The first season of Heart of the Swarm GSL is starting on 4 April 2013.

It is important to note that the players qualify for the upcoming season using Wings of Liberty. Thus, the race distribution does not represent the current state of Heart of the Swarm.

Zerg is the most represented race with 14 (43.75%) players. This is expected as Zerg is definitely the best performing race toward the end of the Wings of Liberty period. I certainly do not want to watch a third consecutive ZvZ GSL final. I’m not a fan of mirror match in the final, and ZvZ is definitely my least favorite. While Zerg remains dominant, Protoss is still struggling in the GSL with just 7 players. I will expect the Protoss players to perform better than last season, based on the fact that Protoss is leading in the Korea ladder. The 7 Protoss players are arguably the best 7 you can ask for right now.

The Terran line up seems good. Flash and Innovation are the best Terran players in the world now. Flash’s TvZ seems unbeatable unless you are Life. If Flash can achieve second in MLG with a late transition to the Heart of the Swarm, the other 31 players have every reason to be afraid. I do not follow Broodwar, and hence I cannot appreciate his dominance, but he is the first player that can give me the “he’s playing perfect” feeling. Not even Mvp at his peak  has that power. I will bet my money on him to win the championship.

Innovation has become my favorite Terran for past 6 months. He gives me the feeling of MMA. I expect him to go far this season.

The rest of the Terran are not as good as Flash and Innovation at the moment. Fantasy is wild card. I just do not know what to expect from him. His games from SPL is far from impressive, nevertheless he manages to qualify for his first Code S seat.

Interestingly, the “big announcement” of Korea Starcraft progaming scene will be announced just a day before GSL commence. Many people are expecting an integrated individual league to be announced, which explains Rain’s seed into Code S. From audience’s perspective, I don’t see the difference of merging GSL and OSL since GSL is the only individual league now. I will interested to see an integrated team league instead of SPL and GSTL running independently with two set of teams.