{"id":52,"date":"2012-01-17T12:36:51","date_gmt":"2012-01-17T20:36:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/starcraft.kevinleung.com\/?p=52"},"modified":"2013-03-17T13:29:09","modified_gmt":"2013-03-17T20:29:09","slug":"stephanos-muta-less-zvt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/?p=52","title":{"rendered":"Stephano&#8217;s muta-less ZvT"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My Starcraft separation continues amidst other things in life, but I did get to watch 2 or 3 games from the SHOUTcraft Invitational 4 finals this weekend between Stephano (Z) and Thorzain (T). My opinion of Thorzain goes up and down, but he has already participated in one of the best ZvT finals I&#8217;ve ever watched against DRG in the Dreamhack Valencia finals (VODs <a href=\"http:\/\/www.teamliquid.net\/forum\/viewmessage.php?topic_id=266635\">here<\/a>). That series was traditional Marine-Medivac-Tank against Ling-Baneling-Muta and really showed how back and forth it could be.<\/p>\n<p>The Stephano-Thorzain series (VODs <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/SpoilerFreeSC\/comments\/oie6f\/completed_event_shoutcraft_invitational_4\/\">here<\/a>), however, shows how Stephano completely blows that matchup apart. Best I could tell, Thorzain played it by the book: early hellion pressure while expanding, transition into marine-tank with some early pressure, and then into the midgame. Stephano completely crushed this by going for a ling-infestor composition with a lot of lings early. This did a few things for him:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the tank count never got very high because Stephano had so many lings out. When the first push came, he just kept pumping lings. Without a sufficient number of tanks, Thorzain was always vulnerable<\/li>\n<li>to make them less vulnerable and more effective, Thorzain spread his tanks. When he did this, Stephano used Infested Terran bombs to have the tanks splash and kill themselves<\/li>\n<li>with low tank counts, Thorzain&#8217;s marines were vulnerable to fungals and banelings, and that completely opened up the game<\/li>\n<li>since Stephano had the infestation pit and not a particularly heavy commitment to the midgame, he got Hive quickly and started tier 3 before Thorzain could really ever build his perfect composition<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=uGbF843MgC0\">SC2NoobSchool<\/a> appears to have a tutorial about this style, though I admittedly haven&#8217;t watched it myself. I&#8217;m not really sure how terran is expected to deal with this, as Thorzain even stuck by hellions a little longer in a few games, to no avail, as the ridiculous ling count always got a surround.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll see how popular this style gets as we get back into tournament season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My Starcraft separation continues amidst other things in life, but I did get to watch 2 or 3 games from the SHOUTcraft Invitational 4 finals this weekend between Stephano (Z) and Thorzain (T). My opinion of Thorzain goes up and &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/?p=52\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,20],"tags":[23,24],"class_list":["post-52","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analysis","category-zerg","tag-stephano","tag-thorzain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":238,"href":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions\/238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}