2 Gate Expand
PvP safer 2-gate expand: 2 (or more) Gateways are started before the natural Nexus (which goes down before 5:00) AND no tech building (Stargate, Robotics Facility, or Twilight Council) is started before the natural. A Stargate / Robo / Twilight before the natural means it is a tech-first opener, not a pure 2-gate expand. Trades a few seconds of economy for protection vs proxy 2-gate / early aggression.
67.4% win rate over 43 ladder games since patch 5.0.16
n = 43 games from 5 players · Stats updated Sep 28, 2026
Since patch 5.0.16, 5 players logged 43 PvP ladder games with 2 Gate Expand, winning 67.4% of the decided ones. The likely range for its true win rate is 52.5–79.5%, so it wins more often than it loses. It appears in 18.6% of the 231 PvP games in the guide sample. This guide is newly published, so there is no weekly trend yet. This is still a small sample (n = 43), so treat it as a directional read.
Key timings
These timings come from 34 recorded build orders by 5 players. Buildings are timed when construction starts, upgrades and morphs when they finish, exactly as the replay records them. The median player finishes Warpgate at 4:06, with the middle half between 3:44 and 4:20. Timing data is still thin (n = 34 replays), so expect these medians to move.
| Milestone | Early (p25) | Median | Late (p75) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pylon startedin 34 games | 0:32 | 0:33 | 0:34 |
| Gateway startedin 34 games | 0:54 | 0:55 | 0:56 |
| Assimilator startedin 34 games | 1:06 | 1:08 | 1:11 |
| Cybernetics Core startedin 32 games | 1:42 | 1:44 | 1:46 |
| 2nd Nexus startedin 34 games | 3:16 | 3:52 | 4:20 |
| Warpgate donein 31 games | 3:44 | 4:06 | 4:20 |
Common macro leaks
Average macro score 74.0 over 43 games from 5 players.
- Supply Blockedin 97.7% of games42 of 43