Hello everybody and welcome to another edition of The Magic Show. Today we’re going to talk about Flash, we’re going to talk about Flores, and we’re going to talk about This Week in Magic.
[The following is a transcript of the show, which you really should check out.]
Today’s featured segment is something we’ll call The Sky Is Falling.
*sirens* Oh my God, have you heard the ruckus about Flash? The world has turned upside down ladies and gentlemen, the fire exits are on opposite sides of the building and what we have here can only be described as a crisis.
What happened was this, and I hope I get this correct: every set release, a little Wizards mouse creeps along the floorboards into the Errata Room for a little doodling. And this mouse – we’ll call him Aaron Forsythe – changes a whole bunch of cards with each whimsical stroke.
Now little did I (or maybe even you) know, but there was a lurking bookkeeper of this well-known and referred-to tome. His name is Yawgatog. And he keeps track of every little change that mouse makes, and through it, he found that an old card was unnerfed:
Flash is, by itself, not a very interesting card. The keyword we know as Flash, the ability to play the creature at instant speed, started with this weird relic from a rules base you don’t even want to know about. Thanks to its wording, which actually puts the creature into play before you have to pay its mana cost, it was buh-roken with Academy Rector. Flash in Rector, get Yawgmoth’s Bargain, have more cards than any other player guaranteed for the rest of the game.
Like many other cards at the time such as Priest of Gix, Great Whale, Cloud of Faeries and so on, they power-nerfed the hell out of it. Suddenly it said “Choose a creature card in your hand” instead of putting that creature into play. But the problem with that was, if you didn’t have a creature in your hand, you’d have to call a judge over to verify that, or you’d have to reveal your hand. Awkward.
So they had nerfed it, then they just released it from said nerf. Now it simply did what it said it did, which was putting the creature into play and then killing it if you didn’t pay its cost minus two mana. I mean, since Academy Rector couldn’t fetch the now-banned Yawgmoth’s Bargain, there’s nothing to worry about, right?
Well, insert hand-wringing from every single Legacy player on the planet. If you’re like me, and God help you if you are, you may be attending Grand Prix: Columbus with the idea that you’ll borrow or buy some old cards and have some fun and possibly win some cash. Not lose on Turn 0 4% of the time, or watch your anti-Flash sideboard fail you directly into the Drop box. Or, you don’t like having to completely warp your deck to account for this ridiculous combo.
What is the best Flash combo deck, anyway? Well, there’s a funny thing about deck evolutions. The evolutions around a broken card are extremely fast and ever-changing. They’re like the Genesis missile in Star Trek II. They form new life so fast they don’t know when to stop, and now we’ve got a whole planet of Flash builds.
It began by fetching four Disciple of the Vault and a host of X/X artifact creatures that would die immediately and win you the game right there. Then it morphed into Kiki-Jiki, Karmic Guide, and Carrion Feeder as a sac outlet to make infinite 2/2 fliers. Then that version began to include cards like Sylvan Safekeeper to protect it from a random Lightning Bolt from stopping the combo. And so it goes. By the time you see this show, the best playgroups will have found yet another angle, another edge, something you or I didn’t think of, but the top tables will get a full glimpse of.
Will it be Psychatog-fueled? I mean, the best damn creature ever couldn’t possibly show up in the best combo deck ever. I mean, could it?
You know how you can tell there’s a real problem here? No one will shut up about it. To contrast, think of the last “big” problem child, Skullclamp. Take yourself back into the days of early 2003. If every article didn’t mention Skullclamp, it was still there, hovering, waiting, thinking about infecting the article with another ridiculous combo, another outcry for its removal from the game, another half-assed attempt to ”foil” it by running lots of artifact hate in the main.
Today, if you have the word “Legacy” in your article, you probably have the word “Flash” in it. And here we are, the first Legacy Grand Prix since the end of 2005 even, seventeen months later, and here comes this damn problem. And it’s a problem. It’s a bad problem.
Kevin Binswanger wrote an absolutely brilliant article where he explained what the hell Flash is doing in the metagame, which is to say completely wrecking it at the moment, and what it means for the Grand Prix. Which is summed up as: “Hell yes it’s overblown, but hell yes it’s good. Please come support my format. We’re really nice and not condescending. And we want Flash banned too.”
That’s my take from it. And our own Ben Bleiweiss concurred with the message of “Come, play, Legacy guys don’t be jerkwads and show up so Wizards doesn’t take this format away.”
And what happens now? I’m 100% serious when I say this: Wizards are literally waiting for the train to hit. They admit, by their own words, that the pros are supposed to break the cards and demonstrate how absurd they are to prove their worth in banning. Just like Pro Tour: Tinker barreled down the tracks, Grand Prix: Flash is the new freight train, and the players at Grand Prix: Legacy are doing their best to build a brick wall.
A big, healthy brick wall made of Duress, Leyline of the Void, Red Elemental Blast, Spell Snare and more. The problem is, it’s been seventeen long months since a Legacy Grand Prix. Thousands of dollars given away, and if everyone freaks out and doesn’t attend, then the Grand Prix may not happen for another two years. Or longer. Or ever.
Is it enough? Can the train of Flash ruin the format? Of course the pundits say no. And I’m trying to be completely fair here. It’s like arguing for playing anything but Affinity in Mirrodin Block Constructed, or in Standard when Skullclamp was legal. Sure you could play another deck, but you have to play it with the idea that you can disrupt 4-6 artifacts in the first 3-4 turns or you may just up and lose. You were playing, as they say, the Tier 2 deck.
Funny thing about Tiers: Everyone loves to hate them, but when someone says something is Tier 1, everyone knows what it means. It’s like that Chris Porter joke about the pill. When I say "the pill," you know what pill I’m talking about. When I say Tier 1, you know kind of deck I’m talking about.
And damn it, Flash is the best deck. But what we have right now is new, uncultured information, only weeks old. You see, what professionals and the hardcore among us do, is turn information into a concoction of power, speed, and consistency over a period of months. This Legacy Grand Prix was actually going to be really interesting, as you had your established archetypes, Goblins, Threshold, Combo like Iggy Pop, and Control, and the great Pikula showed ’em how it was done with Deadguy Ale, a deck that came out of nowhere to take second place in the last big event.
But now you have the elephant. The big, looming elephant. Faster and bigger, and meaner and tougher than any other deck that isn’t geared to hate it out. And now every deck, every strategy, must have ways of dealing with it. Some are built in. Some are not. But for those who have tested for this format, they are none too happy. Sure, it won’t invalidate their matchups against the familiar decks, but now you’ll have a dozen hybrids of the best deck, and if you don’t take the best deck, do you really want to win?
Houston, we have a problem.
Thanks to the DCI, we have to wait until June to be done with this mess. It’s a sad little piece of what will be Magic history, and will now put all future errata under a microscope. You bet your ass the next set review there will be a good long discussion on the Oracle refresh and what it may or may not mean to formats you know and love. Suddenly we have found another chink in the Wizards armor, another point of interest.
So, dear Legacy players: I feel for you. I would love to help you. Kevin Binswanger, among many others, have done so much in keeping my interest alive in the format. Just because I don’t mention Legacy on the show doesn’t mean I don’t see it and read about it.
But the red tape has us tied. Should we change it? Do we want to? Does public outcry and community shock mean we should really ban cards because broken combos were found mere weeks before a large event? I think we all understand that systems need to be in place so we don’t go spooking ourselves into banning a dozen cards because some guy builds a powerful-looking deck that turns out can’t stand up to tournament scrutiny. But as Kevin rightly notes, it’s easier to make a case for banning than trying to get something unbanned.
So until this weekend… here comes the train.
And now…This Week In Magic
Abe Sargent wrote a fun and amusing article entitled Casual Rants. Abe is a writer of impeccable worth and unbelievable consistency. This week was no different, and he brought up two really interesting points. One, Akroma’s Memorial is ridiculously underpriced. For seven mana you get about twenty mana’s worth of abilities… forever… with no activation costs. He suggested thirteen-mana replacements that gave the creatures +6/+6 and/or made your creatures Angels to boot. Neato.
He also talks about Shivan Dragon and our favorite mistress, Serra Angel. Both of these cards see squat play. Are they awful? Not… really. They’re not bad cards… they’re more like mediocre cards. They’ve become measuring sticks, and, generally, they’re measuring against better creatures. More interesting and explosive creatures. Sure, they can end a game here and there, but Tarox Bladewing versus Shivan Dragon? One has a very “combo-like” element to it, the other swings for five plus firebreathing. Red Akroma versus Shivan Dragon? I don’t really have to explain this one, do I?
While I disagree on the playability of Shivan Dragon or Serra Angel anywhere near a tournament table, he mentions Clone and how it made its way into three different decks in the Japan Championships this year. And when you think Clone, you can now point to the strictly better version, called Vesuvan Shapeshifter.
Which leads me to a point about the color Green. Ah yes, Green, the color of “unsolvable creatures.” You want to know what a stranglehold Blue has on this game? When the “best” creature color, Green, gets the unsolvable Quagnoth, which might as well say “I hate Blue mages” on it, turns out Wizards has already printed the ultimate foil – Vesuvan Shapeshifter. Spectral Force is good, but Shapeshifter simply copies it and trumps the undercosted beast. At the same price, with an easier cost even. The Blue mage may not be powering it out an 8/8 on turn 3, but on turn 4 they’ve got a copy to kill it. Troll Ascetic will be affected exactly the same way. These trademark “unsolvable” creatures are, ironically, only “solved” by Blue spells. Everyone else has to kill them, ignore them, or be annoyed by them indefinitely.
Which brings us to… The Flores Minute
Mike Flores brought another theorem article to the masses, and it explained that Chapin told him about Flash’s return to form and how Green is bad because it’s a support color… but that it’s good… because it’s a support color. I mean, look at Critical Mass. No, seriously, look at it. Look at its majesty. Its heavy reliance on Green.
Only Mike Flores could say Critical Mass was “was a perfect marriage of Green and Blue for its format.” Then follow it on the next sentence with “Green was important in the early game, and Blue was important throughout.”
I’ve been married for five years now. Being important in the first few years and not being important again is no perfect marriage. But I digress.
The forums generally echoed these thoughts as people were both perplexed and confused by the notion that Green was bad… but was good… when Wall of Roots was powering out Chord of Callings, and that Green may one day have a decent spell that doesn’t completely rely on another color to win the game.
Moving on, I’d like to take a moment and note I was wrong about Take Possession. Turns out it really is a slightly overcosted Confiscate, and that plain sucks. I know the few words of rules text is sexy, but making this a Sorcery would’ve really thrown kinks into the control mirrors of the world. Like Annex wasn’t defining enough.
Dan Paskins threw another masterpiece our way in What’s the Beatdown? As you should know, Who’s the Beatdown is the foremost Magic accepted theorem. Misassignment of role = game loss. In this one, Dan talks about Dominating, Dodging, Disrupting, Defending, and finally my favorite, Hitting Your Opponent In The Face. Ultimately it comes down to Misassignment of plan = match loss. There is more at stake than a single game when you don’t know your role but how you even plan to go about playing the correct one.
If there was ever a reason to get you some StarCityGames Premium goodness, now’s the time. Also, get it for the Feldman. I’m telling you people, this guy is only improving his game. He’s giving us the real strategy that you pay dollars for, or, in a yearly subscription sense, a nickel for. Many strategy articles aren’t worth the pixels they take up. But R. Feldman breaks out a ton of interesting and thought provoking decks, converging in a control deck featuring the one and only Crovax, Ascendant Hero.
For those serious about Regionals and what Future Sight can do for you, Feldman and Paskins are currently bringing the noise and a good deal of the funk.
So that’s another Magic Show everybody. Remember, I’m going to be up in Columbus this weekend, so if you see me say hi (I’ll be the guy with the video equipment), and if you write for this site, expect me to ask for an interview. I’m talking to you, Menendian!
Until next time, this is Evan Erwin, tapping the cards so you don’t have to.
Evan “misterorange” Erwin
dubya dubya dubya dot misterorange dot com
eerwin +at+ gmail +dot+ com
Written after I got back from my vacation and saw that Flash had exploded. Boom.
Featuring the music of Nine Inch Nails’ latest record “Year Zero”