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Alone in the company of three Zergs, Dear’s chances of making playoffs were under a big question mark. A dedicated Proleague name for SouL, Dear’s achievements on the individual stages were scarce and going into a group with Soulkey and DongRaeGu sounded like a plot with grim ending.
Instead, Dear showed he was exceptionally well prepared for this all-PvZ group. Unfazed by his tough first opponent in DongRaeGu, Dear went on to bait the Zerg into a series of traps before finally putting his head in a box. His multi-step plan on Derelict Watcher involved getting a quick third nexus while shutting out DongRaeGu’s fast ling speed thus putting him behind; a transition into air toss to deny DRG’s spire before even a single mutalisk was produced; and finally, with the spire tech completely defused, switch to a colossus/void ray army to counter Zerg’s everything for the 1:0.
Letting DongRaeGu get away with a tying victory on Whirlwind proved to be Dear’s only stutter in his otherwise flawless performance today. As the two players spawned on Yeonsu for the final match, Dear brought an immortal/gateway army to DongRaeGu’s face while shrugging off the simultaneous zergling attack at his natural and drilled deeper and deeper until the Zerg tapped out in defeat.
Dear had to stay in the booth as his winner’s match against Sleep – another surprise by itself – was played immediately after. A quick paced game defined by Dear’s triumphant 2-base attack opened the series only to see the tempo slow down on Akilon Wastes. In a match otherwise bountiful in mistakes, Dear rushed to a double robo colossus to counter Sleep’s swarm host build preemptively, only to lose the three of his colossi during a massively miscontrolled attack. As the mid-game developed, Dear would lose more and more expensive units due to poor rallying or sloppy control, allowing Sleep to take control of the map, tech to brood lords and pressure his opponent into a position where he should’ve starved to death.
Only Sleep himself was not immune to mistakes of his own. A single moment of mispositioning cost Sleep the entire game as Dear spotted and sniped the majority of his brood lords, leaving the Zerg army without air support. Coupled with a series of zealot warp-ins to down the base count of Sleep, Dear was able to outmuscle his opponent across the center line of Akilon Wastes and eventually bully a GG out of him.
Like for Dear, it was an unexpected start of the playday for Soulkey as well, though in the negative direction. Arguably the best player of the four, the Woongjin ace was paired with Sleep of team AZUBU, the contender of whom the community expected the least. Plot twists, however, would find good home in Group A it seemed.
It is not an unusual sight to see a complete underdog prepare extra carefully for his group and today Sleep was such a player. The AZUBU Zerg played a passive, roach-heavy style against Soulkey, abusing the latter’s infestor timings which opened too inviting of a window in games one and three. Sandwiched between two overwhelming losses came Soulkey’s only victory in this set in the form of a misexecuted bane/roach all-in, a victory more gifted than fairly won.
Beaten bloody by the underdog, Soulkey was left for dead in the loser’s match, awaiting his next opponent between Dear and DongRaeGu, a grim prospect regardless of the result. It was the latter who eventually fell down and Soulkey readied himself for another ZvZ.
It was a quick series between the once best Zerg in the world and his KeSPA successor. Soulkey snatched game one by earning an early advantage and entering the muta wars phase with a lead DRG could not overcome. Almost analogical scenario was repeated in game three and Soulkey showed DongRaeGu the door out of Code S.
With the above results in mind, Soulkey was paired with Sleep for a second time, with extra pressure on the shoulders of the reigning Code S champion now that he was once defeated by the group’s underdog.
One would think that Sleep’s bag of tricks had run dry after the initial three games but that turned out to not be the case and Soulkey almost tasted defeat for the second and last time today. His early ling speed build on Akilon Wastes was timely read by Sleep and only the slightly late banelings of the AZUBU Zerg saved Soulkey from total humiliation and awarded him the lead after game one.
Wounded but not dead, Sleep continued his one-step-ahead playstyle and completely outsmarted Soulkey in game two. Learning from the opening match, Soulkey opted for an infestorless composition in the mid game and went for pure roach/hydra but Sleep had already predicted every one of champion’s moves. Thus, instead of going pure roach – a composition that would lose in a direct fight with hydralisks – and dodging the opportunity of building a mirroring army against a mechanically better opponent, Sleep mixed in a bucketful of banelings to hard-counter Soulkey’s hydras. That came to shock Soulkey into a tap out once he saw the DPS of his army melt in green goo in the matter of milliseconds.
It was on Bel’Shir Vestige that Sleep’s improvised Cinderella story would eventually come to an end. Reflecting back on his triumph against DongRaeGu, Soulkey went straight for spire tech, bypassing Sleep’s almost predictable roach tech. With the tempo and full map control on his side, Soulkey ordered a final victorious march, grabbing the GG from Sleep and preventing a second upset in the group.
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