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Shuttle and Larva have progressed from Group C after a hard fought round of 16 pool battle in the StarCraft II AfreecaTV Starleague over the weekend.
The pair join Group A quarter finals qualifiers Flash and Mind and Group B success stories hero and Snow, who all qualified earlier this month.
Pool D will be played on Tuesday, April 17, with the final two places in the quarter finals to be decided out of Rain, Action, Movie and Mini.
Our StarCraft II expert Zak Y has recapped two of the btter Pool C matches and given a synopsis of the other games below.
Jaedong vs Larva
Map: Transistor
The round started off with a Zerg vs Zerg match between Larva vs Jaedong on Transistor. Jaedong, a one time dominant figure in the SC:BW world, entered the match a 2:1 favourite.
Jaedong opened up with a nine pool, whereas Larva opted for a conservative twelve pool, gaining a slight economic advantage in the early game.
Larva parlayed his economic lead into a fast expansion, whereas Jaedong tried to capitalize on his earlier pool by forcing his way into his opponent’s main with zerglings. While Jaedong did break through, Larva managed to minimize any losses and counter attacked with lings, doing devastating damage to Jaedong’s economy.
Jaedong had managed to tech up to spire, so Larva was forced to respond with spores and Jaedong sent his single muta (all he could afford) across the map. Amazingly, the game had been so scrappy that Jaedong was down to a single drone and Larva had only two.
Both players then began to rebuild their nascent economies, but with two hatches to one Larva had a tremendous lead and eventually Jaedong decided to tap out.
Effort vs Shuttle
Map: Transistor
Match two for this round was also on Transistor, with Effort (Zerg) vs Shuttle (Protoss).
Both players opened up with macro builds, with Effort opening with three hatcheries and Shuttle also grabbing a fast expansion then teching to corsairs.
For his part Effort got a lair, as well as a spire and a hydra den. Both players continued to macro up, and while Effort secured his fourth base before Shuttle even got his third, Shuttle did manage to do some economic damage with dark and high templar drop harass.
The protoss player tried to hit a pre-hive timing with a massive gateway based army but Effort’s defensive posture was too good.
Into the late game Effort made great use of plague to weaken his opponent’s units, while Shuttle continued his high templar drop harass causing economic damage and both players built up maxxed out high tech armies.
Effort attempted a massive doom drop into Shuttle’s main but it was eventually cleaned up. Shuttle did very well during the late game, trading efficiently and holding off attacks on his various bases as well as utilizing reaver drops to keep the zerg economy in check.
At thirty minutes into the game, with almost the entire map mined out. Shuttle had a pretty large supply lead with 3.6k minerals in the bank and after securing and holding the last available expansion on the map the game was his.
The overview
As for the other matches, Shuttle won the winners match against Larva, being the first to move on to the round of eight. Jaedong took a surprising defeat against Effort to be the first of the group eliminated, despite being widely considered the favourite to make it out of the group in first. Unfortunately for Effort despite defeating Jaedong he lost to Larva in the final match and was also eliminated.
