Protoss extinction at the WCS EU quarter finals

Stephano was responsible for the elimination of the last Protoss in the circuit. Photo by: DreamHack

Two Korean Terrans and two foreign Zergs - this is the WCS EU semi finals line-up. Tomorrow, MVP, ForGG, Stephano and Dimaga will battle out for the European championship.

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Happy dies to Dimaga's roaches

Russia versus Ukraine, Terran against Zerg, roaches against metal and gunpowder - this is how the playoffs for WCS EU Premier League began as Happy took on Dimaga, both fighting to get their hands on the boarding card to the seasonal championship in Korea.

While Dimaga certainly came into this series the underdog considering Happy's top form and especially his known prowess in TvZ, the Ukrainian showed he would not be bullied but be the bully himself. A long-ranged hydra/viper composition was taken to Happy's face in game one and the Terran typed out a surrender after seeing his tanks getting shredded without even getting a chance to fire a volley. 

With the start of game two, Dimaga switched from hydras to roaches in order to apply even stronger and earlier pressure... and the recoil of this decision almost broke his jaw. By playing a well-composed, tight and defensive mech on the back of reaper openings, Happy gladly welcomed the roach swarms and slaughtered them as they charged. Two games later, the Terran was in a 2-1 advantage.

One game away from elimination, Dimaga returned to his seat after a short break. While he had not given up on the roach play, he did however found a way to make it work. Taking advantage of Happy's sudden loss of concentration, Dimaga abused the lack of medivac drops and weird upgrade timings to swarm the Terran into a 3-2 loss, orchestrating a full surround finale on Bel'Shir Vestige.

 

Mvp with a 3-0 blaze versus TLO

What was arguably the most hyped match for the night crashed into an anticlimactic development. Despite the tweets of wanting to play exactly MVP, the constantly improving form and his status as one of Europe's finest warriors of today, TLO tasted cold-blooded incineration.

Running on hellbat fuel, MVP onlt needed three games to bring crushing sadness to TLO's face. Aside from suffering from obvious mistakes in his defense like leaving his supply depots leveled or underestimating TLO's baneling waves, the four times GSL champion was otherwise flawless. Whenever the synergy between hellbats and hellions did not end the Zerg on the spot, there always came the bio/medivac transition for the clean things up. Nothing that TLO mustered could stop the inevitable 3-0.

ForGG pulls a 3-2 comeback against Lucifron

Having the only undefeated player in the WCS so far against the absolute god of TvT in one place easily made this a memorable series. Aware what ForGG has done to other Terrans in the past, Lucifron knew full well how to play, i.e. never ever let ForGG do that to him.

The Spaniard thus took the initiative right from game one and battered ForGG to death with a proxy thor rush and doubled the lead by immaculately defending against the Korean's signature killing move, the very same described in the article linked above. Needing just one more victory, Lucifron resorted to thor rushing once again but this time it wasn't enough. This time, things went bad.

ForGG met Lucifron's thor with a clutch repair on the bunker (keeping it in the red but alive for a few critical seconds) which basically decided the game in favor of the Korean. A micromanagement whiff came from the Spaniard in game four shortly thereafter and just like that, the series was back to a tie, Lucifron visibly pissed by his own mistake.

At 2-2, nobody was allowed any more mistakes so the fifth game was directed into a slower tempo but this only allowed ForGG to get into his comfortable, mass hellion zone easier. Although for every SCV of his burnedLucifron answered appropriately, the army numbers weren't the ones the Spaniard wanted to see. As a sizeable hellion raiding party barrelled into Lucifron's main, ForGG sighed in relief at the realization of his own comeback.

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Stephano ends the last Protoss

Being the only Protoss to survive the groups stage certainly put extra pressure on BabyKnight's shoulders but although he was about to play once Europe's best player, the Dane actually had a lot of advantages on his side. He had beaten many a legend through his WCS run, he had already prevailed over Stephano 2-0 in the Ro32, he had a killer momentum and, last but not least, his opponent has always been somewhat predictable in terms of playstyle.

None of that came to BabyKnight's aid. For every second of Stephano's predictability (excluding one marginally unsuccessful 10-pool which almost lost the Zerg game one), there was an entire minute of BabyKnight stubborness, making him stick to a playstyle that was doomed to fail. This particularly showed in games two and three - both colored by Stephano's now signature turtly swarm host/viper/infestor/corruptor composition - in which BabyKnight kept taking head-on fights instead of bypassing the Swarm armies and try to be victorious on the back of warp prism drops, a mistake which ToD diligently pointed out during his cast. Regardless of the sieze of the Protoss army or whether it had a mothership or not, Stephano stuck to the same algorithm - abduct, snipe, repeat, win.

Tomorow, we learn who the champion of WCS EU Premier League will be. Games start at 13:00 CET with the 5th place relegation bracket and continue with the semi finals of the main tournament at 18:00 CET.