Power Rank - ASL3 Edition Text by TL.net ESPORTS Graphics by v1

With ASL3 just around the corner, here's another power rank to help satisfy your cravings! Without further ado, please go ahead and read our own rankings, post your own in the comments below and feel free to discuss to your heart's desire!



#1: Flash







#2: Last







#3: Bisu







#4: Sea







#5: BeSt







#6: Jaedong







#7: EffOrt







#8: Rain







#9: Soulkey







#10: by.hero







#11: Free







#12: GuemChi







#13: sSak







#14: Larva







#15: Light







#16: Movie







#17: Mini







#18: Shuttle







#19: Stork







#20: Snow







#21: Shine







#22: Mong







#23: Jaehoon







#24: Hyun







#25: GGaemo







#26: Lazy







#27: Pusan







#28: PURPOSE







Writers: BLinD-RawR

Graphics: v1

Editors: BigFan

Photo Credits: DailyEsports

With ASL3 just around the corner, here's another power rank to help satisfy your cravings! Without further ado, please go ahead and read our own rankings, post your own in the comments below and feel free to discuss to your heart's desire!Don’t even argue this one, #1 in ranking for March with an overall 77% winrate. Despite his loss to Tyson and Soulkey in the ASL Team Battle, Flash is a machine that learns from his losses. Once he learns how he's lost a particular game, he is able to close the gap in his strategy and evolve his play that much more. With every opposition, he gets stronger. It's going to take everything and then some for anyone to topple Flash from the top.Last’s biggest issue right now is that he's in the shadow of Flash, trading 1st position in the Afreeca monthly rankings with him every month, pinch hitting for team Flash in the ASL Team Battle when Flash couldn’t and still making it to #6 in March despite not playing enough games due to having the mumps. He has an excellent record in all 3 of his matchups. All that he needs to do now is win ASL3 to break out of Flash’s shadow.Bisu has been in a slump for some time now. Only very recently, in fact after the ASL Team Battle, has he started to take practice seriously. He even decided to not participate in SSLC, stating that he was focusing on ASL3 as his reason. The effects have already started to show with over 70% win rate in PvT and him quickly reclaiming his PvZ chops too. We can see that a serious Bisu is a very dangerous Bisu!Sea is a man on a mission. He has proven to the world already that he's no longer the offline failure that everyone thought him to be by making the finals of the last ASL over the PvT Monster BeSt. While losing to Flash in his most successful matchup isn’t something to look down on, it is only when he wins an offline tournament that he will be able to shake off any stigma against himself.BeSt is slowly but surely becoming one of the most dangerous players to play against. While he might have had a minor set back in his PvT in favor of improving his PvZ which resulted in him beating Jaedong twice in the last season and beating hero in the Ro8, 3-1, he's more than capable of switching gears and becoming the macro monster terran destroyer. His Ro4 finish last season only showed his weakness when it comes to making deep runs in tournaments, the only thing holding him back from winning.Jaedong might just be the player who is more comfortable performing inside the booth than the comfort of his own home. He defied all expectations by making it to the Ro4 of the last ASL and took Flash all the way to a game 5 in their semifinals, displaying some excellent mind games in a way that just proves that if Jaedong’s mind could will it, he could find himself victory when no one else thought it to be possible…...Just not at the cost of his wrists.What makes EffOrt so different from other zergs is his consistent results on stream and especially, having a winning record against Terrans who are not Flash. On top of that, he has placed in the Top 4 in March sponmatches, a level of consistency expected of a former CJ Entus player. However, since his victory over Bisu in the VANT Starleague Finals, he has also been showing the curse of every CJ Entus player which is choking when it matters. It's not going to take a lot from EffOrt to get over this since he has done it before, but it needs to happen sooner rather than later.A lot more was expected of Rain than a Ro16 finish last ASL who went on to have a good showing in the ASL Team Battle. While Rain is showing a leap in progress and skill, he still has not had many results as of yet due to a lack of competitions. This will be remedied by the fact that he is one of the 8 players chosen to play in SSLC.One game, that's all it takes for Soulkey. In a high pressure situation against not only the greatest player in the history of the game, but the player he had never been able to beat in the KeSPA era despite their many encounters, Soulkey may have figured out Flash in that one game and ended up giving hope to a lot of zergs that found the ZvT matchup to be nearly impossible. This coupled by the rest of his showing in the ASL Team Battle makes me believe that we are slowly seeing the rise of Soulkey that we were meant to see had the SC2 switch not happened.Another ASL, another Ro8 finish for hero. Despite being bested by BeSt in ASL2 and dropping out to Rain in the ASL team battle, all very surprising results considering that ZvP is his matchup, hero has since managed to make it to the Top 10 in Sponmatches in March with an average win rate of 60.8%.Free’s tournament results so far have been lackluster for the quality of games he's been showing on stream. He was one of the players who was doing extremely well against Flash in sponmatches between Feb and March going on 7-8 game streaks against him during that period. Unfortunately for him, Flash had him figured out and quickly began evening out the score. Should he show this level of play this season, he’d be a serious contender for gold.Another season, another Ro8 finish for GuemChi. Although it remains to be seen if he would have made the Top 4 in ASL2 if his opponent wasn't Flash, GuemChi has proven himself repeatedly in the ASL Team Battle by leading his team to victory. Things are looking up for GuemChi this season!sSak was completely missing in the last ASL after failing to qualify but has more than made up for it in the ASL Team Battle for Team Bisu, showing that he could carry the team on his solo games when he was counted on. We might be able to see the sSak of old in this season of ASL.Larva is the true workhorse of the Afreeca scene, capable of grinding out the most number of games every month especially when practicing for the ASL. Although he did drop out quickly in the last season, he did make up for it by making a Ro8 run in the HoSIC starleague losing to Light in a very close series.Light has always been a TvZ specialist. In fact, he has been considered one of the best TvZ players of all time, unfortunately, at the cost of having a mediocre TvP. It was an all protoss group that did him in in the Ro16 of ASL2. Now in the Ro24 of ASL3, he has to deal with another all protoss group. By just making it through that group, he’d become a serious contender for winning.Movie has been having a very gradual resurgence in both skill and popularity over the last year, making the Ro16 last ASL. It remains to be seen if his returning skill will get him further this season, especially with his PvZ being on point these days.Mini’s prolific hyper aggressive (early game manner pylons in mineral lines) playstyle is going to cause a lot of trouble for his opponents if they don't know how to deal with him, especially in PvT where even Flash has voted him as “The most troublesome player to play against”. He even managed to get a winning record, 5-3 against him in March. What holds him back right now is his largely untested PvZ.Despite winning ASL1 which lead him to be seeded straight into the Ro16 of ASL2, he quickly dropped out of his group 0-2 even managing to lose to Light in the process. It's hard to see what this season has in store for Shuttle, but being a former champion proves that he's more than capable of bouncing back from failures.It might come as a surprise to many to see Stork so low. Even back in KeSPA days when he was rumoured to have focused a lot more on his then girlfriend or playing World of Warcraft, he still managed to make deep runs in tournaments with less practice than usual. That was because he was always being depended on to play his best game. This time around, however, he's not bound anymore to perform. Having stated that he’d rather focus on being a better entertainer than a player gunning for gold, it's unlikely he's going to push himself like his competitors will.Snow was a promising prospect on the CJ Entus team in the KeSPA era and continued to show decent results in online/offline tournaments prior to his army enlistment. He has already shown a couple of good games in the preliminaries of the ASL against Mind which show that his skills haven’t dulled by a lot.Guemchi After a long stint as the official ASL and GSL observer, Shine has finally made his way into the ASL once more. He showed a great series against Mind in the Busan Qualifiers. It’ll be interesting to see where he goes from here.Mong has fallen off hard in the last couple of years, with only brief flashes of his prior excellence shown. He has slowly become a rare sight to see in tournaments and in the last ASL, he was only able to beat Hint but fell to Jaedong twice in his group.Jaehoon’s position being this low might come as a shock to people who have seen his march results, rising to #2 in ranking, but he did so by avoiding most of the top players and playing the ones he didn’t avoid as little as possible. Unfortunately for him, in ASL, he doesn’t get that kind of luxury. That said, he is the enigma, capable of being bafflingly good at the game if the stars align, or at the very least at recalls.After a fairly successful SCII career that took him overseas most of the time, Hyun’s return to familiar territory in both BW and Korea might be one for him to look forward to. While he wasn’t a very solid player back in the KeSPA era, this might be the time for him to shine in BWIn the short gap between his release from the army and the qualifiers for the ASL, GGaemo has played a record of over 1500 games. It's no wonder that he was able to get through the qualifiers with that kind of sheer hard work and focus going into playing the game for hours on end. It remains to be seen what kind of results that his hard work can produce especially since he's had no prior results in the post-KeSPA era since 2012.If we were still following a Tier system in rating players in the scene, Lazy would be considered a solid B rank protoss who was capable of playing some decent games against better players but not at a level where he can consistently give a decent showing, let alone win games. It also does not help the fact that he's placed in the worst possible group for him in the Ro24This is Pusan’s first offline tournament since his return from military service. Prior to that, he was a mainstay in many major tournaments. However, since the boom of big name returns, it's unlikely that Pusan would really be able to maintain that position especially after not playing for so long as well.The New blood amateur in a sea of accomplished superstars, pros and other storied amateurs. Without much to be seen, there's very little to be said about him. In a stacked tournament like this, it remains to be seen if purpose will stick out or fall as quickly as others in his position.BLinD-RawRv1BigFanDailyEsports