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Survivor fans! Welcome back to my third blog (last one before the final episode – woohoo!), where I will provide in-depth analysis and a behind the scenes perspective on this past week’s show – as always, feel free to ask additional questions and send comments to my twitter so we can continue the conversation from there!

LAST WEEK: Tubby fell on his sword and effectively voted himself out of the game, while Tempo, Puck, Brent, and kaitlyn officially made it to the top 4 and are in the money ($$$$)!

Reward Challenge: Suck on it Trebek! DOOM’s taking over, hosting SC2 Survivors Jeopardy like a boss in an Adidas track suit jacket and Budweiser pajama pants (still waiting for my advertising royalty checks). Rifkin came up with the idea to make the categories very simple: Zerg, Protoss, Terran, SC2 General, and of course SC2 Survivors. From there, I took the ball and ran with it, googling around various websites and coming up with tiered questions that ranged from 100 – 500 points.

When we initially planned this reward a few months ago, the plan was to do a SC2 Survivors based trivia question challenge that ran during a Raynor Party match, but since we were forced to use Raynor Party as our first challenge (we improvised due to 2 players not showing up for the team dual), we decided to expand on this idea and make it a full blown jeopardy trivia event. With a large pool of SC2 Survivor questions already in tow, the development process became a matter of figuring out additional questions that weren’t too hard, weren’t too easy, and ultimately forced the survivors into a position where they had think long and hard about taking a risk on answering the questions or letting them pass by.

Fortunately for us in the production crew, the survivors went balls to the wall right off the bat – Puck and Brent immediately start off with -500 scores, missing the first question that asks for a GSL Code A champion, rather than the all too predictable and expected GSL Code S champion (come on, did they really think it’d be THAT easy?). Brent learns his lesson and eventually rights the ship, while Puck continues to stick his hand in the fire, ending up with the biggest (and only) negative score in SC2 Survivors Jeopardy history.

Tempo initially impressed me in this and was doing a great job all game long, but he ended up getting burned by attempting to answer a sequence of questions before they were completely read. It turns out that playing a conservative game, maintaining a solid lead, and banking on getting the last question right is the way to play it – kaitlyn wins reward!

Immunity Challenge: The idea of the 2v2 > winners square off in a 1v1 challenge was set in stone months ago, and at the time of development I had no idea of the influence it would hold over outcome of the game. There are too many different scenarios that could have played out, given a particular player winning reward, but let’s run down the possible choices kaitlyn had going into this:

Pick Brent, play a straight up 2v2, defeat Tempo and Puck, guarantee immunity for their alliance.

Pick Puck, play a straight up 2v2/backstab Puck in game, compete vs Puck in the 1v1/let Brent play Tempo in the 1v1.

Pick Tempo, play a straight up 2v2/have Brent backstab Puck in game, hope Brent can beat Puck in the 1v1/compete vs Tempo in the 1v1.

I mention backstabbing Puck in game only because kaitlyn and Brent are obvious allies. Puck would be too great of a threat going into the final reward/immunity challenges and they want Tempo in the final 3. There’s a huge internal debate that needs to happen before any decision is made. Can they actually win in a 2v2? Which 1v1 is the most opportune?

3v1 in what should be a 2v2 is almost guaranteed victory, but backstabbing comes with a price: it is not a good way to conjure jury votes (neither is a public Youtube video declaring your alliance, but hey, it’s worked for them so far). If they team up vs Puck now and Tempo is sitting next to one of them in the final 2 later, there’s a 99.9% chance that Puck is giving his vote to Tempo to win it all.

Starcraft 2 Survivors has so many layers of strategy to it that it’s easy to overlook these various scenarios (hindsight is 20/20!), but kaitlyn and Brent have been wisely playing 3 steps ahead of the other survivors all season long. They end up making the right choice and decide to play a straight up 2v2, relying on their skill to carry them to a guaranteed top 3 (we find out later that it wasn’t necessarily guaranteed) while keeping their honor intact.

Tempo and Puck almost break through with a 4 gate + ling/bane timing attack, but Tempo burning his banelings on a bunker ends up costing them in the pivotal engagement. This allows kaitlyn and Brent to expand outward, take map control, and never look back.

Let me just say, thank goodness for Husky’s IMBA League maps – zombie mode was the fairest map scenario we could think of, and it proved to have just as many layers of strategy associated with it as SC2 Survivors. Add in a dash of Tempo to form an awkward tri-cast, and we have a recipe for a successfully entertaining 2nd to last immunity challenge (:*[). Oh, did I mention kaitlyn wins her second challenge in a row? Say what you will about the Brent + kaitlyn alliance, but kaitlyn alone is continuing to prove that she is one of the strongest competitors in the game from a plethora of angles. What do you think? Could Brent and kaitlyn have come as far as they have without each other?

Tribal Council: Wow, who saw this coming? Certainly not Puck, who earlier stated that the rest of the game was going to play out with him choosing his dance partner in the final 2. I say it every episode: without immunity, you cannot protect your life.

And unbeknownst to us (unless you donated to the prize pool!) Tempo was safe from the vote the entire time – that’s right, not only did Tubby vote himself out of the game, he gave up a hidden immunity idol to his long-time ally so that at least one of them could make it to the top 3 (what a guy!). This of course makes Tubby’s decision even more mind boggling, but at least he went out with a plan on his own terms.

Remember when I said guaranteed top 3 for Brent and kaitlyn wasn’t necessarily guaranteed? This is it – Tempo had the power to control and craft his own top 3 in the game …and he votes out Puck …because he cheered when Tubby was voted out.

Opportunity was abound on this evening – for some reason, kaitlyn and Brent split their votes between Tempo and Puck. Now I don’t know if kaitlyn and Brent made a pact with Puck to vote Tempo out, or vice versa, but if Tempo were to have tapped Puck, let him know he had the idol, and proceeded to both vote for Brent, the dynamic duo would have potentially been no more (at the very least it would have forced a tie breaker between Puck and Brent – and assuming it would have been a 1v1 scenario, this was more than opportune for Puck).

Did Tempo not trust Puck? Was the burn of him cheering Tubby out too much to ignore? We’ll never know, but yet another layer of strategy was revealed, Puck became the 3rd member of our jury, and once again Brent and kaitlyn emerged from a vote unscathed.

Do you think Tempo would have better odds of winning with Puck on his side? Are Brent and kaitlyn just going to team up and ride their wave of momentum to victory? Who has the best shot at winning over the jury?

Hit me up on twitter with any questions or comments and we’ll continue the conversation from there.

NEXT WEEK: Tempo, Brent, and kaitlyn square off in a familiar arena and two players get one step closer to becoming the ultimate survivor.

IT’S OUR SECOND TO LAST EPISODE! Tell your friends, hashtag #SC2Survivor on twitter, post in our Team Liquid thread, GET HYPED – tune into twitch.tv/basetradetv Friday, 10/4 at 3PM EDT (Rebroadcast at 8:30PM EDT) and catch up on every episode if you’re still behind!