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This report is a Mark4 Production.

Introduction

Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen! Tonight for your reading pleasure I’m presenting a Rook’s Corner special report between one of our better known reporters, Mr.Mediocre, and the ever popular Mantra!. You’ll remember Mediocre from his classic works, such as Grinding the Corn of Destiny Part Deux, and….uhm…..well, use the search engine. I’m almost positive he has some other reports worth reading. Mantra, of course, is one of our Kali regulars, getting as high as four on the Kali tao 1v1 ladder and currently weighing in at seventeen. And despite all this he’s modest, hard working, thrifty, and has a very bad haircut.

I started off with a straight up game of 1v1 between the two contestants on a little known map called “Desolation”. The results were not pretty, to say the least. SilentStrike, my fellow observer, called it “such a terrible beatdown that no report can even be considered.” I tried again, this time pitting BW-Sux up against Mediocre, with chilling results. Mediocre did almost the exact thing to BW that Mantra had done to him. Eerily similar build orders, strat choices, etc. Unwilling to report on a beatdown so horrible, I hit upon a compromise. Mantra would once again play against Mediocre, but SilentStrike (who has gotten as high as #1 on the tao kali ladder, and is currently 14) would give advice to Mediocre to even the odds. With this end in mind, I made a team melee game on the map of Greener Pastures. There are four starts, each one along the top of the map, and many expansions running along the bottom. Both players elected to random.

Terran vs Zerg…guess what Silent tells Mediocre to do =]

Mantra started out with aqua terran in the upper left start, while Mediocre drew purple zerg and got the top center right start. Silent started feeding Mediocre the good wisdom about how to play the map, and advised him to start a muta rush build for a high mobility strat. This being team melee, and Mediocre being lucky enough to have a probe, he started out by warping in an assimilator, then getting his pool and teching immediately to lair. Mantra was a little slow in scouting, but began simply enough with a standard wall in at his choke, and sent a drone to the lower left and started a hatchery after his first barracks was building. As soon as Mediocre found the terran base, Silent advised an immediate switch to a lurker rush, which Mediocre began to execute. About this time I started terrorizing the local animal population with my one remaining SCV =].

Mantra looks to be in a little bit of trouble as Mediocre starts his assault with four lurkers. Mantra gets his first tank off the assembly line and a turret up just in time. Mediocre has a little trouble at first with the ramp, but he buried his lurkers and managed to take out the turret while only losing one lurker to unsieged tank fire. Mantra loses his defending marines, but keeps his tank out of range of the lurkers as they proceed to kill the two depots and force the rax at the choke to lift off. This buys Mantra enough time to build two turrets further back in his base protecting his factory and SCV line, but a newly made starport is undefended by detection and is assaulted by lurkers. For whatever reason Mantra doesn’t lift it off and it falls to the zerg. One lurker makes a dash for the SCVs, but three tanks and the carefully placed turret allow it to be killed after launching only two spined attacks. Mediocre sends four hydras to reinforce and attack floating buildings, but SCVs repair the defending tanks as they deal with the threat. Then, in an almost ludicrously bad move, Mediocre begins morphing a hydra into a lurker on top of where another lurker is buried. The tanks automatically target the egg with siege and kill both it and the lurker with splash.

Mediocre finally tries to move his final lurker into range to kill some supply depots, but it is killed by siege fire as soon as it surfaces. Still, the lurker rush was quite successful. It pinned the terran forces inside their base, killed a few depots and a starport, and provided a big distraction for Mantra.

I am the Ursadon hunter supreme

The mighty Ursadon hunting SCV strikes again. Ahem, where was I?

Boy, you’d think a kick ass Kali player like Mantra could do a little better than this, wouldn’t you? I mean, Mediocre has nearly destroyed his terran base with his gosu lurker attack. Then again he does have that haircut…smarter people might have noticed a little something else Mantra has on the mini map too.

Mediocre makes his tech tree switch at this point. Having already reached the lair stage, he decides that the mobility of mutalisks and the mostly metal approach Mantra is using will work to his advantage. His first four mutalisks attack the SCV line, only to find that the turrets Mantra had put up for lurker detection serve admirably to deter the zerg incursion. Circling around the front, the mutas get some free shots at the two tanks defending the front door before they are unsieged and moved under the air defense umbrella of the turrets. A small group of hydras are brought in to attack the defenses, but even combined with the mutas they are destroyed by the sieged tanks, killing only one. They do take down the turrets in the front part of the base, letting the mutas get free hits in on the outlying buildings. With this encouragement, Mediocre begins sending in zerglings, while Mantra desperately defends with a vulture and one remaining tank. They actually hold the first two waves with his SCVs repairing like mad and getting in the way of the zerglings, but a determined attack with the mutalisks in support finally breaks the terran defenses. As far as Mediocre is concerned, it’s all over but the razings. So why is Mantra making threats on my life in the pic below? Look at that mini map carefully.

Oh, you mean that skill. Yeah Mantra has it right here.

Mantra finally reveals what’s he’s been up to. Boy, recon sure is a good idea. With his four expansions across the bottom of the map he has “eight control groups of random zerg crap” all streaming right into Mediocre’s main just as Mediocre is congratulating himself on razing the terran base. What an incredible mind job by Mantra. Let him get right to the edge of thinking he’s won, and then choke slam him onto the canvas!

Even if his meager forces had not been off razing the terran base, it’s pretty doubtful Mediocre could have stopped the zerg swarm. The strain was too much for the poor boy, and emulating his hero T_Mac, Mediocre promptly disconnects. Fortunately, it’s team melee and I command Silent to take over. He shamefully presides over the dismantling of Mediocre’s main and expansion, giving his best shot to sunkening the hell out of the place to no avail.

And with that we have a winner. My thanks to Mantra for offering his skill in the art of deception, and thanks to Mr.Mediocre for a hard fought game. You can find an interview of Mr.Mediocre here, where he shares his thoughts on the game. Thanks for reading!

Mark4