The most important things first: Alarak hails from Sweden and loves Tacos!
Before Rivals, Alarak had played both StarCraft:Broodwar and StarCraft 2, but says he wasn't very good at them. His specialization was rather to build custom maps / fun maps with the SC2 Galaxy Editor. In recent years, Alarak has been competing in a PvE mapmaking contest for Blizzard's RTS games. Last year, he came in 2nd place and will try again this year. You can watch a video of one of his sophisticated creations for SC2 here.
Q: Hey Alarak! On ladder, you’re known for your Fanatic Aggro deck with Phantom. Partly of course because you levelled your key Nod units higher, but probably also because overall, Nod is stronger than GDI right now. Which GDI decks do you like to play recently?
Alarak: First of all, I haven’t played a whole lot this season, but experimented with a few different decks. My current list is Riflemen, Missile Troopers - Slingshot, Predator Tank - Drone Swarm, Mohawk - Liang. Most of the season I played Riflemen, Missile Troopers - Predator Tank, APC - Talon, Mohawk, Liang. This deck lacked the anti-air but was great fun building a wall of APC and Predator Tanks. So I swapped APC for Slingshot to cover the air better and because Slingshot is so darn good, I could swap Talon for Drone Swarm for cheaper and more effective Anti Infantry. I use Liang because he’s extremely overpowered honestly. Heals for an insane amount, steal pads and only costs 50. It even flies and moves fast!
Q: Let's move to your performance in the Rivals tournament circuit. In the Rivals Team League, you're 9-2 after 3 weeks. How did that go, and how have your other recent tournaments been?
Alarak: I'm pretty happy with my games in RTL, lost 2 games to one of the Koreans from the Taste that Korean Nuclear team last week. One of the losses was due to the Mammoth Tank + Jackson freeze that happens quite often, and has a severely increased freeze duration on emulator, which is what I use almost all the time. The other loss was me playing bad honestly. So all in all pretty happy with the results.
That’s about where it ends though. Haven’t had much success in other tournaments. I was in the coliseum finals again last Friday where I came 5th, very unhappy with how I played but all of my opponents are very skilled, special shoutout to the winner, srpss. Such a beast at the game.
Q: Tournament play is very map dependent. In a recent analysis, I noticed that some specific maps are chosen more often than others, e.g. Rorschach and Open Water. What do you think makes people chose these particular maps?
Open Water and Rorschach were both also in the map pool we had during the entire summer, so people are well practiced on the maps. So I think Rorschach and Open Water are just what people choose if they don’t care about maps, which is a huge mistake.
Q: With your knowledge of what people might play on these maps, what would you play? Would that be based on your expectation of opponent decks, or just by what you feel comfortable with?
Alarak: As some may have seen in Coliseum finals, deck countering is more important than skill in some cases. As I said earlier, I played very badly during coliseum but I still got two wins out of knowing my opponents deck. In both games I knew my opponents plays a ton of air heavy decks so I brought a Sniper/Slingshot deck that I had 0 practice with and quite comfortably won both games.
In tournaments, you have to scout your opponent to see what they are well practiced with. I usually play something that is semi-good on that map but still beats what I expect my opponent to play. My favorite thing to do personally is to play something completely different from my go-to decks, or play something that just makes some sense on the map, just to confuse the opponents that actually try to counter what they think I’ll play. Tournaments is so much about mind games and I really like that.
Back to Rorschach and Open Water though, I know the most popular deck is Giga as so many find them oppressive. Good counters to Giga on both those maps are Fanatic Aggro, Artillery or Bomber decks. One would say Fanatic Aggro is bad vs 2-range decks but it’s effective because of how difficult it is to block double boosted Scorpion Tanks.
Q: Now, let’s tap into your expertise even more systematically. I’m going to list some deck archetypes. Please tell me what you would think a good map for these decks would be – and how you would attempt to counter this map/deck combination.
Alarak:
Deck Type: Artillery
- Maps you would expect: Artillery has 3 range so it’s always a tough one, it can be played on most maps, it’s only bad when the spawn point is easily accessible by enemy units. It’s exceptionally good on 2 pad maps and maps like Rorschach, Open Water or Tug of War.
- How you'd try to counter it: High pressure decks with good anti air and usually some air myself. I also really like MLRS vs Artillery, when I have either Jackson or MSV with it.
- Maps you would expect: Any map where you can park your Giga Cannon at a spot where it can fire at 2 full pads means it’s a very good map for it.
- How you'd try to counter it: Giga Cannon is such a strong piece, but my ideal way is to play Bomber decks or some Air to Ground units, and try to make them overcommit on building ground forces that I then overrun with air spam.
- Maps you would expect: Chem Warriors with Jade is another deck that can appear on any map but I usually expect them on maps where pads are spread out because you usually need more than 1 unit to deal with them unless you got some very heavy anti infantry. Maps where it is easy to walk to the enemy base are also great Chem Warrior Jade maps. A second pathway like Open Water, Half and Half and Rush In are some very good Jade Chem maps, especially Rush In.
- How you'd try to counter it: Personally I have always had trouble dealing with this sort of decks but recently been trying heavy air decks to decrease the Chems usefulness. Running heavy air makes the Chems irrelevant unless you get them all the way to the enemy base and use Catalyst Missile. Quite an investment.
- Maps you would expect: Suzaku APC relies on its air power a lot and APC holding pads in my opinion. Thus any map where there are a lot of choke points or rocks for air units to gain an advantage on are good maps for. Also great on spread out maps.
- How you'd try to counter it: Borca kills Missile Troopers, Pitbulls and APCs. That’s all I have to say basically.
- Maps you would expect: This deck is just all around good, but requires some practice. It works on most maps but usually you’d know if your opponent has any experience with this deck or not.
- How you'd try to counter it: Fanatic Aggro destroys this deck. Fanatics murder Mutant Marauders and Boosted Tank makes short work of Chuggy.
- Maps you would expect: Same goes for this deck, but Seth is insane on spread out maps so that’s something to look out for.
- How you'd try to counter it: Fanatic Aggro is weak early game vs this deck but quite good in the lategame vs it actually (Editor: e.g. thanks to Phantom). 2/2/2 is also very mediocre vs Arty and any Stealth Tank decks.
- Maps you would expect: Any map where it is easy to stall or hard to harass harvesters are good tech maps. Cracked Ice, Battlefield, Rorschach are some examples. 2 pad maps or grouped up pads are very good for Borca. Rorschach, Open Water, Down the River, Hot Zone are all extremely good for Borca.
- How you'd try to counter it: Air decks or Fanatic Aggro does quite well vs Borca. Don’t let the Borca get too much value and you are usually pretty set.
- Maps you would expect: As long as the pads aren’t too spread out, this deck works quite well in most other maps.
- How you'd try to counter it: On maps where the pads are grouped up, I usually overrun it with Fanatics and Tanks. Sniper/Slingshot/Predator works very well vs this deck too
Q: Awesome, thanks! I bet a lot of players will find your thoughts on this very useful. What’s the next tournaments you’ll play / look forward to?
Alarak: RIFLE 3 is going to be very fun I think so I’m very excited about that. The sponsor being Redwood Studios is really cool. Haven’t gotten much information about the Bandito Tournament yet but hopefully that one will be great as well.
Q: Back from tournaments to the daily grind: If you had the levels, which deck would you like to try on ladder more?
Alarak: Oh good question! I think Bomber decks or Sniper decks. Maybe Chemical Warrior or Giga Cannon decks too. They all share that they include epics, so yeah. That’s the main problem with those decks.
Q: Competing in so many tournaments, you know a ton of good players very well. What’s your favorite 3 opponents to play against and why?
A: Well 13lade is the only one I feel like we both have this sort of mindgame going on and that’s super fun. Srpss is just so insanely good at this game so it’s always great to see which way he stomps me this time, and feels amazing whenever I take games off him! I also like playing Nickcool because I have no clue whatsoever what he’ll bring.
Q: If you had one wish what the developers should do with Rivals?
Alarak: Rework Tech to make everything cheaper and reduce the paywall of 150 Tiberium. Make it a normal building that costs like 70 or something and just has strong units. Sandstorm could be like a tier 2 Pitbull for 90 Tiberium, Wolverine would be a better Rhino but slower that costs maybe 60-70. Centurion could be an alternative to Scorpion Tank. And so on. Would make so many more units playable.
(Also, I would like if they some reworked maps to not be so obviously good for one archetype).
Q: And lastly, what would be one thing you wish the community would do with Rivals?
Alarak: Not quit the game, support it to the end. Maybe we can get this game back up and running. We just have to work as a community and continue to show our great support. Redwood sponsoring was a great sign it isn’t over, let us hope it’ll continue in this direction.
Q: Thank you so much, Alarak, for your time and your insights! Wish you much success and fun in your next tournaments.
Q: Thank you so much, Alarak, for your time and your insights! Wish you much success and fun in your next tournaments.
Notes from the editor:
- If we all subscribe to Alarak's YouTube channel, maybe he produces some more content for it?
- Humble Alarak didn't mention his games against srpss to qualify for the Coliseum finals, so recommend you watch them now, especially if you didn't obs Alarak's games so far:
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