GSLTL

The GSL Team League starts tonight. Esta mafahan i tiket-hu, ya listo yu'!

For those who don't know what this means, the 8 best teams in Korea with players in the GSL will be competing against each other to see who is the best Starcraft 2 team in South Korea right now. All of the famous names will be on standby over the next few days and may be called forth to defend the honor of their team. The teams in question are:

The SCV Life (TSL) home to Clide, Killer, Alive, Rain and winner of GSL Season 1, Fruitdealer.

Old Generations (oGs) home to Nada, Ensnare, theWind, and winner of GSL Season 3, MC.

Startale (ST) home to July, Rainbow, Squirtle and the foreigner Torch.

Incredible Miracle (IM) home to winner of GSL Season 2 Nestea and winner of GSL Code S IMMvp.

For Our Utopia (fOu) home to Leenock, thebest, scf and choya.

Prime World Elite (Prime.WE) home to check, anypro, polt, maka and the always predictable unpredictable (2 time finalist but never champion) MarineKing.

Slayers home to really only Boxer (although training with him could make anyone badass).

And finally Zenex home to Kyrix, Byun Choa and ButterflyEffect.

I was searching online to see who people are favoring to win this Team League, and most divided the league into two tiers, with only 3 or 4 teams capable of winning the whole thing. OGS, ST and TSL were clearly favored, with IM close behind, although not for any depth of their team, but simply because they have the best Terran and Zerg on their team (although not much else after that).

For me, it's hard to pick who I think will win. I've only been following Starcraft 2 for a couple months now and don't have any real team favorites. So instead of picking the team which I like or think will win, I've decided to root for the team which I want to win, simply because everyone else thinks they can't win. I don't know much about the team Zenex, but they are my underdog choice for winning the GSLTL this week! I hope that I don't have magic powers of negativity and tragedy in the same way Artosis has, in which whatever he says will happen doesn't simply because the universe likes to make him look stupid.

Planetary Assault

In the last Guam Starcraft 2 tourney over the weekend, I went 2 and 4, which was alot better than I thought I would do. I didn't think I would win a single game, I didn't practice or play at all the week before and since I have very little experience against humans, when I do play against people of any level, I tend to make stupid mistakes and give away the game very easily. This past tourney was no different, as I found that the strategies I use against AI on insane and VH didn't work very well against humans.

My biggest win was on Scrap Station, Protoss v. Terran. My opponent likes to rush cloaked banshees, which doesn't work as well against someone like me, who noobs it up by always going forge first and building canons. It doesn't even matter what race I'm playing against or what their strategy is, I almost always go forge first and lay down canons, especially to prevent any Dark Templars or burrowed units from giving me nightmares. The problem with rushing the cloaked banshees is that you don't have much for other units. You wall in but don't have much defense at your base. My plan was to rush void rays and also proxy pylon with zealots outside his main.

He arrived with two cloaked banshees when I finally got my first void ray out. Thankfully I had some stalkers who could take advantage of the vision that the canons provided to stave off the banshees. And when my void rays arrived at my opponent's main, he had a handful of Marines who were easily taken out. I warped in two zealots to attack in the front and start killing depots. While I was killing off my opponent's base, he built some vikings and was able to take out one of my void rays while I killed off his vikings (charged void rays are the best). When he stopped resisting my killing his base I began to get suspicious. I warped in some zealots and sent them down to the gold and the side expansions, and of course he had built a command center at the gold and was mining like crazy. As I sent down some zealots and my remaining void ray to take out his gold base, I notced that he was attacking my main. I assumed that he still had his banshees left and was trying to snipe my buildings and probes, but I was pretty sure that I would be okay.

When I looked at my main to see what was happening, I was pretty certain that I'll always be a horrible macro player. While I was distracted in my opponent's gold base, he had snuck a command center into my main, landed it and morphed it into a planetary fortress. Thankfully for me, he had landed it at a point where it was getting hit by one of my canons. He started bombarding my buildings with his fortress, and so I left my zealots to take out his expansion and search for others and moved my void ray back to take out his fortress.

Since I won the match, the fact that he was able to build a planetary fortress in my main was a "lol moment," and it was really hysterical moment. If by some chance he had built the fortress in my base and I had lost, then it would have been a major "I suck" moment.