Originally I was going to write about Hulk Flash (and Patrick suggested that I finish it on a "Game on!" sort of cat call), but that would just be the 999th bad article on Hulk Flash in the last two weeks so I will only devote a little bit of this article to it.
There used to be a Deadguy saying about Patrick Chapin, which was "if you have every idea, then by definition, you will have the best ideas." Working with Pat is the kind of process that you have to take with a grain of salt because he is even more prolific than I am, and therefore the vast majority of the innovative sounding things that come out of his mouth or keyboard will necessarily be bad. That said, he really does also have the best ideas, and decks routinely fall out of his brain and alter the universe. He also can’t shut up. Pat is a deck whore. You can point-blank ask him and he will not be able to contain even the most forbidden deck. The Deadguy success with Deadguy Red at Worlds 1998 is actually largely attributable to Patrick, who blabbed to the world about their deck so they changed to a Red Deck at the last minute… and two of them made Top 8!
Anyway, Patrick called me some weeks ago with a suggestion on how to make one of my Reanimator decks even better (I was pretty sure one of my Reanimator decks was going to be the best deck). "What if you add Flash to your deck? Isn’t it good to Flash out Sundering Titan and kill two of their lands, untap, and Exhume it?"
"Silly Chapin! They errata’d Flash eight years ago to prevent Flash plus Academy Rector."
"As of (something like one second ago), they changed it back."
This was like the moment when it became clear that all of John Uskglass’s old alliances were still in place, and Magic flowed through England like rain and wind, and little girls could be taught conjurings by rock formations, or you could politely ask a nearby forest to smash an enemy to bits. The world was awash in both possibility and – dare I even think it – magic.
Like I said, Chapin has every idea, so he immediately jumped from a marginally broken Exhume setup (which, let’s be honest, is like Armageddon + 7/10) to a baby Flash combo. Most of you caught on only later in a process you kind of stumbled onto, so you probably didn’t puzzle through a pre-Phyrexian Marauder stage. In our path, it started on Arcbound Ravagers and zero mana creatures like Ornithopter or Phyrexian Walker. Pat was worried about how many Ravagers we would have to play, but I countered with "Why not play them all?"
This was our first deck:
4 Disciple of the Vault
4 Flash
4 Thoughtcast
4 Protean Hulk
4 Arcbound Worker
4 Arcbound Ravager
4 Chrome Mox
4 Frogmite
4 Lotus Petal
4 Myr Enforcer
4 Shield Sphere
4 Darksteel Citadel
4 Seat of the Synod
4 Tree of Tales
4 Vault of Whispers
There are two things wrong with this deck:
1) It never lost any games.
2) No Force of Will. No Psychatog, even.
3) It was not nearly the best Flash deck.
I know 3 > 2, but the first point doesn’t really count as something wrong. Pat was queerly dissatisfied in testing. The problem was that he never lost, but he also never felt like he was getting a good conclusion to his efforts; I would equate it with really soft lesbian porn, if you take my meaning… the kind you can get at Blockbuster if you’re seventeen.
A lot of the time he would just have a double mulligan Affinity draw and maul. This was fine, because Affinity defeats the unarmed from five cards like clockwork… but he was not even a good Affinity deck. In fact, this is a dumb Affinity deck. You beat Goblin Lackey (this, remember was weeks ago, and the concept of "a Flash mirror" was not anywhere in our universe) with Shield Sphere. Threshold was a joke. Given how many cards are in the mix, it’s surprising that there aren’t really that many Legacy decks to test, as there are in Standard and Extended.
So most of the time, Pat just wanted cards like Brainstorm and Intuition so that he could find his combo. In case you have been living under a rock, you can play Flash and Protean Hulk; due to un-errata, the Hulk hits play and you decline to pay the vig. He dies and you go and get something. In this case it was one Arcbound Ravager (2) and four Disciple of the Vault (4) optimally, plus four Shield Spheres (0), plus whatever artifact lands or Moxes or whatever you have in play. That is more than enough to Ravager the opponent out.
I was really excited by this deck because I was already entertaining fantasies of having produced the actual consensus best deck in the history of Magic. Marrying the best offensive deck ever to a two-card first turn kill seemed like a fine route. Reality came around and ultimately Patrick, Osyp, and others all liked the combo better than the novelty of having it in an Affinity deck (like any of them can win a tournament in Japan), and Flash Affinity was scrapped in its nascency. Honestly, I can’t see it being better than the best non-Affinity Flash decks that will show up in Columbus, plus it gets hosed down by more than one potential sideboard card.
Patrick moved to a two-Ravager model, but the X-artifacts (Phyrexian Marauder and Shifting Wall) simply took up less deck space. If you’ve read Nick Eisel article, you know about the Kiki-Jiki version, which takes up less than half the room. Patrick went another way (he has every idea, remember), which I think will ultimately be best, if not for this tournament (and provided Flash isn’t banned):
His combo is Angry Hermit III. Flash gets two Nomads en-Kor (2) and two Cephalid Illusionists (4), plus some number of Shield Spheres (0). You deck yourself, flash back a bunch of Therapies to protect yourself, or make yourself discard Dragon Breath or Sutured Ghoul, then flash Dread Return for a quad Hulk-fed Ghoul. This combo actually takes up tons of room instead of constricting the room, but in the off chance that Flash is not immediately banned, I think this will be the best version. The reason is that in other versions, if you draw Kiki-Jiki or Karmic Guide it’s really hard to combo, and if you draw too many Disciples, you can’t really win any more, etc. Some players will be willing to go with the inferior Kiki-Jiki combo to save space, however, in the Angry Hermit III-Flash deck, if you draw Nomads and Illusionist, you just kill them. Your bad cards are good!
It’s like having two different two-card combos that win in the first couple of turns.
I think Illusionist will be best Flash post-Future Sight because not only do you get Summoner’s Pact (everyone will), but you get Narcomoeba. Mill yourself, guarantee four guys to flashback Therapies, and set up Dread Return. Have two different, two-mana, two-card kill combos. Uh… Sign me up?
The Disciple variants have an edge over the Kiki-Jiki or Ghoul versions in that they truly win at instant speed. The other decks combo at instant speed but still have to attack you. The Kiki-Jiki version is compact, but highly vulnerable to any one mana spell: Lightning Bolt, Lava Dart, Darkblast, Pithing Needle, certainly Swords to Plowshares, can stop the combo… Just think of the problems that a two-mana spell might turn up! The nice thing about a Flash-driven Illusionist combo is that you get to have two full copies of both sides, plus numerous fodder candidates, and one piece your combo can move around damage, which can help to limit certain types of disruption. End of day, you can theoretically fire a number of Therapies to defend your Ghoul pre-combat, for no mana. To get out of it, the opponent needs several pieces of disruption.
Anyway, enough about Protean Hulk. Now onto a more general Hulk-flavored problem, that of Green.
Jamie has been complaining about Green since, well, forever. His arguments come packaged in one of a couple of flavors, like "Green itself is conducive only to a swarm deck," "Green is the color of sharing," and "Black and Blue mages use poor Green to further their ends."
I’ve never agreed with Jamie about this stuff because I happen to think that Green is a fine color to play, and his arguments about it being narrow in some ways and embarrassing in others don’t actually sway from that point. Jamie wants his deck to be flexible, and I want my brain to be flexible (but not my deck if I can help it, so that I can avoid unnecessary errors), so we have not seen eye to eye on this for more than ten years. Our paradigms differ. As such, I will take this opportunity to make fun of him for a few paragraphs:
Green isn’t really a very good swarm color. I guess it has some swarm-ish cards, but swarm White has numerous Nationals and multiple PT wins, including Worlds. Black was a nice attack color for a while there, both in Bad Moon and Hatred eras. Where is swarm Green? The only person I can think of who casts Overrun in 60 cards is, um, Jamie. The best implementation of Green’s ability to product massive amounts of Insects and Saproling, is in a Blue deck to tap the opponent out. I have no beef with Jamie’s "sharing" problem, because of Eladamri’s Vineyard, onetime errata on Verdant Force, all of it (but let’s face it, Vineyard effects would be far to good if they only helped one player), but pointing to it and ignoring the fact that most of the cards in most of the other colors also suck is like indicting Red for having poor-to-no enchantment removal. Well, there we are! Another set, another bunch of cards without Red enchantment removal, and still no Black enchantment removal! These colors are stuck burning and blasting and resurrecting and stabbing themselves in the foot. When will they get good sharing? What I’ve never agreed on is Green making life so much better for Blue and Black to its detriment or dignity.
In Jamie’s world, the presence of a lot of Green is a sign of subservience. He looks at a Greater Good Gifts Ungiven deck and hears the whimper of “yes, master” with every Sakura-Tribe Elder. Unless I miss my mark, Jamie sees Blue and Black mages as a kind of terrible cheerleader clique (Blue being stuck up rich girls that lie a lot, and Black being morally-suspect butter faces), and Green as the math nerds that they let do their homework in exchange for not getting their football player boyfriends to swirley and depants them every day. I don’t see that at all. Gifts Ungiven – despite the name – was barely Blue. I know I come back to Critical Mass a lot, but that deck was a perfect marriage of Green and Blue for its format. Green was important in the early game, and Blue was important throughout. The long game was obviously Blue (tap out for Keiga and Meloku), but the edge the deck got was vitally Green (get ahead on mana with Sakura-Tribe Elder, or seize early or middle tempo with some Green man and not have to tap mana again). You can look at the Critical Mass manabase and see how important Green versus Blue was to the deck:
Creatures (17)
- 4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
- 1 Isao, Enlightened Bushi
- 4 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
- 4 Kodama of the North Tree
- 4 Keiga, the Tide Star
Lands (23)
Spells (20)
9 Forest
7 Island
1 Minamo, School At Water’s Edge
1 Oboro, Palace In The Clouds
1 Okina, Temple To The Grandfathers
4 Tendo Ice Bridge
The deck has more Green than Blue lands!
Look a bit closer, and you will notice it has significantly more Blue than Green cards (I think the Green part of the pie chart is heavily influenced by the presence of twelve Kodama of the North Tree Green mana symbols).
This speaks a bit to the tension between Green and other colors.
Critical Mass needed early Green for Sakura-Tribe Elder, and GG as soon as turn 3 for Gnarled Mass. The long game was Blue, but the deck needed to squeeze in more Green mana in order to draw sufficient colors in the first few turns.
All the colors do individually strong things. The essential problem with Green is not that what it can do is somehow weak compared to other colors (it’s not); it’s that Green, perhaps due to its wild and untapped nature, doesn’t get a long very well with the other colors and is very greedy in its timing.
As far as I can tell this is the best thing Green can do:
I kid. But only a little. Green is good at something in a way that no other color is good, and it is a very special something, probably the second most powerful something after Blue’s card drawing: low cost manipulation and mana acceleration. The problem with Green is that in order to take advantage of its historical sweet spot of acceleration and manipulation at one and two (and kind of three), of which Farseek is a perfect example of both branches, you have to have Green mana early. Survival of the Fittest is not fit to draw when the game is over. Farseek is awesome on two and decidedly worthless on twenty-two. The problem is that Blue and White decks aren’t really interested in what Green has to offer in terms of an end game, but they are married to heavy Green mana if they want to take advantage of cards like this. That, more than anything else, is why Green has not been incorporated more frequently into more intricate strategies, even when it would be helpful.
A great counter-example is Shimizu’s U/G Pickles deck from Yokohama.
Creatures (14)
- 1 Willbender
- 1 Silklash Spider
- 1 Mystic Snake
- 4 Wall of Roots
- 1 Brine Elemental
- 3 Thelonite Hermit
- 2 Vesuvan Shapeshifter
- 1 Deadwood Treefolk
Lands (23)
Spells (23)
Sideboard
The deck doesn’t really live and die by Green. The end game is Vesuvan Shapeshifter plus Brine Elemental. The power source is the ‘Tron, and though Green, this isn’t one of those decks where Green’s goal is to find the ‘Tron. However the facilitator is Chord of Calling, which is a three-of triple-G in this largely Blue deck. Shimizu’s Pickles is a great example of the compromises made by Blue in order to accommodate Green search.
Look at Wall of Roots.
I know this card was staple to Loam, clearly the steadiest deck of the Extended season just passed, but all respect to Loam, it has never been more perfectly positioned, not even in Survival / Squee. A base-Blue deck with twelve colorless lands can consistently play Chord of Calling at GGG thanks to Wall of Roots, which has an implied G that played it, G itself (Convoke) and G mana production as its super power. Shimizu moreover selected Harmonize, which has a natural ramp consistency with Wall of Roots that leaves a card like Careful Consideration (a better "search" card advantage four mana spell) in the dust.
I’d be curious to hear if Jamie thinks that Green is just serving the ends of the awful, awful Blue mage here (I’d guess yes). To me this is an exercise in glorious tuning and synergy exploitation and the seizing of subtle interactions. I do a lot of work in advertising and I’d draw this analogy: what is the more important part of the equation, the client or the channel? Without a client, channels are empty. Without a channel, the client doesn’t have a venue to sell. Both are needed for success. Individually, nothing gets done. Together, the client sells product and the channel earns commissions. Sometimes the client gets a good deal and sometimes the channel has the client by the balls, but ultimately, neither one can exist without the other (or at least a different channel / client). Is it offensive that the end game is Blue? The early and setup game is Green. I think of the early turns and fast plays as much more important than the end game (despite thinking the end game is very important, as you know) because you don’t get to the end game if you don’t live through the early game.
In a sense, Green doesn’t play well with others. I know this is odd because it is lambasted for sharing, but hear me out. It is greedy for mana, high mana count, and early game mana dedication for its best cards, Llanowar Elves and Birds of Paradise on one, and Farseek and company on two. With the exception of Life from the Loam in Extended, it does not exceed the capabilities of other decks in the middle or late turns (you can’t even say entwined Tooth and Nail is better than BlueTooth or Kuroda-style burn flurry on the same mana). This isn’t "bad" in any way because I don’t know if any color can say it’s the best in the abstract at middle or end game sequencing (though Blue is obviously best at more small and individual elements than any other color); that said, Green almost has a stranglehold on its turn. The conclusion is subtle: Green is a pre-plan facilitator whereas other colors can come in at later mana points as support more naturally. Think of deck names. It’s Counter-Rebels, and Counter-Sliver, and Counter-Post, implying (correctly) that you could play other Sliver decks, other Rebel decks, etc. There was Erhnam’n’Burn’em, directly contrasted with Ernham’Geddon; Ernham is static, and the secondary color is the nail in the secondary role.
The early game stipulations also prevent Green from taking advantage of the best cards in (for example) the Standard format, but I’m not sure how much of that is intrinsic to the color itself. It is the most natural thing in the world for Wrath of God (White’s best card) to pair with Remand, Blue’s best card; Wrath of God on balance plays badly with Green’s best Standard card, Birds of Paradise. Birds of Paradise is greedy and wants to go first. They play together only in niche situations (Glare boarding to kill more of the opponent’s "Birds" than his own) or in oddball decks like The Masterpiece and some versions of Beach House where Birds is optimal for the fast Phyrexian Arena.
Look where Green has no tension. Red has always been a fine partner. We have seen many decks with some kind of Birds of Paradise (or Llanowar Elves) and some kind of Demonfire (or Fireball, Disintegrate etc). Red doesn’t mind because Green has better creatures and can dominate the manabase for early and follow-up drops; Red’s job is essentially to support Green with direct damage. I don’t think Jamie would be offended at Green with Red, but then again, that kind of deck is usually built to swarm.
Let’s come back to what Green does best in order to illustrate its underrated moments of innovation and out-of-the-box angles of attack. You have Stupid Green, the first great Survival of the Fittest deck, which was straight Green. It was not a stretch in that deck to play lots of Forests, so getting the early Elves into Survival of the Fittest, and certainly the mid-game operating mana, were not color issues. You can say that as good as Stupid Green was at one tournament, the deck was better as a B/G variant, but to me, that actually shows an enriching of the strategy, not a domination or subjugation by Black. You have Baron Harkkonnen, Adrian Sullivan‘s original U/G Mahamoti Djinn deck. Here is a deck where Green acts vitally at every point in the game. Adrian had to make his Blue deck very Green because he wanted Wall of Roots as his two drop and to play Sylvan Library consistently on turn 2. He chose sub-optimal cards like Natural Spring through his mid-game that, while less powerful than other options, were Green and could fit into his forced manabase. Finally, he ended on Green, with Gaea’s Blessing Recursion a legitimate end game strategy.
I once thought that we would see a resurgence of some of the old school style control with Time Spiral due to the reprinting of Gaea’s Blessing and Whispers of the Muse, and the addition of instant card drawing like Think Twice to Standard. I was assuming more of a Donais / Schneider / Walamies game plan, which proved successful over the course of many tournaments, rather than Adrian’s (which was highly successful in a much more isolated silo), but it was not to pass. Even with the mana, even with the tools, the problem, I think, is the greediness of having to play with Green mana. I have found that you can get straight card advantage much faster in Standard without oblique strategies like Mouth of Ronom recursion or having to consistently take two from your Breeding Pool to have Remand mana up on turn 2.
Jamie likes to make the argument that straight Green decks have never had the success of straight anything else, and he is definitely right. However, straight everything is a shorthand of yesterday. We live in a time of three- and even four-color decks. It’s really hard to see any one color shine for anything but a specific card, rather than the whole color itself. White is Wrath of God. Blue is lots of things but mostly Remand. Adrian Sullivan is willing to splash for Gaea’s Blessing, but most people aren’t. If you want to point to a culprit, Green’s enemy, I think looking at successful decks with Blue and Black and yelling Uncle Tom is a mistake. The enemy is the Signet. An Azorius Signet is the mana acceleration equivalent to Indian outsourcing. Signets require no colors to start, do 80% of a Farseek’s job, and are actually more effective the turn they show up than anything else. They’re really fantastic on turn 3.
I guess we just have to wait what will happen in the next year. Ravnica lands and Signets will rotate so we will see more monochromatic decks. Green may have another dominating, Tooth and Nail-like, end game waiting in the wings that will reward mid-game dedication to some kind of Forests.
I’m looking at you, Wild Pair.
LOVE
MIKE
I’m blushing.
I’m looking right back, big boy!
xoxo