Hello again! Welcome to my second Starcraft 2 Survivors blog, where I will provide in-depth analysis and a behind the scenes perspective on this past week’s show – as always, feel free to ask additional questions and send comments to my twitter account @DOOMeSports so we can continue the conversation from there!
LAST WEEK: If you missed last week’s episode I encourage you to check it out and read my analysis – to tl;dr it in a nutshell: “Ding, dong, the king is dead.“ Suppy became the first member of our jury and it’s now the dual alliances (kaitlyn & Brent/Tubby & Tempo) vs. Puck in a kill or be killed scenario.
Reward Challenge: Any Day[9] fans in the building? Our take on the fastest max challenge broke the barrier of race-restriction and opened up an opportunity for terran, zerg, and protoss to all get in on the fun, together. We decided to switch things up in this way to give the survivors a little (just a little bit!) more control over their fate in the game. Ultimately, this made the proceedings as randomly even as we could possibly make it – the decision to approach the challenge with a certain race becomes just as important as the execution of a particular build.
Going into the challenge, each of the survivors knew that they would end up in a King of the Hill for immunity (and guaranteed top 4!) – while it’s comforting to know what you’ll be faced with in the next challenge, the potential result was obviously a scary ordeal for anyone not named Puck.
What the viewers didn’t see was that we gave the survivors 45 minutes to attempt the challenge as many times as they could. In addition to this, they were all in the same skype call, they could pick any map that either is or was in any ladder pool, and there were no restrictions on googling the best build order. As you can see, nobody took advantage of researching the results of Day[9]’s VODs on the subject (google ‘fastest max challenge’ and all three races show up) and as a result, we were treated to a freestyle max supply slugfest mostly on Neo Planet S.
I was initially worried for Puck when we started the challenge – he sat still with his hands off the keyboard and mouse for a good 10 minutes before I chimed in letting him know we had begun. His reply, “I know, I’m thinking very hard about how I want to dominate this challenge.” Ladies and gentlemen, visualize victory and it will be yours.
Prior to this, Puck stated that his only chance to stay alive in the game was to win every challenge from here on out, and he gets one step closer to that goal by taking first place in reward! Although we assume that Puck could take out any remaining survivor in a 1v1, eliminating that risk altogether and ensuring that he only needs one win in the KOTH to guarantee a top 4 finish in the game is a key moral victory and huge momentum killer for Brent, kaitlyn, Tubby, & Tempo. Let’s give credit where credit is due though – props to kaitlyn for giving it her all and narrowly finishing in second place by 3 seconds.
BONUS Reward! We switch things up yet again – in addition to competing in the KOTH, we give the survivors a chance to win a very special bonus reward by casting each other’s games. The best caster (decided by an American Idol Style panel) wins a crucial new advantage of the game – tune in next week to find out what it is 🙂
Immunity Challenge: The order is set and we’re off! Game 1: Tempo vs. Brent; Game 2: Tubby vs. Winner; Game 3: kaitlyn vs. Winner; Game 4: Puck vs. Winner
Gameplay: Brent vs Tempo is our first match-up and right off the bat it becomes very obvious that Brent isn’t messing around this week. Unfortunately for Tempo, his status as the lowest ranked player in the game shows and is crushed by an early helion/banshee timing attack that he simply is not prepared for.
Casting: Tubby and Puck stole the show while kaitlyn laughed just as much as the viewers likely did here. Although I appreciated his passion, it felt like Puck wasn’t entirely in his casting groove yet – Tubby’s deadpan humor won me over and I ended up giving him the nod for the best casting performance of this game.
Gameplay: This was a wildly unexpected game, and baffling from my perspective as an outsider looking in. When did Tubby switch to Zerg? Is he more comfortable in ZvT than PvT? Why go for a low percentage build like swarmhost drops when you and your ally’s survivor lives are on the line? He almost pulled it off – almost – but I think Brent’s nerves may have gotten the better of him early on, and his ability to compose himself was the true key to victory in this game. That and the largely ignored drop in Tubby’s main that destroyed every tech structure…
Casting: Who let the trolls out? As soon as Tempo dropped from the game it looked like his chances to win the casting portion were slim to none. Thanks to Puck’s persistent, epic trolling, and a truly impressive show of adaptability, Tempo ended up finding a way to steal victory from the jaws of defeat in this judge’s mind. It can be argued that Puck made the game considerably more entertaining with his troll cast, but without additional support from kaitlyn to take things to the next level (who missed an opportunity to join in on the fun and make her presence known), I saw him more as the Scotty Pippen to Tempo’s Michael Jordan-esque slam dunk responses.
Gameplay: What do you know? Another swarmhost build! While kaitlyn goes for a more all-innish take on things with a swarmhost + nydus play a’la TLO – and damn near pulls it off – I’m starting to think that some pregame cross-alliance discussions may have occurred before this KOTH went down. Technically, Tubby is the highest ranked ladder player besides Puck, but I get the feeling that Brent was the chosen one here, and these games were nothing but warm-up matches to prepare him for the beast lying in wait at the end of the tunnel to immunity.
Casting: Although the combination of Tubby + Tempo has proven to be pretty unstoppable over the course of Starcraft 2 Survivors, Puck’s passion for every event that happened in the game was truly inspirational. It’s a good thing his casting peaked at this point too – it was his last opportunity to impress the casting judges before trying to win the challenge outright and dethrone Brent. At this point I had a three-way tie for Tubby, Tempo, and Puck with a strong lead for Puck in the event of a final tie-breaker scenario.
Gameplay: Let’s give it up for Brent – this challenge proved that he is no slouch when it comes to straight up 1v1s, and this game was much more even than a lot of people would have expected it to be. Although he couldn’t match Puck in tech when the game reached a three base vs. three base scenario, we still got to see that Brent can hang with one of the best Starcraft 2 players in NA.
Casting: I couldn’t control my laughter this game – Tempo steals the show with an unprecedented ‘Tyrone’ impression and uses his comedic genius to put himself in the best position to win the bonus reward. I would have liked to see kaitlyn try and make a last-minute push for victory here, but perhaps she was focused on watching the game and channeling all energies to her ally, Brant. Oh, sorry, I meant to say Brent!
Tribal Council: This is perhaps the most important tribal council yet – Puck can’t go home, which means someone’s alliance is about to break. I do my best here to fish out who has convinced Puck to come over to their side, but no one budges – I can’t blame them for this, being that the person you vote off is going to be the same person who potentially votes for you to win the game!
I’ll speak to this a bit further – we’ve had some really tame tribal councils, which signals to me that there are some intense discussions going on behind the scenes that the viewers and I don’t really get to see (BUT DOOM! You CAN see these intense behind the scene perspectives! You’re kidding me! How do I do that?! By donating to the prize pool of course! [in all seriousness, 100% of the prize pool goes to the survivors and we’re 28% away from our goal of a $1000!]). The most raw, emotional tribal council was easily the one where kaitlyn plays her hidden immunity idol and votes off Massan, but we’re seeing pattern of predictability emerge as the game progresses. The Sasquatch and QueenE votes do come to mind as the biggest blindsides in the game so far, but even then, our survivors have been quite civil (perhaps downright sneaky!) towards one another when it comes to discussing how they approach voting each other off.
This week is all but predictable though, as it’s up to Puck to decide who he wants to stay and who he wants to go – or is it?
In one of the oddest turns of events to take place this season, Tubby controls his own destiny by falling on his sword and voting himself out of the game (and taking one last opportunity to interrupt me at tribal council!! All in good fun :D).
Why? Because as captain he promised his allies a top 4 finish, and he’s a man of his word.
Let’s take a moment to commend Tubby for being as noble as a knight, but considering that he’s well-liked and one of the strongest players in the game, I think this was arguably the worst move in Starcraft 2 Survivors thus far (not counting Yume’s back-to-back reward & immunity absences). It will become more obvious why I think this way as the game progresses, but passing up on top 4 and guaranteed money after all the hard work you put in seems silly to me. Not sure if he regrets this decision in hindsight, but hey, it’s probably better to know you’re going home than to go home unexpectedly.
Agree? Disagree? Hit me up on twitter and we’ll continue the conversation from there.
NEXT WEEK: Can Tempo survive in a post-Tubby Survivor? Is Puck going to continue blazing a path to ultimate victory? Or will the brent/kaitlyn alliance find a way to win?
Tune in on twitch.tv/basetradetv Friday at 3PM EDT or 9PM EDT to find out!