“How did it come to this?”

- Theoden, King of Rohan, on 2014 Code A Season 1

Looking at the upcoming Code A line-up, one cannot help but ask that question. The lower clique of the GSL has been getting tougher by the season and by early 2014 it has become so stacked that it’s basically Code S without the money.

This upcoming season will be especially cutthroat. If last year the Challenger League (the WCS equivalent of Code A) offered players multiple chances to climb back to Code S (or Premier League), this year it’s win or go home. There’s just one massive dual tournament group stage: winners climb up, losers are back to the preliminaries. Nobody’s safe and even established champions and household names have the real chance of getting eliminated and losing their place in the GSL.

“How did I end up here” will thus be, I presume, a question that many players will ask themselves before the tournament is over.





​Speaking of household names and established champions, one such player has the questionable honor to play in the opening day of Code A. Meet Jin Air’s newest recruit, the ex-Woongjin ace sOs.

In November, sOs stood atop of the StarCraft 2 world as he conquered the BlizzCon World Finals through mind game and a vast repertoire of quirky and innovative builds. He made HerO, Polt, Bomber and Jaedong lie before him to form a red carpet of crushed bodies which led straight to the most expensive StarCraft 2 trophy in the world. To hold the $100,000 check was a career defining moment for sOs.

As with most successes of such caliber, sOs’ run was applauded by the viewership but there was a strange awkwardness to the celebration. As great an achievement as it was, Kim Yoo Jin’s championship wasn’t seen as the logical finale to that year of StarCraft. His 2013 wasn’t as dramatic as Jaedong’s or gold-laden as Taeja’s. He didn’t break-out as strong as Maru and Dear did. He didn’t return from exile like MMA or broke a curse like Bomber and neither was he a part of some great rivalry like Soulkey and Innovation. By being one of only six players to not win a single gold medal this year and ranked twelfth in the standings leading up to BlizzCon, sOs didn’t fit the role of world champion at all. He was looked at with equal doses of admiration and critique, a “privilege” reserved for other “out of place” champions like Seed or Sniper.

Regardless, one would think that a player who had beaten the biggest tournament of the year as well as his Challenger League opponents would be entitled to a Code S spot but the change of format came to play a cruel jape on sOs. The new WCS rules stated that only the top eight from the previous regional season would be entitled to Code S seeds and so Woongjin’s Protoss got left behind. Though his top twelve finish in last Code A granted him a high seed for the coming one, it was but a cold comfort: seeded or not, sOs is still two losses away from going from GSL elimination.

Luckily for him, sOs has good chances of surviving Code A. In the opening match of the group, he plays Shine in what has historically been the best match-up for sOs so it’s likely that the champion starts off on the right foot.

From there, his job gets harder. His next opponent will be either Classic – the STX and SKT trained Protoss who’s at 73% win rate in HotS – or Gumiho, the Terran who made killing Protoss through mad multitasking his specialty. This will not be a walk in the park for sOs by any margin. On the contrary – he has to take it as seriously as WCS playoffs, especially given the fact that he's been consistently failing Jin Air in Proleague and is yet to win a game there.

Two weeks after his triumph at BlizzCon, I wrote in my DreamHack Winter preview how being a world champion was not enough to make sOs the new ambassador of the Protoss; that the SC2 scene, with its characteristic viciousness, will demand even more results, turning sOs’ triumph into the sharpest double-edged sword.

This sword is now ready to draw blood.

The opening matches (click them to place your GosuBets):

Group A: sOs vs Shine

Group A: Gumiho vs Classic

Group B: Effort vs Curious

Group B: Sleep vs Ruin

