Did somebody drop the StarCraft II pro scene into a blender? In the past few weeks, StarCraft II has been a game of musical chairs with major player moves left right and center. Players have been leaving teams, joining teams, and voyaging across the globe in a shakeup that has already assured this year will look much different from the last.

Starting on our own front here at MeetYourMakers, our StarCraft II Academy welcomes two new players:  Jeon “PhoeNix” Young Sik and  Jeon “Dragon” Yong Soo. PhoeNix is a Zerg player who’s played for such teams as WeRRa, MVP, Team ReIGN and Type Gaming. Not unknown to the foreign community, PhoeNix was the first player to join a foreign team and one of the first to have a stream on Justin.tv. Dragon has been on SlayerS and Millennium as well as WeRRa with PhoeNix.  Though he plays Terran officially, he keeps himself keen on the other races by playing Random on the ladder. Both players play on the “High Master” level on the Korean/Taiwanese server and now both will be leveling up their skills with MeetYourMakers.

Next up, one of the top stars of StarTale, Protoss player  Won “PartinG” Lee Sak, posted a quick, concise message on his Twitter at the start of the year: “I leave ST”. His reasoning for leaving StarTale, as posted on ThisIsGame.com, was that he was seeking new experiences while he was still young. There were no hard feelings between PartinG and his former team; the player openly thanked StarTale’s coach  Won Joong Wook for his continuous support throughout his time with StarTale. Coach Won, despite losing such a strong player, responded with "I am very thankful to PartinG for putting in a lot of effort during his time living side by side with StarTale and wish him good results no matter what team he joins." (Translation found on TeamLiquid.net)

To help fill StarTale’s void in power, Coach Won hired  Jo “Golden” Myeong Hwan, formerly of SlayerS and later Quantic Gaming. Though he doesn’t sport the world championship trophies PartinG does, but still boasts a solid reputation. The Zerg player has taken gold at a number of major qualifiers, including the North American Star League Season 4 and IEM Singapore (American).

 Outside of the Korean Peninsula, the renowned international team Team Liquid picked up Zerg player  Jens “Snute” Aasgaard from Team GamersLeague. He shined brightly just last month in Germany at HomeStory Cup VI, where he beat  Kang “Symbol” Dong Hyun 4-0 to take first place. He is an innovator, most famous for taking risky 3^rd and 4^th expansions against Protoss who block his natural expansion to support their own greedy builds. He uses this to quickly build a strong army quickly to take out the Protoss who’s build wasn’t prepared for more than one base’s worth of units.

Last, and never least, is  Ilyes “Stephano” Satouri, who stirred up the entire foreign StarCraft II world when he announced several weeks ago on Twitter that he would “probably (certainly)” be participating in the GSL Code S tournament in South Korea. The ambiguity of his tweet pushed many to the edges of their seats, with more than 30 pages of comments on the announcement’s page on TeamLiquid.net. But it is now officially confirmed that the charismatic  French Zerg player will in fact be playing in the Code S, starting at the end of the month.

Stephano’s invitation may very well be in response to his performance at the GSL World Championship match in Las Vegas last month, where a 5-man team of Koreans took on a 5-man team of the world’s best non-Koreans, including Stephano. Though the Korean team eventually won, it happened only after Stephano took out four of the world’s greatest StarCraft II players in a single sitting, nearly all-killing a Dream Team of Korea’s finest.

If the StarCraft II scene continues changing the way is has in the first few weeks of the new year, expect 2013 to look nothing like 2012.