‘Chiu on This’ is a short and regular opinion blast

ByuL has announced his retirement from Starcraft 2. With his retirement, I strode down memory lane to reminisce about his career. He was a Korean player recruited early on by Fnatic and had shown some promise, particularly in the teamleagues. He then joined Incredible Miracle where he played in WCS NA and was alright there. Among that time I’d say that his best style of play was with mutalisk, ling, and baneling against bio Terran, but it wasn’t exceptional. He then joined CJ Entus upon his return to Korea.

At that point in time, he raised up his level of game to the next level. It’s hard to say how much influence he had from other players. For instance, his counter-attack style recalls some of the peak Nestea play and they both did play under Incredible Miracle. During that period of time, Life was an ascendant ZvT player and so it seems likely that ByuL watched his games as well. At the same time, CJ Entus was a KeSPA Korean house and outside of Life (Whose peaks I suspect were almost all correlated to his own self motivation at any given time), have almost always made players better. Whatever the case was, he took the best of what Life had to offer and the best of what Nestea had to offer and killed Muta, zergling, baneling vs Terran Bio. He killed it by mastering it to such a level that the entire Terran race capitulated and gave up playing it against him. He had the aggression of Life without going over the edge. He had the map control and precise consistent counter attack damage from the mutalisks. I actually think he will go down as the greatest mutalisk player SC2 ever saw.

From that form he was able to get to three GSL Finals and like soO, lost all three of them. It was bemusing in that he could have beaten any of these players he met except in the finals. One of the best players of 2015 and another Zerg kong that will live on in the shadow of soO. Sadly he never did much in LotV except for a brief moment when mutalisks were relavent in 2017 which makes me wonder how much the entire expansion has hurt his entire style of play.

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