Day 1 - Knowing my place!

Game 1 - RHYNO (P) on The Shattered Temple

"Bad, really bad" is unfortunately the only way I can describe this guy. This was my placement match for the new season, and as is such was expecting to get paired against a REALLY REALLY EVEN MATCH, but unfortunately I did not. But let's march onwards.

His entire strategy seemed to be to build fucking everything at once, since apparently the one base 5 gate robo build is all das rage amongst the toss hardcore nowadays. He seemed to hinge solely on cheesy shit that in the end didn't work. Let's get an account of it.

First of all, my standard build against toss has been lately to open with speedlings + roaches, and pump out a shitload of hydras and a few mutas for support against colossi. This has worked out incredibly well, since the mutas also have the fun side effect of ripping probes to complete shreds in mere moments.

The first real action after a sleepy opening came when he took his dreaded warp prism and used it to warp exactly 3 stalkers into my base. Unfortunately, I don't think he meant to attack with that, but one of the stalkers started firing on my extractor which popped up that lovely OUR BASE IS UNDER ATTACK warning (and thankfully not the OUR DRONES ARE UNDER ATTACK one, because the queen voice saying drones is about as bad as Day9 saying "Dr. Seuss"), which kind of gave him away. Up marched my hydras + roaches + lings, down went warp prism + 3 stalkers.

A bit before this point, I began what is easily the best creep spread I have ever accomplished in my SC2 career to date. This will come in handy later.

I began building my spire, deciding that my best bet would be to max out and eat him alive since he'd obviously wrecked himself trying to get that up. I took my third at the gold base, then proceeded to pump out mutas + hydras + a couple more roaches and a few more lings.

Soon enough, having cut drones fairly hardcore knowing that at any time I really could just stomp him into dust but deciding to wait until it would be the most hilarious to do so, we hit my push. You know that beautiful creep spread? The hydras got there near-instantly despite their reputation for being "slow as shit" due to it, and I proceeded with my 153 supply worth of army to crush his 56 supply army. (This does not include workers, but for those who are inclined to see I had almost double his.)

Which consisted of a mothership, a colossus, 4 immortals, 3 zealots, 4 void rays, and a couple other things that died too quickly for me to notice. Eesh. Placement done, I found that I ended up in the same division as one of my e-friends, pickemgenius.

The war is fucking on.

Game 2 - starvty (T) on Typhon Peaks

Let me give you a bit of background information before I even start telling you about this game.

When I first started playing, I started playing as Zerg for two main reasons.

1. Amongst my group of e-friends that play SC2, the two best players of them are/were Zerg players (although I believe one of them plays random more often than Zerg nowadays).

2. Zerg is fucking cool. Like, literally. The Terrans are fucking America IN SPAAAAACE and the Protoss are a bunch of uppity psychic dickheads. The Zergs have banelings, It is impossible to hate banelings.

Unless you play Terran.

You see, I know this firsthand because my noob mind decided immediately upon getting repeatedly roflstomped by every person I was matched up against that the real problem wasn't that I was a poor player (nay, I was clearly a candidate for at least GSL Code A). I instead decided that the problem was the race I was playing as.

I tried playing as Protoss once, and quickly developed the only necessary skill one needs to play Protoss which is resisting the desire to throw one's computer out a fucking window every time pylons and the construction thereof is mentioned.

So instead I switched to be the TERRANS! YAY TERRANS! A lifetime of dull grey and machine guns for me, then.

So I quickly noticed a pattern. Vs Terran? I'd win about 60% of the time. Vs Protoss? Oh hi oh shit. Vs Zerg?

FUCKING. MUTAS.

So by the time I'd switched back to Zerg, I made the deduction that every low-level Terran I'd play against would be just as ill-equipped as I was to deal with said mutas. I hatched a brilliant strategy.

I would rush to mutas as quickly as humanly fucking possible.

So, with that in mind, on to the match!

The first thing that sticks out on the replay is the overlord timing. I usually try to get my overlord out on 9 (as I vaguely recalled somewhere reading that popping your o-lord out on 9 is a net gain over popping it out on 10 and using the extractor trick, which always made me feel kind of douchey anyways), but in this game my inability to read got the better of me and I built it on 8 instead. Whoops!

I as is usual took the early worker lead, scouting that he had no gas, which meant DUN DUN DUN BIO BALL almost certainly. Or he is a massive tool, which is better. I had just started building my pool, so knew my best bet for my short-term defense was to get a few banelings.

Nothing really happened for quite a while, I maintained my worker lead and expanded once. I did get myself supply blocked on 26, however.

There was a point where he had 1 marauder and 14 marines to my 3 zerglings and 3 banelings. Defense defense hurf durf. Glad he didn't decide to push. Here's where the funny part happened.

I decided to pump out 6 more lings to go along with my 6 mutas that were building. He took his marine + marauder ball and promptly walked right into my 3 banelings. Then the 6 more speedlings ran in and cleaned up. He lost almost his entire army in one push.

While he was sitting there in complete and utter shock, my mutas swooped in from behind. He proceeded to stim without medivacs, and proceeded to die quickly. +20 points!

Game 3 - Brandon (P) on Shakuras Plateau

I can sum this up in one sentence, really, cause it's all you need to hear:

"Everything he's doing points to a robo build. I SHALL BUILD MANY HYDRAS"

And so I built many hydras.

The end. -12 points!

Summary

So by going 2-1 today, I ended the first laddering day of the new season with 8 points in 44th in my bronze division. PEG has 32 points and is somewhere up where I should be.

Fuck him.

Stats so far:

vs Protoss - 1-1
vs Terran - 1-0

Shakuras Plateau - 0-1
Shattered Temple - 1-0
Typhon Peaks - 1-0