While Grand Prix: Stockholm has come to teach us a thing or two about Limited with Future Sight, the whirlwind of looking at a wide variety of formats through the lens of Future Sight continues to twirl through Magical Hack, and it is the format leading up to Grand Prix: Columbus that catches our eye this week. Next week we can have a look at the Stockholm results, and additional personal anecdotes and stories can be added as it seems I am accidentally doing quite well in this format. After bottoming out on a long run of lost MTGO drafts and poor three-on-three or eight-man drafts “IRL,” I’ve inexplicably won eleven of my last dozen matches in Time Spiral – Planar Chaos – Future Sight draft, and such an unusual turn of fortune happens so rarely for me with a new Limited format past the first day or two of the pre-release that we have a good starting-point to try and figure out what it is, exactly, that I am accidentally doing right.
This article is going to cheat; yes, Future Sight has a very strong impact on Legacy, for much the same reason that it has a strong impact on Vintage. Dredging for fun and profit is surprisingly workable the further you go back in time, and while you may not be able to get away with the “no mana to cast spells” trick that works for Ichorid in Vintage, a much broader card pool lets the new graveyard-centric and Dredge-enabled cards from Future Sight go kaboom. However, for the Grand Prix these cards will be legal… and yet the “Future Sight” update does have an enormous impact on the format, because the power-level errata that had previously neutered Academy Rector plus Flash as a neat combo trick has recently been removed. Flash plus Protean Hulk is the latest fad, capable of winning on the upkeep of the very first turn of the game, beating you on your own first turn before you even get to play a land.
If you haven’t been living under a rock these past few days, the combo can work in a number of different ways, the commonly accepted two “best” techniques being Karmic Guide + Carrion Feeder (a reanimation effect plus a sacrifice outlet, to let you re-use Protean Hulk repeatedly) into Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker + Benevolent Bodyguard (allowing you to cleverly stack and copy Karmic Guides then feed Kiki to the Carrion Feeder, generating infinite hasty flying Karmic Guides plus an arbitrarily large Carrion Feeder)… or four Disciples of the Vault and some combination of X-cost artifact creatures. Each of these comes into play as a 0/0 and immediately dies, triggering a loss of four life, and you can have as many as eight of them because there are two separate cards, Shifting Wall and Phyrexian Marauder.
One has its marked vulnerabilities – Swords to Plowshares stops the combo temporarily against the Guide + Feeder version, as it removes the Feeder from the game and leaves them with “just” Protean Hulk to win the game with by beating down, and Pithing Needle on the Feeder or Kiki-Jiki likewise stops the combo midway through and leaves it short of “infinite” at “only a really good board position for attacking later.” The other takes up more room, as the miscellaneous additional creatures take 10-12 slots depending on how many X-cost artifact creatures you feel you need to play, and either one is vulnerable to Stifle on the leaves-play trigger of the Protean Hulk or specific hosers like Planar Void or Leyline of the Void which prevent the trigger from occurring in the first place.
Since the combo costs so little mana and more or less performs itself once the Hulk’s ability resolves, a lot of room can be left reserved for tutoring effects, fast mana like Elvish Spirit Guide, and protection like Force of Will or even Daze. This is practically a hard-counter due to the fact that the combo happens so damnably early in the game, with the occasional turn 0 kill on the draw, turn 1 on the play being more or less the same, and entirely too many games won by their own second turn because they just need to Mystical or Worldly Tutor the missing combo piece of their ridiculously compact two-card instant win. Winning by turn 3 at the latest is more or less assured with a decent version, so long as it doesn’t have to mulligan itself into oblivion, which is still considerably faster than most decks are equipped to stop it.
Nick Eisel wrote a quite reasonable article on creating variations of the Hulk Flash archetype here, following up on Ben Bleiweiss article last Friday and the first publicly-seen article to the best of my knowledge, by Bill Stark. You will have to look there for more information about it, as frankly I doubt I could make myself play the deck even if I wanted to… the notion of having to give up on what is at this point months of work leading up on the Grand Prix leaves me feeling sick to the stomach, to the point where I’m not even sure if I am going to play or not if I am just going to face Flash.dec over and over again. Even if everything else can be made equal, and the deck can be faced from an equal footing, there are only so many times one can play Russian Roulette and have at least some expectation of walking away alive. A road-trip to Columbus to figure out that yes, the gun is loaded at some point, does not sound like what I tend to think of as “fun.”
Some would say if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. I say if you can’t beat ‘em, adapt until you do. I do not specifically have an aversion to playing the best deck… but I do have an aversion to being a sitting duck instead of a moving target. I like being the guy with a gun in his hand instead of the guy with a bulls-eye t-shirt. Sometimes “sitting duck” is a fine plan, when few people know that you’re even the target and we have the illusion of an open metagame… then I’ll happily play the best deck, if one can be readily identified. I’m pretty sure I already know what I am playing for Regionals, and I just need to confirm that the metagame between now and then advances and develops in the way I think it should… but for Columbus, it’s taking what was a few weeks ago an interesting yet well-established metagame and flushing it down the toilet, as the junk-rare Flash skyrockets from reject rare to four for $25 pretty much anywhere you can still find ‘em.
Going into Columbus, I was prepared for the metagame I expected to face… after all, nothing changes quickly in the Legacy format, and nothing was going to change between the printing of Planar Chaos and Future Sight… right? I’ve been tweaking and tuning this list patiently for six months, adjusting and re-adjusting based on slight format changes and advances in my understanding of each matchup, only to learn that the matchups I considered “good” may be quickly vanishing in the face of the latest monstrosity, and even I myself may just be too slow to face the Flash deck. Some may very well have seen this deck before… after all, following up on Grand Prix: Philadelphia a year and a half ago I wrote “Leaving My Legacy Behind Me,” which broke the deck to the public for the first time. Some have wondered how the deck would grow and change in the intervening time, while others would just have to be curious based on the recent outcome of Peter Jahn Ultimate Extended Tournament series, where B/G Survival won the whole thing. Philosophically, this deck is directly descended from that deck, albeit accepting the fact that without an effective tutor like Vampiric Tutor one just has to accept that you need a non-Survival backup plan, which for this deck is “beat down.”
I haven’t tested enough against Hulk Flash to even decide whether I am going to Columbus or not; if I am comfortable enough with the matchup to consider it reasonable, I’ll go. If not, I’ll likely stay home and find something else to do (like wash my hair or blow-dry the dog), instead of hiking out to Columbus only to feel the very strong urge to vomit all over my shoes. There are definitely aspects that make it possible to face the deck, and a sideboard strategy that is quite reasonable, but traveling long distances to commit potentially suicidal acts is not very high on my list of things to do nowadays. And thus I present to you:
Creatures (27)
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 4 Wild Mongrel
- 3 Arrogant Wurm
- 4 Basking Rootwalla
- 1 Genesis
- 1 Ravenous Baloth
- 1 Eternal Witness
- 1 Viridian Zealot
- 1 Krovikan Horror
- 4 Wall of Roots
- 1 Masticore
- 1 Sadistic Hypnotist
- 1 Loaming Shaman
Lands (21)
Spells (12)
One honest concern is that the deck may be too slow to keep up with Hulk Flash despite having significant pinpoint discard, and thus I hope to test more in order to learn whether the deck does in fact require replacing four Forests with Chrome Moxes in order to “keep up.” Testing is crucial, but who to test with is even more so, and I am aiming to get some significant testing in this weekend in real life head-to-head testing… as otherwise I am relegated to the Magic Workstation testing pool, which is not prone to leave me with results I want to trust a few days off from work and a couple hundred dollars in travel, food, and hotel rooms to go to a Grand Prix with no Byes.
I have tested this deck extensively, and it performed well at the last Legacy Grand Prix in slightly different form. I made Top 8 of a Magic Workstation tournament hosted on the forums of this very same website, not losing a match until the quarterfinals, just to stretch my legs and get a little practice in between other things I was focusing on, namely Extended and testing Tenacious Tog two months ago. Similarly, I won the Magic Workstation tournament organized on these forums with Tenacious Tog, and pulled a mighty 3-3 with the deck at the one PTQ I got to play with it, so your mileage may vary. Instead of an absurdly complex Survival deck, we have what amounts to a beatdown Rock deck with a broken Survival plan, and it is effectively a hybrid Survival / Aggro Rock deck that disrupts on the back of Duress plus Cabal Therapy and uses Survival of the Fittest as an “answers” tutor as needed but has an aggressive plan for winning the game in true combo fashion with it instead. Yes, there are bullets to tutor for… Masticore against creatures is quite powerful when backed up with Gaea’s Cradle, a four-of in this deck; Viridian Zealot cheaply and effectively answers most artifact or enchantment threats, while Genesis allows you to recur it once per turn as needed; Sadistic Hypnotist allows you to search for and cast Mind Twist when appropriate. Nothing gave me greater joy at the last Grand Prix than knowing I was the only person in the room with a copy of Sadistic Hypnotist in my 75 cards, and having Brian David-Marshall come by when doing coverage, see it in play and have a picture taken of the board position. But even that might not be fast enough, even if you can do it on turn 3, because as we all know you might not be alive on turn 3. My, how the times change.
While it should be pretty evident what is going on here, it’s important to note that in addition to the pinpoint disruption and the powerful Survival tools, the deck includes a turn 4 kill off Forest, Gaea’s Cradle, Birds of Paradise, Wall of Roots, and Survival of the Fittest, so long as you have any creature in hand to discard by turn 2. Leaving out individual pieces of the “combo” slow it down but you can still reasonably expect to be attacking with Rootwallas and Arrogant Wurms for the kill on turn 5 if you don’t have, say, the second accelerant but do have Survival plus Gaea’s Cradle. “Just” attacking with Wild Mongrels and doing “fair” things like Madnessing Arrogant Wurms to swing with next turn beat down surprisingly quickly… by what would have been the definition of fast prior to reverting Flash to its original text, which now says 1U, Instant, Win The Game if you have Protean Hulk in your hand. As I said, adding four copies of Chrome Mox may make the deck fast enough to still compete… but I don’t know for certain that this is true, your mileage may vary. For an idea of how the deck played prior to the change, read “Leaving My Legacy Behind Me” as linked above; just because it’s a report from a year and a half ago doesn’t mean it’s outdated, although some of the technology of the deck has progressed greatly since then and several key inclusions have altered the deck as they were printed, notably Loaming Shaman. Overall the matchup expectancy and the design philosophy remain the same, as does the ability to do ridiculous things with Survival of the Fittest in play. It may just have to try and do them faster, however, with Chrome Mox added in the mix.
If all you want to do is beat Hulk Flash, however, there are worse things you can do than build a deck solely around that purpose. Some of the key avenues of attack are cards that are frankly good against the format anyway, and building an aggressive deck full of disruptive elements can help to ensure that you win a surprising number of games so long as you are fast enough to deploy these cards at a rapid enough pace to keep Hulk Flash off their game. They do possess key elements for beating hate cards, it’s true, like Massacre to answer Meddling Mage or Samurai of the Pale Curtain… but there is no reason a carefully-designed U/W Fish deck cannot actively unseat them, while also making an effort to be “reasonably viable” in the environment as a whole. Many decks of this variety are likely to be attempted, to the point where the metagame may just break down into “Hulk Flash” versus “Smash Hulk”, which is I guess one way in which to alter the somewhat stagnant Combo / Goblins / Threshold metagame that has been delicately see-sawing for the last two years. Additionally, many of these same avenues for attacking Hulk Flash work against its most reasonable competitor, Iggy Pop, which has similar vulnerabilities to cards like Meddling Mage and Stifle. But before we start pouring on the hate, let’s look at what I consider to be the most reasonable alternate competitor to Hulk Flash, a carefully-aimed version of Iggy Pop.
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Lotus Petal
4 Leyline of the Void
2 Duress
4 Brainstorm
4 Cabal Ritual
4 Dark Ritual
4 Infernal Tutor
4 Ill-Gotten Gains
3 Tendrils of Agony
3 Intuition
3 Mystical Tutor
1 Empty the Warrens
4 Flooded Strand
4 Polluted Delta
1 Island
2 Swamp
2 Underground Sea
1 Volcanic Island
1 Badlands
1 Cabal Pit
Sideboard:
2 Duress
2 Chain of Vapor
2 Empty the Warrens
2 Pyroblast
2 Red Elemental Blast
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Echoing Truth
1 Hurkyl’s Recall
1 Wipe Away
1 Massacre
There is very little room to fool around with IGGy Pop, but a little bit of the extra tutoring can be shaved off. After all, many of the hands you’ll see with IGGy Pop are just complicated puzzles, rather than hands that require one very specific piece before it will work, and a Mystical Tutor and Intuition can make way for a pair of Duresses to add alongside the maindeck Leylines of the Void to increase the likelihood of still being there on turn 2 against Flash.dec. After sideboarding, access to the full four copies of Duress plus the eminently hateful team of Blasts does well, and the Blasts help fight off hateful Meddling Mages that will likely be blooming up like mushrooms if the format is as warped as it’s claimed.
And if things are just that warped, try making a list of cards that are really good against Flash that cost two mana or less, then play them in a deck with Chrome Mox in it to boot… it’s kind of an amusing exercise.
4 Daze
4 Force of Will
4 Brainstorm
4 Enlightened Tutor
1 Umezawa’s Jitte
1 Worship
1 Winter Orb
1 Planar Void
4 Savannah Lions
2 Isamaru, Hound of Konda
4 Meddling Mage
4 Galina’s Knight
4 Samurai of the Pale Curtain
4 Chrome Mox
4 Flooded Strand
2 Polluted Delta
4 Tundra
4 Wasteland
1 Plains
1 Island
1 Underground Sea
1 Scrubland[/author]“][author name="Scrubland"]Scrubland[/author]
Sideboard:
4 Silver Knight
4 Stifle
1 Pithing Needle
1 Trinisphere
1 Crucible of Worlds
1 Null Rod
1 Tormod’s Crypt
1 Aura of Silence
1 Engineered Plague
It’s a little odd for a Fish style deck, since it is trying to bridge the span between the former metagame and the presumed Flash-centric metagame, being fast enough to do something impactful on its first turn if it’s on the draw. Again, like the case with my previously well-tuned Survival deck, four copies of Chrome Mox may be just what the doctor ordered to bring a deck that is almost ready to compete up to speed against the startlingly-consistent turn 2 to turn 3 combo kill. An Enlightened Tutor array of tricks allows you to simulate multiple copies of powerful hosers; Jitte can help “solve” creature matchups, or you can assemble pro-Red creature + Worship. Planar Void means that in addition to countermagic you have Meddling Mage and Samurai of the Pale Curtain as creature-drops that gum up the works for Flash, plus four Enlightened Tutors for the graveyard-hosing enchantment. To pay attention to the old metagame it has pro-Red guys and interesting things to do with Enlightened Tutor, like take out one-toughness Goblins with Engineered Plague as those are usually the most problematic ones: Lackey, Sharpshooter, Fanatic and to some degree Siege-Gang Commander are the real dangers, while “only” Warchiefs, Piledrivers and Ringleaders can be dealt with and contained through normal creature combat.
Add to that the disruptive power of Force of Will backed up by Daze, and of course Wasteland as well, and the hope is that you have a multi-pronged attack against combo decks like Flash, which only gets better by removing irrelevant cards and putting in Stifles… combo-breakers and pseudo-Wastelands all in one package. Winter Orb is the hard-sell Tutor target but the presumption is that other unknown decks might fall to a mana disadvantage, and it can help to make Daze a better counterspell after the first two to three turns of the game have passed. Winter Orb may not be great against anything that is really known, but it can be crippling if decks like Psychatog start cropping up where they were more or less a suicidal deck-choice prior to the sudden shift in the metagame.
If nothing else, it’s fun to play a Fish deck, and I am well-known for getting some absurd joy out of decks like this even if it doesn’t actually have Lord of Atlantis in it. Some players will jump to extremes like this one, or aim to tune their Threshold decks to look or feel more like this, and more than a few homebrews will likely try to do something new by pointing at the expected metagame and not wondering whether they are actually capable of beating a decent draft deck. I am hoping that my weekend testing session against Hulk Flash shows that I can at least fight against the depressingly-simple combo deck enough to fire off a timely Duress or Cabal Therapy, as this will allow me to play the deck I wanted to anyway with some simple re-adjustment to match the speed of the environment. The hope is that four Chrome Moxes where Forests used to be will let me hang with the big dogs without killing myself via card disadvantage, and four Leylines in the sideboard will help pick up a little bit of that margin for the sideboarded games along with boarding in a faster aggressive clock. The fear is that I’m just outclassed, and as much as I don’t think I am, it would be awfully depressing to travel 500 miles just to find out I’d have been happier staying home and petting the kitties.
Sean McKeown
smckeown @ livejournal.com
And in the air the fireflies
Our only light in paradise
We’ll show the world they were wrong
And teach them all to sing along.
Nickelback, “If Everyone Cared”