We’ve been seeing an unusual amount of exciting and creative games this season and the last seven days have been no exception. This week has been witness to some of the best cheese we’ve seen in a long time. Infact, make that some of the best Protoss cheese we’ve seen in a long time.

We watched as PuSan added another layer to PvP proxy cheesing on Heartbreak Ridge by building a forge to lock BeSt’s workers out of his base for a very long time, giving PuSan a huge economic advantage. Bisu made easy work out of Perfectman on Match Point with a sneaky two-gate proxy he threw up around five and a half minutes in, giving him three while his opponent was only expecting him to have the production capabilities of one.

What’s even better than that? How about nbs[cm] cannon rushing RorO‘s natural expo in a PvZ on Byzantium 3. Yes, somebody cannon rushed in a pro league game. And they won.

Let’s face it – this season is not going well for Protoss players. At all. The climate is forcing Protoss players to innovate right now and though we aren’t seeing anything as huge as Bisu’s Sair/DT style changing the metagame of a whole match-up, there are some subtle and still game-winning tricks coming out of Protoss sleeves everywhere right now.

Another such trick, though not a cheese-oriented build, was Siz)KaL’s reaver control against Reach, exploiting the terrain of Heartbreak Ridge so that his first surprise scarab from above the natural expansion was delayed, essentially letting him shoot two scarabs before the enemy knew he was there. He plays solidly the whole game and really has been doing great this season, if not as much so as phenomenons like RorO and Shine.

Two last mentions for Protoss antics – one to Light for making heavy use of Nal_rA-ish hallucination throughout his 40 minute game against Violet (though he lost) and the other to one of our own. Top foreigner EG.iNkA was seen doing lots of recalls on his probes to evacuate them from dying expansions – very efficient, very pro.

Terrans? BoxeR treated us to yet another wonderful game in his career by using massive amounts of firebats and a nuke in his game against zerg player BaxteR. This was truly an entertaining one and after all was said and done the man himself looked on the verge of some tears of joy while talking to his once-protege, fellow coach, fellow Terran legend and friend iloveOov.

The guys from Hwaseung Oz weren’t sharing his enthusiasm for the night

Flash continues to steamroll over his opponents so convincingly you’d think he was facing B teamers. He is in especially top shape so far this season and KT Rolster as a whole remains in the lead for the team rankings. If there’s a Terran you can depend on right now it’s this guy.

In Zerg news we have HyuK and Jaedong battling it out during the Oz vs SKT1 match and you know who won there. At least you do now; HyuK came out on top of this one after some of the best mutalisk and scourge fighting we’ve seen in a while.

This puts HyuK 2:0 to Jaedong for their last two encounters with each other. HyuK has been catching a lot of crap from the foreigner scene over his bad (or unstable) performance last season but I’m going to set the record straight – this guy is on fire and he has been since the close of last season where we watched him perform an all-kill on STX Soul. If you didn’t start paying attention to him then, you had better be now. This guy has won 12 of his last 13 games against Protoss (including a win over Stork) and 13 out of 15 games vs Zerg (including the two aforementioned wins over Jaedong as well as two over Kwanro and one over sAviOr and herO)

What? Yes. Forget what you’ve heard, even what you’ve seen – this guy is playing some seriously good Zerg this season and is long out of the range of being taken for a poor player.

Other Zerg goodness was sAviOr vs Hyvaa in a rather unusual and very suspenseful ZvZ on Tornado and Shine continues (somehow) to take out everybody he comes up against. And the exact same goes for RorO – another Zerg player that was awful right up until this season when it seems some kind of ‘gosu’ button was finally pushed in him. I’m beginning to wonder if these two deserve the image associated with their past performances anymore. We’ll see how well they hold up as the season progresses.

People to keep an eye on:

HyuK is still liable to collapse and if he starts playing more Terrans (his worst match-up by far) we may see just that. On the other hand, we just as easily may see him continuing to carve a name for himself out of his opponents until he takes a title. Just how much pwnage does he have to dish out to make you a believer?

Shine[KaL]‘s Mom is getting filmed during every game he is at, and he’s winning all of them. I’m starting to think she is some kind of ancient Starcraft shaman, cursing his enemies. She looked pretty grim in the one game he recently lost against Light, maybe he wasn’t eating his vegetables and she punished him with a loss.

Siz)KaL – We’ve been seeing some really solid Protoss play from this guy this season and if he can reach his consistency we’ll be seeing more GGs from him. The Protoss need all the heroes they can get right now.

And that’s what went on in The Starcraft Scene This Week :)