While the "skill cap" on blink stalkers is extremely high, there are many hard counters that can stop even perfect blink micro. MaNa won because he went for one

While the "skill cap" on blink stalkers is extremely high, there are many hard counters that can stop even perfect blink micro. MaNa won because he went for one these. Immortals are the perfect hard counter to stalkers because - cost-for-cost, they are more efficient in a faceoff (resources) - immortals are space-efficient dps (damage per second) in a battle. In a given battle, an army of 4 immortals is far more likely to all be in range of an enemy and doing damage than an army of 8 stalkers bumping against each other trying to get to the priority target - immortal shots do not have projectiles, but are instant. No matter how perfect your stalker control, once an immortal targets a stalker, it is guaranteed to take 30+% of its hitpoints in damage. The last point is very important. Once MaNa had 3+ immortals, even with perfect blink micro, a little bit of target fire and timing micro on MaNa's part allowed him to slaughter the stalker army one stalker per volley, while it takes them longer to clean up the immortals (especially with shield battery support). Another thing glossed over in this discussion -- AlphaStar did more than classic blink micro. It did a very technical maneuver (the casters briefly allude to it) of triggering the barrier on one immortal with a single laser, then focusing all fire on an immortal whose barrier was already down from a previous iteration of this tactic, and then walking away until the barrier has worn off (while blink-microing weakened stalkers). Repeat. This is a detail of increasing the efficiency of trading stalkers with immortals that humans don't often even think about, let alone execute (because good blink control is often more impactful). That AlphaStar came up with this shows that it's not just about perfect execution of micro, but also perfect understanding of micro.