GRAND FINALS: Maru vs. Serral (IEM Katowice 2024) 

Super fast, thank you!

Shit finals

@@Foudzing Why?

​@@Metaspace2 because it was not interesting Maru had no chances. If terran wants to win vs zerg at the highest level of play he has to do dumb allins and pray zerg doesn't scout and fucks up like olivera did last year, playing the macro game against a good zerg = lose.

no, thats just serral, no other european, american or asian has his level. No more tears, only dreams now.@@Foudzing

yeah, he played great especially after terran nerf. Total skill dominance.

@@Contractor48you are stupid

@@Contractor48 widow buff, Cyclone buff, medivac buff, Bane nerf, infestor nerf, lurker nerf, broodling nerf, OMG TERRAN NERF!!1!

@@andrewduan5123 what buff? Cyclone and window mine buff? Don't want it. I am complaing about the same thing as you. The older one was better. Remove all nerf and buff from zerg and revert the "buff" from terran. The old ghosts, cyclones, old raven with anti armor damage and auto turrets are needed. And window mines without armory.

@@Contractor48 the most useless in terran the air ship it turn like a tiny bugs to air flyer of zerg imagine you have spaceship but you cant fly fast and the armor so low even he can fire air to air but can't fire land unlike to Zerg flyer it's multi roll faster more armore can auto heal can attack land and air so I can say Zerg so OP at all specially the fungal can crawl in the ground without detecting and the banelings can destroy the whole place in a split seconds

Watching this instead: no regrets

Wait, people consider the other event a "game" to watch? I always thought that was a music show or something.

@@juliuskwak1263 I thought it was a what are the best adverts of the year highlights video source

@@juliuskwak1263correct

@@mariusevander2214also correct

you made me spit water to my monitor lmao

Serral's gotta be happy about that one! Serral: 😐

tbf he does occasionally hit a very rare 🙄@@ClearAlera

You can see Serral's face, he realises he's up against the wall! Serral: 😐

Google "steven segal emotion chart", its applicable to Serral

I honestly dont think Toss is underpowered, people just dont like playing as toss. Reynor showed that, he took up Toss and was instantly like top 5 toss in the world. The race isnt bad, just that skilled players prefer other races.

​@@crazzynezmore so toss players are stuck having *FUN* rather than winning

@@crazzynez hahaha Reynor top 5 Protoss World? Not at all 🤣🤣

The main problem for Toss is NOT balance but the skill of the players. Just look at the last series Hero vs Serral - Serral won 4:1. But game 3 was the biggest throw I have EVER seen in any Starcraft game. Hero can play awesome - and then again he plays bad. Bad compared to other top players not like in “he plays like you and me”. If you are this inconsistent you won’t go far, it’s simple as that. I agree that the Ghost is a problem in TvP, but in general, the Toss players are just not as good as the Terran and Zerg players. That's why they don't win tournaments. And it is not only me who is saying this. Harstem e.g. said it too.

@@wedgeantilles8575 They dont win Tournaments cause Protoss is the weakest race. "TeRrAnS aNd ZeRgS aRe JuSt BeTtEr". Low IQ

Why sad?

Because Maru is an excellent player but he always seems to be on the back foot because he plays Terran and Terran is nerfed to hell.

@@mgyldz ok, bro. go back to bed.

Terran is the strongest race at the moment. ​@@mgyldz

@@martinwest7250 Yeah no. It has been consistently the least played race in GM. It gets worse in lower leagues as the skill required to play Terran effectively is way higher.

thanks, yes i'm back

@michajanicki6860 Good to see you!

Lol Maru got absolutely wrecked. It's almost boring watching him play Serral.

@@colinfaust3058 Yeah, Serral has something like a 90% winrate in the knock-out stages against Maru. 2 years ago somebody posted a comment after Serral destroyed Maru: “Serral makes Maru look like somebody I could beat” - that sums it up pretty nicely. And yet you always find people in chat who claim Maru is the GOAT…

@@wedgeantilles8575 Well it says a lot. Because Maru is definitely the GOAT of Terrans. There are no Terran in SC2 that were ever better overall than Maru, not even Innovation or TY or Taeja. So that speaks volume if the greatest Terran can't beat the greatest Zerg 9/10 times. I'll be honest, Serral is indeed really really incredible, but the balance at the top between Zerg and Terran seem rather imperfect. If the Zerg doesn't make any blunder and applies constant pressure like Serral does, the Terran is going to bleed. For the simple reason that Zerg units are much more mobile and in a late game battle where you gotta split your units to defend multiple bases, Zergs will for sure be able to draw first blood. Now, does that mean that Serral only beats Maru because he's a Zerg? For sure not, he's insanely good. But to see people like Dark win maybe 40% of the maps against Serral and someone like Maru 10% is quite confusing. Dark isn't better than Maru, but ZvZ is the only match up that doesn't take balance into consideration as both players have the same tools. So I'm thinking that balance might have something to do with Serral's dominance in ZvT.

@@EternityGamesVids Sorry, but Serral uses several infestors, burrowed all over the place to get fungals in, because that is his only chance in late game. As soon as one gets killed, he makes another. He borrows lings on a terran natural, to force out a scan. He uses overlords to spread creep, sometimes even in lategame. And now compare that to Maru this series: He refuses to build ravens. He does not build proper walls to prevent lings from getting in. He does not use a liberator to shield his mineral lines from a ling runby. He played creedy without proper scouts several times. Serral plays on a completely different level than Maru. Serral uses tons of infestors (that he can NOT have with his army but who needs to be spread out across the map), uses vipers, uses everything Zerg has lategame. Maru uses ghosts. Even 1 Raven is too much effort for him. How can you blame anything on balance, when Terrans are too “lazy” to use the tools they have? How would the games go if Serral wouldn’t build a single infestor, because"too much effort"??

@@wedgeantilles8575 I agree. I find the lack of ravens in most ZvT games baffling... What do terrans have against that unit? It will save your scans for mules, and you can use it for harasse or anti armor. At least just put it on follow. When you see how many different spells the top zergs fires off, then why can terran only play with ghosts???

Serral has obviously been the goat for many many years now and there is no serious argument for Maru, especially after this destruction of a series

With the OP race tho

@@yannickfrogel3537 only a copium addict would say that. Serral is in a league of its own, and Roaches/Banelings/Infestors all have received significant nerfs in the past couple years, all units he used extensively against Maru in the final. As much as I am a Terran fanboy and a Clem/Byun/Maru/Heromarine stan, there is literally no way to argue against that.

Katowice isn’t the global finals this year. The saudi tournament is

Winning a tournament/series makes you a champion, not the best player. It's merely evidence towards being better. In the absence of superhuman analysis that can get a handle of how "objectively good" the plays are (in the same sort of way we have for Chess), the closest you can get to "who's better" is ratings, and the finals could have been a BO19 and Maru could have won them 10-0 and only about there might ratings give a different verdictl. A single tournament series, even BO7, isn't that much evidence compared to everything else. And on topic of "the greatest" and if you can question that status, well, you don't even need to be better to be considered the great by some. In Chess where we have "basically objective" rankings for how good the players actually are and a lot of people still swear by e.g. Bobby Fischer even though computers think he's only fourth best in history, some individuals even put up the likes of Lasker or Capablanca or Morphy, even though "objectively" they'd be like #100. Well, here they might concede that they're not objectively so strong, but rather gesture towards talent (whatever that means) or unbroken records (when the playing field was much much worse) or winning some notorious "match of the century", or something. If by "great" you mean something else than "good" then Maru can easily be argued on similar grounds, or NesTea or MVP or Flash/Jaedong, or even someone like FruitDealer.

Zerg is literally op and the map pool is z favored . There I said the truth unlike you

zerg is op, serral just use op race to win. give maru hellbat rollbacks and raven rollbacks and ghost rollbacks, he will crush this washed up race-abuser called serral.

salty boy over here@@einerheit5871

Just goes to show you how much blizzard hates protoss.

@@einerheit5871 Terran spell caster keep getting nerfed, like in this patch they buffed cyclones to compensate for the ghost nerf. And then they nerfed cyclone to the ground..

It doesn’t need any updates.

They dont make any money off it and the game has been slowly dying since they arent trying to bring in new players

Why they need to make and market the crap out of a SC3

I miss the days when once the Protoss got up the Golden Armada it was game over. You could've taken the entire map but you'll never be able to defeat them in a straight up fight.

Zerg gets minimal nerf while terran and toss are shadow nerfed in the name of balance. How cyclone was buffed to compensate terran ghost nerf and then it got nerfed to the ground is beyond my understanding.

Protoss might be "underpowered" at the 7k mmr pro gamer level. Anything under that, and it's literally the easiest race, then terran being slightly harder to play but overpowered, and zerg is still the most underpowered and most nerfed of all races.

​@jebediah4780 zerg is much simpler then Terran, what are you talking about,lmao, oh let me guess, you play zerg

@jebediah4780 I do agree Protoss is the easiest race to play, but that's also what makes them so underpowered at high levels. The reason why pros are the pros is because they make the difficult things look easy to do. Hitting mass snipes on Brood Lords or Ultras? Pretty hard. Burrow moving Infestors into perfect spots and landing fungals? Pretty hard. Blinking Stalkers? Chargelots? Mass Phoenix? Not that hard. Even Recall which is supposed to be the Protoss's spear is absolute trash being limited to a single unit that's literally the biggest and in the most vulnerable situation to be able to use recall. Terran has situational presence, you'll always lose the battle running into siege tanks and Libs. Zerg have swarm, you may defeat this army, but what about that one over there and the next one on the way? All Protoss have is hopefully my army is stronger than yours.

I think it's Apples and Oranges, Serral has adapted to Maru's playstyle, and his gameplay just keeps getting better, but I'd still rather play against Serral. I confess, I love to watch a Terran Turtle's shell crack, it was pure Zerg desperation.

@Unknown0YTO, You need to watch real AI with 100k+ APM. It's like one Serral for each individual unit. During testing they limited AI APM because it was impossible for humans with two hands and one brain to win.

If maru or serral played toss, they wouldn't be the best players in the world

@@dotarian6754 For winning tournament, choosing toss seems a bad decision.

hero is the only decent pro protoss right now.

@@dotarian6754 serral would destroy any protoss bro, especially hero (who is my fav player). Same story with Maru-Hero. 8 protosses in top 24. 0 in quarterfinals. It speaks for itself 🥲

Sorry, but the main problem for Toss is NOT balance but the skill of the players. Just look at the last series Hero vs Serral - Serral won 4:1. But game 3 was the biggest throw I have EVER seen in any Starcraft game. (BTW: That WAS a final!) Hero can play awesome - and then again he plays bad. Bad compared to other top players not like in “he plays like you and me”. If you are this inconsistent you won’t go far, it’s simple as that. I agree that the Ghost is a problem in TvP, but in general, the Toss players are just not as good as the Terran and Zerg players. And it is not only me who is saying this. Harstem e.g. said it too.

If serral played protoss, he wouldn't be the best in the world. We can deduce he's a good player but it also means zerg is kinda busted.

@@dotarian6754or that Protoss is underpowered. Really it’s impossible to tell how good serral would be if he chose to play a different race, maybe he would still be good as he is, maybe he wouldn’t, know one will ever know

People are delusional. Almost all the comments are just complaining about balance. Serral and Maru are both absolutely incredible players, and the fact that each of them has had success for close to a decade is a testament to their respective skill. The first two games were fun to watch and very close, and Maru unfortunately got tired (as one would playing a marathon of intense games) and made some mistakes in the last two games. I don’t know how anyone can watch this tournament and attribute all their success or failure to the race they chose to play with.

@dotarian6754 if Zerg were busted, other Zergs would've been close. Protoss is a step behind the other two.

not really, it 's just zerg being OP as usual lol. Most "pro" in SC2 play zerg because of that and most tournament champions are zerg players.

@@TheBikeOnTheMoonwell, if you take out serral, 2/3 of the rest was won by Terran. There were 6/12 terrans qualified in this tournament and only 4/10 Zerg. If we look at it purely objectively, when taking out Serral, it would seem Terran has better stats… Then again, there is Serral.

@@TheBikeOnTheMoon That is statistically wrong. Most well-doing pro players play T at this point (most of them being korean), tournament top10 have by far most T players, even with P almost not showing up at all and GM is like 50%+ T players with the least amount of zerg players. Zerg is pretty underpowered in ZvT at this point but serral is just two leagues of skill above everyone else. T receiving buffs after buffs is quite a joke considering they got the best overall unit in the game so far (thors) and do not even use their whole arsenal of units properly at the highest levels (ravens + BC).

@@TheBikeOnTheMoonliterally just spewing BS 😂😂😂😂 just say you’re bad at the game and go

@@TheBikeOnTheMoonofc, the old "zerg OP" chestnut. There's a saying "the bad d*ck is bothered even by his own hair". It's a bad translation to English, but I think you get the meaning.

Blizzard had like 2 people maintaining sc2 at most and both got laid off by Microsoft More like "if serral wins anyway, noone will notice we are putting exactly zero effort into StarCraft 2"

Unstoppable for the past five years -- true dominance

Correct. Just look how close some of these games were despite maru getting outplayed like crazy.

'of course the spellcaster that can win any engagement with one fungal is balanced, why you ask?'

@@dgam4211 As you can clearly see, there is no single fungal that even remotely wins the game. Also, 2 uses of EMP can just as easily win games, and 8 cloaked ghosts with 16 snipes can by far more reliably win games if zerg ever does not pay attention. So i guess you're saying snipe and EMP are both unbalanced?

toss suck rn

Has blizzard ever liked protoss?

Blizzar likes protos its just that it become obnoxious @@dotarian6754

how to buff toss so they stop dominating ladder, but sucking at top level play.

​@@andrewduan5123by nerfing cheeses and terrans. Nerfing serral & reynor & solar & Dark(not sure he throws enough games) is also required

And another surprise: zerg wins.

@@Vipperland Correction: Serral wins Honestly you could make every zerg unit cost 5 more minerals and he would still win tournaments, he's easily the best player we've ever had in Starcraft 2, with statistics like Flash in Broodwar He's a statistical outlier. Also if you're interested, Terran had 6/12 of the post-groups slots Zerg had 4 Toss had 2 (Neither made it out of the Ro12)

I'm not talking about Serral, he is almost a god in star craft. In every tournament, the same result tvz or zvz.

@@Vipperland if you take Serral out of the occasion, the results of every premier tournament since Jan 2023 have been. Code S Team League 2023: Onyside- Maru (majority T team) V liquid-Clem (majority T team) (majority T team winner) ESL Masters Winter 2023: Clem (T) V Dark (Z) (T winner) GSL S3 Code S: Solar (Z) V GuMiHo(T) (Z winner) GSL S2 Code S: Maru (T) V Dark (Z) (T winner) Gamers8 2023: Reynor (Z) V Cure (T) (Z winner) Katowice 2023: Oliveira (T) V Maru (T) (T winner) Team League Summer 2023: Onyside (T team) V Basilisk (Z team) (T winner) GSL S1 Code S: Maru (T) V Cure (T) (T winner)

​@@Vipperland Thb considering the player count in this game, it might be that Protoss players are just not as good as the best T and Z players. As a dev you can't really rely on the performance of 4-5 protoss players to nerf or buff the race. SC2 community complains abt all races anyway.

Yeah honestly, even having just a couple ravens around the map patrolling with his armies, would have saved him from a few of those fungals which cost him him a few small armies.

I think it would hurt their metrics to have portions of EVERY video that nobody watches. But I do agree with you that knowing there is only 5 mins left of a video in a match that is 3-0 sort of gives away who wins the last game. It's hard to avoid seeing the time bar at the bottom of the screen, no matter how hard I try.

We all know what will happen even if they do the things. It’s tvz, what have you expected?

If it was terrain or zerg, I'd agree. :D Can't say I miss Protoss that much, not even after this many years of barely having any.

they were just trying to keep the suspense going i think. In theory it was technically possible, with perfect pickoffs and a hundred mistakes from serral - but realistically it would never happen.

They just brought up that it was possible and if anyone could pull it off, it was Maru. It's literally their job to analyze the game and explore options.

They probably mean that maru should be able to fight in a way in which he kills all corruptors and enough of serrals army eventually so that serral cannot build a single corruptor, but that most likely would never have happened with the amount of gas serral had and alone his mineral wall at pocket 3rd being enough to build a corruptor.

Yes. By player's request. Pooping is allowed too.

Having zergs in your bracket doesnt disorove zerg op. All that proves is serral is the best zerg. Zerg's still op.

@@JohnSmith-mj3vj There were 5 terrans and 3 zergs in the quarterfinals and Clem won the last premier tournament, stop whining.

@@honk2727 and zerg won like the other 7 premier league tournaments in 2023. What's your point? Yea, terrans can perform well enough but once you get to the tippy top, they can't hang. It's like a sports team that is consistently good and so they always make the playoffs but never great so they never win. Zerg was literally in every final and won like 80% of them lmao. And it's not just serral either.

@@JohnSmith-mj3vj When you take away Serral's games, Terran had a 18-15 map score vs Zerg this tournament, and had a guaranteed final's player as early as the quarter finals. They hang just fine. Terran isn't being kept down because of balance.

@@cousinpatsey2471 bruh, you know you already lost when you gotta manipulate stats. How you gonna say "take away the player with the most wins and zerg looks ok in comparison". Take away Maru's wins against zergs, who only faced 3 zergs vs serral facing 4 terrans and its 14-26 in favor of zergs lol. End of the day, zerg has a 60% win chance vs terran and nearly 85% vs protoss. Add that to them winning 80% of tournaments and you think it is balanced somehow.

Quite often you rather see a zerg crashing waves and waves of units against T walls without the ability to really do anything else and while the Z looks dominant like 20 minutes in, you get the crawling feeling that in the end, T will just have turtled enough so that Z dies. Luckily, serral is just too good for any T's to do that to him, but if that was not the case, we would still see that quite often.

@@asdfasdf-mn8iu thats true because terran marines are early mid and late game unit mix with some ghost ... And from start to finish they benefit from the same upgrade Give zerg an early range unit that can go until mid game at least ( please dont talk about queen ) Thats why

Which side? Who won?

Yeah, Serral won 4-0, but games 1 and 2 were incredibly close. Maru only started to make critical mistakes in games 3 and 4.

Perhaps by playing better you can be aggressive and have economic advantage too? Or is it not possible in a balanced game to play better? :O

@@asdfasdf-mn8iu me doubling my bank account by playing better

그냥 알파고임 최적의 플레이를 찾아서 이겨버려

Watchers have been screaming it at the top of our lungs for the past 3-4 years and yet it just is not picked up by pros. I think it's specifically that Ravens cost too much to be thrown around like Zerg Overseers and therefore you don't catch Infestors till too late anyway because the raven detection isn't enough to cover a fungle from downtown. TLDR: Ravens need to be cheaper or expect this to continue because Terrans can't just infinitely scan the map (not that they should be able to).

I never understood why it wasn’t - at least in the late stages of the game. Having detection that moves with the army clears Creep easily and prevents those Infestor and Baneling ambushes. I don’t play Terran though, so maybe there is a good reason.

@@moneygrab610 yeah infestors and banelings so OP at all imagine the infestors crawling in the grounds and can't see and then automatically can pop up and borrowed as fast

@@Whattheheck_78 lol? Mines, ghosts? Ghosts are the strongest casters in the game lol countering all late tech. And the only counter is a good fungal and a timing attack which is hard AF

​@@ostankovalex1176it's not, and it's not harder than actually using the ghosts. It's two clicks.

It definitely looked like Maru became frustrated. Understandable though, as two intense late games that were very close just barely slip through his fingers. At that point, you have played over an hour straight of your best Starcraft only two be down two games in a Bo7.

@@moneygrab610 yeap, the man got tilted. He was very weak in the last game. And it's not that easy to play a sht ton of games in a row.

Zerg OP as af

Yeah, i love serral because he plays so well. Much more enjoyable to watch than the other pros sometimes fumbling really hard with stuff i struggle with also. Serral just plays so clean and well.

Zerg nerfing just creates more great Z players and more whiners

They are too expensive and instantly gunned down.

Maru is that good. There is your answer

​@@christtel1484 so then serral is even better. Because He also 3-1 Dark only losing to an early all in, and 3-0 clem. Clem shut down solar as well. There were 6 terran , 4 zerg and 2 protoss in the playoffs. There were literally only 3 ZvT matchups in the entire playoffs. That was Clem vs Solar, which Clem won, and Serral Vs Clem, Serral Vs Maru. So your only basis for zerg being OP is that Serral dominated. In the group stages, Serral again dominated 5-0. SHIN and Solar had good results 4-1, but Reynor and Scarlett were eliminated. Dark went 3-2. Compared to Terran players, Heromarine went 5-0, and Byun, Maru, and Cure went 4-1, clem and gumiho 3-2. Protoss was the only one with lackluster results, only hero and skillous getting a 3-2. Based on the stats, it is actually terran that is over powered, and only Serral was able to make it so far.

If serral played protoss, he wouldn't be the best player in the world. Just sayin...

@@dotarian6754 he has won open cups playing protoss before, just to make a point. He's the GOAT of SC2 for a reason. (I do think protoss is bad right now)

I don't know how the grouping works, but the fact that semi is z vs z and t vs t seems like they don't want a mirror match final? Even from round of 8 it seems it seems that is already planned. The way they groups from the start (each group has strong and normal players instead of one group of strong and another group of low ranks) probably already plan this for the start. I mean, if they have 2 groups of strong and another group of low rank, the final might end up Serral vs Kelazshur because Serral might knock out Maru even before round of 8. Of course they can't plan anything, but it seems they use the ranking and fight history to get what they want and they kinda get what they want ( not a mirror match). The fact they get Serral vs Maru which they highly hyped is a sus.

Yeah man if serral can win zerg is op hes not good

@@svsv1191 24 players made up to group stage of this tournament. 10 Terrans, 8 toss and only 6 zergs. Its not about OP zergs, Serral is just a goat

Oh, what bothers you about serrals unit composition? That he uses every unit zerg has except mutas and swarm host? Yeah, fuck that unit composition.

@@asdfasdf-mn8iu Well, if you can't see it, I'm not here to help you how to read a SC II game. But I guess it's not so apparent in the lower leagues.

@@thee0581 All you're revealing is your absolute clueness about the game, buddy. The fewer unit compositions a race has, the more problematic it becomes btw. Not the case for T, who can pursue all kinds of buildorders compared to "3 hatch into ling bane or roach ravager" for zerg.

Those rocket can detect and reveal burrow/stealth unit sensor can only detect

They do.

Where in those games did banelings shine? The only game in which they were somewhat relevant was in game 2 and that was the closest. Also, banes were necessary there to even kill the army that was fungaled time and time again because zerglings are so bad at killing fleeing units.

@@asdfasdf-mn8iu fastest highest dps unit in the game is bad at killing fleeing units

@dgam4211 Zerglings don't have the highest DPS in the game, that's thors, then libs, and then probably stimmed bio. Do you know what's exceptional at killing fleeing units? Stimmed bio with concussive. Isn't that nice? T really gets all the treats.

@@asdfasdf-mn8iu delusional