Weekly Cups (May 5-11): New 2v2 Champs

Weekly Cup Competitions
Week of May 5 – May 11

by Wax

The start of the GSL and the EWC 2025 cycle brought an end to the unofficial off-season, but weekly cups and online competitions were still as busy as ever in the second week of May. Classic, herO, and ByuN took the trio of 1v1 cups, while 2v2 competition saw a new (or old) powerhouse team emerge to take a shocking win.

*Partial brackets may be shown.

May 5: WardiTV Mondays #34

The week started with Classic conquering WardiTV Mondays, going through MJG, Percival, Cure, ByuN, and herO to come out on top. Classic’s 3-0 win against herO in the finals might seem like a major upset on paper, but when you consider the fact that he has two other wins against herO in the past few weeks (including the GSL qualifiers), it may just be another sign that Classic is getting back into his best form (VOD).

MaNa was another underdog Protoss who got a big PvP win, as he took out MaxPax 2-0 in the quarterfinals. However, herO cut his run short in the very next round.

*****

May 5: Monday Night Weeklies #16

Both herO and MaxPax came into MNW looking to make up for their WardiTV eliminations a few hours earlier, and the two favorites ended up clashing head on for the title. herO took the direct route to the finals through the upper bracket, while MaxPax was forced to take a lower bracket detour thanks to ByuN.

While MaxPax drew first blood in the finals with a game one win, he ended up suffering a 1-2 loss that would have had 2024 MaxPax rolling in his grave. He gave up the tying point after failing to defend his Void Ray fast expansion against aggression, and lost the cup-deciding map in a mass Phoenix war (VOD).

*****

May 6: PiGosaur Cup #30

MaxPax’s no-good, unfun week continued in the PiGosaur Cup where he suffered another PvP upset—this time at the hands of Creator. Unfortunately for Creator, he couldn’t capitalize on this big win, as he just barely lost 2-3 to ByuN in the finals. After looking a bit reliant on two-base aggression in recent cup play, ByuN showed some solid macro play to win game five on Persephone (VOD).

*****

May 11: uThermal 2v2 Circuit – May

The second week of May was heavy on non-standard SC2 action, headlined by the month’s edition of uThermal’s 2v2 Circuit. April’s event saw the dominant Spirit-MaxPax pairing briefly split up due to MaxPax’s absence, but Spirit still managed to establish himself as the uThermal 2v2 Bonjwa by winning a fourth straight title with temporary partner ShoWTimE.

The May tournament saw Spirit reunite with MaxPax, which made them the automatic favorites to win the title. However, in the uThermal tour’s very own Bisu revolution moment, the uThermal-Goblin pairing came from out of nowhere to win the championship. The duo had barely been on the championship radar, with their previous best finish having been top four.

Initially, uThermal-Goblin seemed to be using a Phoenix-Cyclone composition as a crutch, but they proved to be far more well-rounded players as the tournament went on. Once MaxPax-Spirit adapted to the Phoenix-Cyclone composition, uThermal-Goblin also adapted themselves to take a well-deserved 3-2 finals victory. Amusingly enough, uThermal said on stream that he believed that his pairing with Goblin had actually been the strongest 2v2 at some point in the past, but they had both become somewhat “washed” since then.

Unfortunately for half-champion ShoWTimE, his adventure with new partner Elazer didn’t last very long as the team was taken down by the eventual champs in the RO8. Another eye-catching pairing was Serral-ZhuGeLiang—this time with Serral off-racing as Protoss—but they were bounced from the RO8 by the duo of GgMachine-Shameless (VOD).

The May tournament concludes the monthly open portion of the uThermal 2v2 Tour, with the top players from the five monthly events (and one last chance qualifier) set to compete in a future $10,000+ main event (details TBA).

*****

May 6: Kung Fu Cup 2025 #11 – StarCraft Evolution Mod

*****

May 10: StarCraft Evolution League #11

In SC: Evolution news, underdog Threepoint took a cup double in the Kung Fu Cup (VOD (Korean)) and SEL (VOD (Korean).

In the case of the Kung Fu Cup, this last cup appeared to end its run of being played in modded “VS” versions of StarCraft II—it remains to be seen what other competitions the long-running series might have in store.