Le sigh… it seems like every couple of years we have to go through this horrendous mess again. Some rare everyone dismisses as terrible jank ends up wiping out an entire format. It happened before with Illusions of Grandeur plus Donate, and it’s happening again with Flash plus Protean Hulk. When, oh when, will Wizards of the Coast learn that jank rares ruin formats? Oh sure, they look harmless and crappy enough at first glance, but a few years down the road? Bam! Cancer.
So please Wizards, the next time you want to print that garbage rare that’s slightly better than Pale Moon, remember that jank rares destroy formats.
Moving on… Flash is the real deal in Legacy. The average kill of the deck ranges from turn 2.2 through turn 3 depending on the exact configuration of the deck, and it usually has 8-12 protection cards to go along with that. The two main kills people seem to like at the moment are Disciple of the Vault plus X-mana artifact creatures, and the Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker plus Karmic Guide plus Carrion Feeder kill.
Now that we’ve got the basic bio out of the way, I’ll try and help identify the key areas of where the deck has you completely beat, and where it’s brittle.
1) Flash is always faster than you
That’s all there is to it. Flash is like SX in Vintage, but this deck actually works. It will outrace any deck you throw at it on a consistent basis, as well still being faster than most decks even after mulligans. Keeping “slow” hands is perfectly fine with this deck, because winning on turn 3 is really no different from winning on turn 1 or 2 in Legacy. The fact that it has so few set-up cards and is so high on Tutors means it can easily take multiple mulligans, and if you kept a hand purely on the value of racing the weakened Flash player, you still have a good chance of losing.
Once you learn the simple lesson of no longer trying to race the deck in the first few turns of play, you come to the problem that the fundamental turn of two for Flash will outrace almost all of your disruption on a common basis. There are still a number of answers at the zero- and one-mana range, but you have to specialize to be successful in stalling Flash. Cards like Leyline of the Void, Force of Will, Extirpate, Stifle, and Duress are all very good against the deck, but the speed of the deck means they become the basic “must haves” for an opposing counter-Flash deck.
Although the cards I listed range from good to excellent against the deck, they’re largely going to be played because you may not see a turn 2 on the draw, and hence you need them. Slower disruption spells like Chalice of the Void and Meddling Mage are better than most of those cards, but are far more risky because of the opportunity Flash will have to simply blow you out of the game before they come online. This means all of your major hosers have to be assisted by these cheap stall mechanisms to buy you time to set up a clock. This leads to my next point…
2) Flash is an instant speed win
People overlook this against many decks, because there really isn’t a difference when they choose to go off. But against a Threshold, Stax, or similar type of interactive deck, it becomes a major issue with using expensive or reactive disruption. Many people are now taught and trained to intuitively attempt to resolve spells when the opponent is limited in his options at the end step. Unfortunately that doesn’t apply to the Flash combo, and I’ve seen a number of players hamstrung in what they can or cannot do at any point in the game.
Take Trickbind, for instance. One would think it to be an excellent answer to Hulk Flash due to the nature of the protection typically run. It would require Duress, Xantid Swarm, or similar to stop the effect and allow for a safe combo. The problem comes from always having to leave two mana open if you want to keep that option available. The card loses a lot of its appeal in decks like Threshold or aggro-control, when you essentially are forced to keep mana open all the time. If you don’t, the opponent knows you’re vulnerable. If you do, you’re severely hamstrung in what you can do until the later point of the game.
This goes with all reactive cards against the combo, which makes it a risky proposition to rely entirely on Stifle and counter effects to hold the combo in check until a manabase is established. This unfortunately means Flash gets free reign many times because the instant speed tutors are only a single colored mana, and Elvish Spirit Guide / Simian Spirit Guide can provide unseen mana for Flash with some builds, providing a further consideration.
All you can really do about this is play some amount of proactive disruption spells, and keep track of all the information the opponent reveals to you over the course of the game. It may help narrow down the specifics of the Flash build, which could greatly change your tactics in the middle of a game.
3) Flash has no draw engine
Nearly every single relevant Flash deck I’ve seen lacks any sort of card drawing engine. That’s not to say there isn’t draw in the deck, as Brainstorm is ubiquitous with the Flash combo, but they consist almost entirely of cantrip draw spells. Without discussing how optimal this is due to the power of Tutors in the deck, this fact comes up every time the Flash deck is forced into a drawn-out game.
Because of the power of the Tutors with such a compact combo, discard still isn’t a great way to beat the deck. However, pinpoint spells like Duress and Cabal Therapy can cause a lot of damage to assembling the combo early on, while doing nearly as much damage as a Hymn to Tourach to their overall card resources. Once they lose a few key cards from their hand, the whole deck becomes one big topdeck session to assemble the two-card combo again.
If you can survive past turn 5 or so, most Flash builds fall apart and have to rip very well to win against any deck that wants to force interaction (like Threshold or Fish). In many cases slow-rolling is only a viable option for one major attempt. The upside of going off early, even without protection, is that you can try yet again in a turn or two with the remaining Tutors in your hand.
The complete lack of a draw engine adds one more important wrinkle to the deck when debating hands to keep. Most of the time the amount of protection Flash has is going to wildly fluctuate because of this factor. Sometimes you can narrow it down based on what colors you see out of the deck, but many times you simply have to guesstimate on the number of blue cards they’ve gone through and how many are in hand. Testing with the Flash deck is important, because it should give you a better idea of how to actually value your hands in accordance to the average draw.
4) You need to interact with Flash to beat it
As I mentioned from #1, you’ll pretty much never be able to race the Flash deck barring some very unusual circumstances. What you need to do is get cards down that force Flash to waste time looking for cards that aren’t going to kill you. Leyline of the Void, Meddling Mage, and Samurai of the Pale Curtain are all things that you can support relatively easily, and they force the Flash player to come up with an answer like Chain of Vapor or Massacre before winning. Anything that buys you another turn or two is great when you’ll probably need a minimum of three or four attack steps to win (unless you’re playing Iggy).
Unlike Vintage though, you rarely ever get a broken enough hand where you get to ignore Flash and just win anyway. Keep that in mind even with combo decks, because it doesn’t take much to get rolled.
These three listings are just some basic counter-strategies that I’ve found worked to some degree in testing. Obviously the results change based on how fast the Flash deck is, what it’s running for protection, and the contents of the kill. So please try to hold down on the whole, “my deck always beats Flash” or vice versa.
Lands (16)
Spells (44)
- 3 Tendrils of Agony
- 4 Brainstorm
- 4 Cabal Ritual
- 4 Mystical Tutor
- 4 Dark Ritual
- 4 Intuition
- 4 Ill-Gotten Gains
- 4 Lotus Petal
- 4 Lion's Eye Diamond
- 4 Leyline of the Void
- 4 Infernal Tutor
- 1 Empty the Warrens
Sideboard
Iggy-Pop was the best combo deck pre-Flash, and post-Flash it’s one of the only decks you can make a case for playing in its stead. Leyline of the Void naturally fits into the deck, and it provides a game 1 advantage against Flash and Threshold that many decks lack. Naturally the board (and 3-5 slots in the maindeck) need to be modified to help deal with Flash, but it has a powerful and consistent base.
This is one of the few decks that has a fast enough kill to get away with running fewer disruption slots, with maybe just Leyline, Extirpate and (arguably) Stifle / secondary disruption effect being enough.
Creatures (13)
Lands (17)
Spells (30)
- 4 Brainstorm
- 2 Counterspell
- 4 Force of Will
- 4 Swords to Plowshares
- 3 Serum Visions
- 3 Daze
- 4 Predict
- 3 Mental Note
- 3 Pithing Needle
Sideboard
Make a few changes to your basic Threshold build and it has as good a chance as any against a Flash build. Stifle effectively replaces Pithing Needle, Meddling Mage goes up to a set, and I’d feel much better about fitting the fourth Serum Visions and Daze into the deck. Effectively, if you take a stock Threshold deck, trim some of the fat and replace a few cards that aren’t as effective in the current metagame, you’ve got a deck that can stand up to most builds of Flash. If you really needed the room, you could always cut Swords to Plowshares, though I wouldn’t recommend it against non-Flash decks.
Creatures (2)
Lands (23)
Spells (35)
- 4 Brainstorm
- 4 Counterspell
- 4 Force of Will
- 4 Accumulated Knowledge
- 3 Intuition
- 2 Cunning Wish
- 3 Vedalken Shackles
- 4 Engineered Plague
- 3 Fact or Fiction
- 3 Chalice of the Void
- 1 Darkblast
Sideboard
This Psychatog deck may not look like much, but it’s got enough punch post-board to hold Flash down and not let up. Post-board you’ve got a set of Force of Will, Duress, Counterspell, and Chalice of the Void. Not too shabby. Oh, and the deck can win on turn 5-6 utilizing only one creature that Flash can’t kill. Not a bad deal. Of course, you could also make maindeck modifications like Stifle, or maindeck the Duress for a better game 1, but if you want to build control that can stand up to Flash, this isn’t a bad start.
The deck itself I took from a recent Legacy tourney in Ohio where the build went 2-0 against Flash, which led me to test it further. I thought at first the results may have been a fluke, but the deck has a surprising amount of resilience against Flash.
Hopefully this helped those of you considering anti-Hulk strategies for the upcoming Grand Prix, and I hope it highlights some of the small weaknesses / types of things that are good against the deck for those who are playing it. I’m not going to bother giving out my own list, because honestly between Eisel’s article and the approx. 3,000 long threads on the deck, you can figure out nearly every single general outline of the deck for yourself.
As for the errata itself, I figure it was bound to happen just like every other power-errated card. The timing was very unfortunate, and I wish Wizards had at least released a general public statement that said “yes, the card works now,” which would’ve saved a whole lot of people from asking / double-checking if the combo had worked. All I can really say is that broken decks / skewed metagames happen in other formats. It’s happened here, and while the timing is unfortunate, just get on with your lives already.
There’s nothing to be done with all the incessant complaining and bitching until after June 1st. Yes, the GP will now be completely different than before. Accept it and try your best at this new version of the format. With luck, it’ll be back to the same old same old after June. If not, then there’s a real problem, since once Future Sight becomes legal…
Let’s not think about that until later, shall we?
Good look and try your best at the GP, desho, desho!
Josh Silvestri
Team Reflection
E-mail me at: joshDOTsilvestriATgmailDOTcom