to see if he could follow through. Unfortunatly for Minigun life was about to defeat him 3:0, with a combination of roach/ling timings and some impressive hydralisk micro. Despite some very impressive forcefield micro from Mingun he was just unable to compare with life's amazing macro game.
The very strong Liquid Terran faced off against Fnatic’s newest pick-up and community favorite gone MIA, SaSe. Everyone has seen Taeja’s play consistently for the past year, but SaSe’s experience in HoTS and his strategies were unknown coming into the series. SaSe showed some of his creativity in the series, and was able to utilize strong defensive builds with consistent hallucinate scouting to put himself in decent positions for the mid-game. SaSe was able to take game 2 with strong gateway counter-aggression in response to Taeja’s rush to medevac widow mine drops. Protoss player should take note that with these fast techs from terran comes a vulnerable window ready to exploit. However, Taeja’s solid macro and play ended up giving huge issues to SaSe throughout the rest of the series. Despite dark templars that did massive damage, SaSe’s play fell just a little short as Taeja wrapped up the series 3-1.
...And continue some more
As the Bomber/Goswser was given start, all eyes turned to the foreign Zerg. A recent tweet saying he'd add Bomber to the list of Korean Terran powerhouses Goswser had slain certainly contributed to the hype surrounding the match and, to everyone's greatest pleasure, the match did live up to it.
What started as a simple ZvT with a lead for the Terran soon turned into absolute madness. Bomber stuck his hand into his bag of tricks and showcased the jaw-dropping combo of after-burned kamikaze Medivac chased by allied Seeker Missilе, incising into the enemy army and blowing it to bits. His "trick" in game three, however, was much less impressive and after losing 80 supply by nuking his own units, Bomber somehow managed to stall the game for 40 more minutes before finally surrendering to Goswser at the 80th minute. A standard macro game closed up the series for Bomber but what a series it was!
Thorzain vs Killer: A war of attrition
Killer vs Thorzain saw some great plays by both players. Killer in game one showed some very interesting usage of the Viper, he was able to pull most of Thorzain's air force, which was able to give Killer game one. Game two showed us why Thorzain is known as the spoon Terran, with game two lasting a staggering one hour and fifteen minutes with Thorzain coming out on top to tie the series up 1:1. However it was not enough, in the end with Killer taking the series 3:1 by not letting Thorzain get his economy off the ground.
A very micro intensive series between Polt and Creator. By utilizing multi-prong drops Polt was able to simply tear Creator apart with his agressive drop play. However, Creator showed that he would not simply let Polt walk over him. With an impressive display of multitasking Creator was able to fend off Polts relentless asaults and take game two. In the end though, he just could not push back Polt's agression. In the end Polt took the series 3:1 over Creator.
