This past week, I want to remind everyone why Legacy is a great format. Rather than write up another in-depth analysis of how to maneuver Stoneforge
Mystic around Dryad Arbor and Mother of Runes, I want to use this article to highlight some of the more diverse and out-there decks of the
format’s history. With almost two decades of card interactions, Legacy has a rich diversity of decks that do things no other format’s decks
have done before. Whenever I get tired of looking at an endless sea of overpowered two-drop-centric aggro-control strategies, I come back to decks like
these to remember that there is so much more to this format that we know and love so well. It’s encouraging to look at these decks and think of
just how much deck design space has yet to be explored in this format we’ve all come to know and love. Sure, Stoneforge Mystic and Jace, the Mind
Sculptor transitioned in dominance from Standard to Extended to Legacy in the span of a year, but there is so much more to this format than
just playing counterspells.

This list is a reminder that there is a lot of cool stuff to figure out in Legacy. Some of it is downright bad, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean
we shouldn’t be trying to find interactions like these. There are a lot of lessons that we can learn from these decks. Each of these decks has a
lot going on. I’ve taken away a lot from studying these lists and lists like them, and I hope you will, too.

#10: Pattern of Rebirth/Natural Order

One of the coolest decks to come out of Grand Prix Providence was the creation of a Canadian mastermind who put three different green tutors in the
same combo deck and had seen some real success with it. The three tutors? Green Sun’s Zenith, Natural Order, and Pattern of Rebirth.

NO Pattern

Felix Lapan

Test deck on 01-15-2012

Legacy

Creatures (20)

Lands (21)

Spells (20)

Sideboard

Green Sun’s Zenith and Natural Order have played well together since the creation of Zenith, but the inclusion of Pattern of Rebirth gives the
Dryad Arbor-wielding mage a very different line of attack. People have played at least one Tarmogoyf in their Zenith/Natural Order decks, but this deck
plays zero. Rather than being an aggro-control deck with an option on a combo finish via Dryad Arbor for Progenitus, this deck is a straight combo deck
with a Plan B of a different combo finish. Interestingly enough, Natural Order also fuels the deck’s Plan A, as it can still Natural
Order for Protean Hulk and sacrifice it to kill its opponent on the spot. Just how does this deck do that, though?

Brian David-Marshall has a great deck tech and discussion with the pilot here. For those of you who want the quick
‘n’ dirty, here is it:

Step 1: Get a Protean Hulk into play. There are a couple of ways to do this. The first way is to get a creature in play, get a way to sacrifice it in play or in your graveyard, cast
Pattern of Rebirth targeting that creature, and then sacrifice it. Pattern will trigger, and you can go get your Hulk. The second way is to cast
Natural Order for Protean Hulk. The third is to simply hardcast one from your hand. This last line may seem a bit unrealistic, but you are playing
Tinder Wall, Phyrexian Tower, and a bunch of cards that add one mana to your mana pool. Getting to seven mana is not actually the most out-there thing
imaginable.

Step 2: Kill your Protean Hulk. As with Step 1, there are a number of ways to do this. The first one—as demonstrated in the Providence
coverage—is to cast Cabal Therapy beforehand (and presumably clear out their primary removal spell in doing so). This leaves you with a zero-mana
sacrifice outlet for your Protean Hulk. It’s important to remember that when you flashback Cabal Therapy sacrificing Protean Hulk, your Hulk
trigger will happen before your Therapy resolves. This means that if they have a removal spell, they’re going to get to cast it. Be aware of
this, as it could be a problem if you’re holding some combo pieces in your hand. More on this in a second.

Another way to kill your Hulk is to activate Phyrexian Tower. Not much to see here, although I could definitely see playing a Knight of the Reliquary
in this deck as a way to backdoor your Phyrexian Tower through Green Sun’s Zenith or just beat down in a bad situation. Perhaps not the best but
something to take into consideration.

Finally, you have a number of one-mana creatures that serve as repeatable sacrifice outlets. The deck plays both Carrion Feeder and Viscera Seer so
that it doesn’t lose to a removal spell with its flashbacked Cabal Therapy on the stack and the Body Double’d Protean Hulk trigger on the
stack. Feeder and Seer are functionally identical for the purposes of this deck, so splitting them makes a ton of sense, as you don’t want to get
one killed and Surgical Extraction-ed, leaving you without a way to combo.

The deck does play Starved Rusalka as a way to Green Sun’s Zenith for a sacrifice outlet, which is adorable. Since it costs mana to activate,
though, it’s pretty tough to actually combo-kill someone with a Rusalka. Still, having that functionality is a nice touch on the
deckbuilder’s part. As a personal fan of both Canadians and combo decks with a ton of different lines of play, this deck is absolutely part of my
Legacy bucket list.

For as much as I love the Pattern of Rebirth deck and want to play it, I am inversely enthusiastic about playing the next deck on the list:

#9: 43 Lands

This is the sort of deck that you either love or hate. If you’re Evan Erwin or Matt Gargiulo or Chris Woltereck, you love it. If you love wacky,
off-the-wall control decks that take an hour to win, this is the deck for you. If you’re of the opinion that Magic is meant to be played a
certain way and that not playing spells outside of Life from the Loam is “not real Magic,” then you’re probably going to hate the
deck.

More than any other deck on this list, 43 Lands is polarizing. It’s a prison deck, and a lot of people hate playing against those. After all, a
successful prison deck stops an opponent from doing anything meaningful to advance the game state. It takes forever to win, which is doubly agonizing
for an opponent who has been de facto dead for half an hour but hates conceding. It has a ton of triggers and game actions and decisions to
take care of every turn, so the deck’s pilot isn’t to blame for taking a minute or two on any given turn, even after the game is
theoretically locked up. Finally, it lacks a real transitional sideboard. Sure, you could board in fifteen creatures, but you’ll still have a
very slow deck with a lot of lands that get much worse when you aren’t getting full value out of your Life from the Loams and Explorations.

For all of these potential drawbacks, though, the deck wins in a way that no other deck has before—it just kills you with a tremendous diversity
of land-based activated and static abilities. It gains advantage through a combination of Life from the Loam (its draw engine) and Exploration/Manabond
(its mana engine). It attacks from an angle that few people are ever prepared to answer. Sometimes, it just kills you by playing 12 lands and an
Academy Ruins and recurring Mindslaver. How sweet is that? What other deck in Legacy has ever activated Mindslaver once, let alone a second
and third time? For all the tedium that it may inflict on its opponents, it’s a unique strategy that could only exist in a card pool and format
as diverse as Legacy.

In a nutshell, the deck wants to find a way to play more than one land a turn—either Exploration or Manabond—and resolve that enchantment.
From there, it wants to find and cast Life from the Loam, then do that for the rest of the game. It can use its rapidly growing manabase to repeatedly
regrow and transmute Tolaria West to tutor for specialty lands, use its superior manabase to Wasteland and Rishadan Port people off of ever playing
spells in their main phase again, and finally attack with Mishra’s Factory or Creeping Tar Pit until the other player is dead. Lines of
play—especially in the first few turns—are far more involved than you might expect, as the deck has the daunting task of growing its
manabase, disrupting its opponent’s manabase, and not dying with the constraint that it doesn’t have many ways to affect the board outside
of its own manabase.

If you’re interested in a more thorough primer on the deck, be sure to check out Michael Caffrey’s article on Lands with Enlightened Tutor here. If you want nothing to do with
playing 43 lands, though, I have a deck that’s on the other side of the spectrum. How would you feel about playing 43 blue instants?

#8: High Tide/Reset

Seeing this deck succeed in Legacy sold me on the format. The sheer beauty of its homogeneity still tickles me today. How many other combo decks in
Magic’s history have been able—let alone are designed—to go off with their own death on the stack? How many combo decks can
kill in an opponent’s attack step while having an incredible mana engine and very few deck cards? Beyond all that, though—how many people
had ever heard of the card Reset before David Gearhart made off with dozens of StarCityGames’ dual lands by casting it for months on end?

For reference, an old decklist:

High Tide / Reset

Drew Levin

Test deck on 01-15-2012

Legacy

Lands (18)

Spells (42)

Sideboard

This is not the only deck that functioned in a different world of rules. If you’ll remember back when M10 was released, there was a number of
rules changes. The most notable of them was that damage no longer used the stack. There were, however, a number of name changes to game zones along
with that rules change. One such name change recast the “removed from game” zone as the “exiled” zone. Wizards decided that
cards that were exiled from the game (for instance, by Flash of Insight) would not be retrievable by cards like Cunning Wish. At the height of the
deck’s success in Legacy, a valid line of play was to Brain Freeze oneself to fuel a massive Flash of Insight. There was no need to worry about
milling all of the deck’s win conditions, since the pilot could simply get back whatever was needed by casting Cunning Wish.

Outside of that rules shift, the deck is fairly intuitive. It’s an instant-speed Storm combo deck designed to go off at the last possible moment,
typically through multiple pieces of disruption. It used the stack and its instant-speed nature to outmaneuver almost every piece of disruption that
decks could throw at it. Stories of killing an opponent who had four pieces of countermagic on the stack—each spell targeting nothing—were
not uncommon, thanks to well-placed Remands and Twincasts.

The deck certainly had an Extended-format predecessor to thank for much of its development, but the adoption of Reset as the primary mana engine in
conjunction with High Tide is still inspirational to me today. Sure, the deck could’ve worked as a two-color deck with Early Harvest. Sure, the
deck could’ve worked as a sorcery-speed deck with Candelabra of Tawnos and Merchant Scroll. But the beauty of the deck is that it didn’t
settle for those imperfections. It’s a Wasteland-proof combo deck that never has to play a spell on its own turn. And at the end of the day,
someone has to find the Resets of the world. Maybe there’s another revolutionary archetype out there that revolves around a forgotten card from
Fallen Empires, or Homelands, or Legends. Who knows? But the person who finds it? That could be any one of us. I believe that’s a lesson worth
remembering.

#6: Bomberman/Painter

One of the amazing aspects of Legacy is how the printing of a new card can completely change the way an old card works. This deck is a story of how
that happened twice.

Once upon a time, the card Lion’s Eye Diamond worked about as people thought it would: disgustingly broken, but “just” a Black Lotus
with a few deckbuilding restrictions. Nothing too wild. Then along came Auriok Salvagers.

Auriok Salvagers plus Lion’s Eye Diamond makes infinite mana, assuming they don’t have a removal spell for your Salvagers at any point.
There is the unfortunate side effect of your inability to have a hand during this loop, but the deck quickly makes up for that. After you loop
Salvagers and LED a few thousand times, you will want to do something with all that mana. Fortunately, the Spellbomb cycle from Mirrodin lets you draw
your deck in conjunction with Auriok Salvagers and that infinite mana thing you have going on. Of course, that’s just if it’s your Aether
Spellbomb. If it’s your Pyrite Spellbomb, you can move right along to using your infinite red mana and infinite white mana to recur Pyrite
Spellbomb and shoot them.

That combo deck existed for a while, often with something like Gamekeeper to tutor up and free-roll Auriok Salvagers. The deck wasn’t the
greatest, but it did do something pretty sweet. A while later, the third set of Lorwyn block was spoiled. Initially, the set was largely dismissed by
Legacy aficionados as irrelevant to the format. About a week before the set’s street release, however, the word got out.

“Did you hear about that card Painter’s Servant? Yeah, it turns out it combos with some artifact from Tempest called Grindstone to just
kill people on turn three.”

Just like that, there was a new combo deck in the format. It took a while for people to find the right build for the deck, but it was only a matter of
time before someone got the bright idea of jamming both ideas together. John Cuvelier did just that in May 2011 at SCG Orlando:

Painted Stone

John Cuvelier

4th Place at Star City Games Legacy Open on 05-15-2011

Legacy

Creatures (10)

Lands (22)

Spells (28)

Sideboard

One of the many attractive features of this deck is the raw power of its card selection. Sure, Intuition can be a three-mana, instant-speed Demonic
Tutor, but this deck can use Intuition to get three different cards, if it so desires. After all, what are you supposed to do when an opponent casts
Intuition for Painter’s Servant, Grindstone, and Lion’s Eye Diamond with a Goblin Welder, an artifact land, and a Sensei’s Divining
Top in play? No matter what you give them, you die the next turn.

Another truly insidious aspect of the deck is that Goblin Welder is a Standard Bearer that doesn’t force them to make the right play—if
they let Welder live, their removal will never hit a Painter’s Servant. If they kill Welder, they might not even have a removal spell for your
Painter. And even if a control deck does manage to get your Welders and Painters under control, there is the problem of what they’re going to do
about your Auriok Salvagers. No matter how you look at it, Bomberman and Painter combine around Goblin Welder and Intuition to make a fairly complex
(but really cool) deck.

#5: Emrakul Survival

This is the first of three successful decklists from Legacy Grands Prix in Columbus, Ohio. Although this didn’t make the Top 8, I was lucky
enough to meet Patrick after the tournament and become personally acquainted with the sheer power of his deck.

Combo Survival

Patrick Chapin

Test deck on 08-08-2010

Legacy

Creatures (21)

Lands (23)

Spells (16)

Sideboard

This deck was made possible by the printing of Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. There were several other elements of the deck that contributed heavily to its
success, but no creature in the history of the game except for Emrakul can both dodge removal and cripple an opponent with a simple attack. This deck
was revolutionary for plenty of other reasons—it is very likely the only successful deck in Legacy’s history to play full sets of both
Sensei’s Divining Top and Aether Vial; it has a combo involving an obscure Portal Three Kingdoms card; and it has access to a theoretical
infinity of resources due to the combination of Emrakul’s Feldon’s Cane ability and Survival of the Fittest’s ability to more-or-less
create that trigger on demand.

So how did the deck work, exactly? Patrick explains the primary combo of the deck here:

Turn 1: Land, Vial
Turn 2: Land, Survival
Turn 3: Land (need a Taiga at some point), Get Squee, Pitch Squee to get Mesmeric Fiend, Use Vial to Fiend them during their draw step, Endstep get
Loyal Retainers
Turn 4: Return Squee, Pitch Squee to get Emrakul, Vial down Loyal Retainers, Pitch Emrakul, respond to reshuffle trigger by using Loyal Retainers,
Call a judge to prove to opponent that this works since they won’t believe that Loyal Retainers works this way even if your card is in English.
After reshuffling your library (including Loyal Retainers), get Anger from resolved Survival trigger, Discard Anger to Survival, attack with
Emrakul.

As with all the other decks on this list, the beauty of this deck is that there’s just so much going on with the deck. It has access to
unparalleled levels of selection with Sensei’s Divining Top and Survival of the Fittest; a ton of disruption with Cabal Therapy, Mesmeric Fiend,
Magus of the Moon, Harmonic Sliver, and Iona, Shield of Emeria; a bunch of mana acceleration so that it can start doing multiple things each turn
starting on turn two; and a quick combo kill that can be tutored up on your end step and put into play uncounterably with Aether Vial. It even has two
Wastelands! If this were the best-performing Survival of the Fittest deck at Grand Prix Columbus 2010, perhaps we would have had longer to learn the
lessons that this deck can teach us about proper design and maximizing value. After all, how many other combo decks have we seen that don’t play
blue? How would you go about designing such a deck in today’s Legacy format? And finally, what can we learn from studying this list?

#4: Mosswort Bridge/Emrakul

This deck is on the other end of the spectrum from Patrick’s Survival deck. Whereas with his deck I saw strategic dominance in multiple areas and
added value everywhere, here I see a really cute gimmick deck. I mean no offense to the deck’s originator or to the notion of cute gimmick decks,
either: I’ve played a few gimmick decks in my time. Still, it’s important to call something what it is. This…

Mooswort Bridge / Emrakul

Drew Levin

Test deck on 01-15-2012

Legacy

Creatures (8)

Lands (17)

Spells (35)

Sideboard

…is a gimmick deck. It’s a very well-thought-out idea that was likely fleshed out as much as possible. It has multiple alternative lines of
attack if Plan A falls through. But when your Plan A is to put an Emrakul under Mosswort Bridge, untap with it, cast and resolve Phyrexian Dreadnought,
and flip Emrakul from underneath the Bridge, you’re squarely in gimmick territory. The deck’s Plan B (Show and Tell, putting Emrakul into
play) is a turn slower, but it requires no comes-into-play-tapped nonbasic Forests or additional creatures to turn on said Forests.

So what can we learn from this deck? First off, don’t ignore your “cute” ideas. This deck is awesome, even if that isn’t in the
most strictly competitive sense of the word. It does a lot and has a lot of deckbuilding experience behind it, and that experience only comes from
making a lot of decks and seeing which ones sink and which ones swim. Your “cute” ideas will never get better if you don’t try to
perfect them as much as possible.

Second, learn from your failures. This deck never made it to the top tier of the format, but this one did:

Bant Show & Tell

AJ Sacher

12th Place at Star City Games Legacy Open on 02-27-2011

Legacy

Creatures (14)

Lands (20)

Spells (26)

Sideboard

As it turned out, Show and Tell + Emrakul was good; Mosswort Bridge and Stifle and Phyrexian Dreadnaught were bad; and green one-drops created a
perfect pivot on which to base a Natural Order + Show and Tell strategy. There were successful elements of the Mosswort/Emrakul deck, and while I have
no idea if AJ appropriated the Show and Tell idea from this deck as a result of direct exposure, the concept of Show and Tell for a 15/15 was still
valid. After a while, it turned out that the U/G NO/Show deck wasn’t that great, so AJ learned what he could from the above deck and refashioned
it into another weapon:

NO Bant

AJ Sacher

2nd Place at Star City Games Legacy Open on 03-13-2011

Legacy

Creatures (12)

Lands (21)

Spells (27)

Sideboard

The lesson here? You can probably cheat Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker into play with Mosswort Bridge.

Wait, no. That’s not the lesson. The lesson is to go for the cute thing even if you know it’s not going to break the format, perfect your
idea as much as possible, and then see if there’s anything worth salvaging on a more competitive level. If you happen to enable some Nicol
Bolas-ing on turn three, though, that’s an entirely acceptable outcome as well.

#3: Dream Halls/Conflux

For a long while, Dream Halls was banned in Legacy. In late 2009, Dream Halls came off of the Legacy banned list as part of a move toward a more open
Legacy format. Other unbans of that era of Legacy format management were Entomb, Replenish, Metalworker, and Grim Monolith, only one of which has
caused significant problems. All of the other cards dealt with powerful linears—Entomb would fuel a graveyard strategy, Replenish an enchantment
strategy, and Metalworker and Grim Monolith a fast artifact strategy. Nobody quite knew what to do with Dream Halls, though. It was clunky, expensive,
relied on its namesake card too much, and every kill seemed to take up too many slots.

Then, three months later, a Dream Halls deck won a 270-person tournament in Germany.

Dream Halls / Conflux

Drew Levin

Test deck on 01-15-2012

Legacy

Creatures (5)

1 Bogardan Hellkite
4 Progenitus

Lands (17)

Spells (38)

Sideboard

Instead of telling you how the deck works, I’ll tell you the story of the first time I met Lewis Laskin. It’ll end up just as edifying and
much more entertaining.

This story takes place in Philadelphia in late 2009, maybe a month after Dream Halls got unbanned. I was playing a rough approximation of the High Tide
deck from earlier in this article, and my previous round had gone to time. I was still sorting out my deck from my sideboard when the next
round’s pairings were called. I only had to move one table, which was nice, but it meant that Lewis, my opponent, probably knew what I was
playing. Sure enough, after introductions, he launched into an upbeat, high-energy diatribe.

“MAN, I can just never beat you ever in a million years. This matchup is like, the least favorable thing ever. I’m probably just actual
zero percent versus your deck.”
He said all of this while wearing a grin that would put the Cheshire cat to shame. I didn’t really know what to make of it, so I sort of shrugged
and assumed that he was messing with me. Clearly he knew what I was playing, and I had no idea what he was playing, so either he was trying to lull me
into a sense of false security to win a close matchup or…he was being completely honest.

The game only really happened on turn three. We both didn’t play spells beyond cantrips on turns one and two, then Lewis played a Show and Tell
on turn three. I put an Island into play, while he revealed a Dream Halls. He just started laughing, then dejectedly announced, “Uh…pitch Dark Ritual, cast Conflux. Any responses?” I had no idea what he was thinking I was going to do. I leaned over and
read Dream Halls. My first impression was that it only worked for him. I leaned back in my chair and wondered why he was acting like he had already
lost the game. I leaned back in and reread the card. As it turns out, Dream Halls is a symmetrical effect, so I proceeded to start pitching High Tides
to cast Meditates and won both games shortly thereafter. Lewis, to his credit, was the most courteous opponent imaginable, laughing as I Brain Freezed
him for lethal each game. Afterward, he explained his deck to me:

“So the deck has two combos, both of which need Dream Halls. One is that you pitch a card to cast Conflux, getting a Conflux, a Progenitus, a
Force of Will, and two Cruel Ultimatums. You get however much protection you need with your Confluxes and then cast all three Cruel Ultimatums,
pitching your Hellkite to cast each one and returning the Hellkite with each one. Then you pitch your last Conflux to cast your Hellkite, making it
the natural 20.

If they happen to have some sort of hate card, you can just pitch any spell to cast a Progenitus and beat them up in two turns. Pretty
sweet.”

The awesome part about this deck—aside from the fact that it’s a blue-black deck that casts Conflux—is that its kill suite has been
refined a ton. It used to be far bigger than the 4 Conflux 3 Cruel Ultimatum 1 Bogardan Hellkite build that won Germany, but its designer and pilot
clearly took the time to figure out what the most efficient distribution of kill slots was for his combo deck. Regardless of how efficient something is
right now, it is very likely possible to make it more efficient. If you learn nothing else from the Dream Halls deck, learn how to maximize slots when
building your combo decks.

#2: Vengevine Survival

Very rarely is the coolest deck at a given tournament also the best one. The last two decks on this list break that barrier. Each of them directly led
to the banning of the card at the center of the deck’s strategy, and both of them Top 8ed their respective Legacy Grand Prix in Columbus, Ohio.
The first one is the brainchild of Legacy master and aficionado Caleb Durward:

Vengevine Survival

Caleb Durward

Test deck on 01-15-2012

Legacy

Creatures (24)

Lands (21)

Spells (15)

Sideboard

This deck truly broke the format, leading to a season of turn-three and four kills before Wizards decided to ban Survival of the Fittest a mere four
months after his breakout finish at Grand Prix Columbus. So for those of us who didn’t live through the months of “play Survival or lose to
Survival,” here’s how the deck works:

Step 1: Get a Survival into play. In Caleb’s deck, a Wild Mongrel sometimes suffices.

Step 2: Pitch some Vengevines.

Step 3: Madness out a Basking Rootwalla as the second spell of the turn. Caleb’s deck could attack for eight on turn two just by playing a
Mongrel, pitching two Vengevines, and then pitching a Rootwalla. Since Madness “plays” the card, Vengevines trigger and come back to play.

The effect is much more pronounced with Survival of the Fittest, as the deck will pretty much always attack for 16 flying damage if left to its own
devices, thanks to Wonder. The full set of Basking Rootwallas ensures that Caleb is capable of returning his Vengevines after a board-clearing
Firespout or Wrath of God, making sweepers an ineffective way of containing this strategy, let alone defeating it.

The deck isn’t just a combo deck, either. It can produce aggressive beatdown openings even without Survival, using its mana to efficiently
dominate combat on the backs of free 1/1s and 4/3s. Although the deck would end up becoming much more refined as more people realized that it was the
best deck in the format, it is interesting to note that successful versions never once adopted Brainstorm in any quantity, making it easily the most
successful blue deck in Legacy to never play the card.

Of course, in true Legacy fashion, the number one deck on the list is both blue and did play Brainstorm…

#1: Counterbalance Hulk Flash

There isn’t a lot to be said about this deck that hasn’t already been said. It is very likely the best deck to exist in any format ever,
given the context of its existence. No other deck in Legacy has ever been anywhere close to as good as this deck was, and I can only hope that nothing
will ever challenge it for the title. The deck, for reference:

Counterbalance Hulk Flash

Drew Levin

Test deck on 01-15-2012

Legacy

Creatures (12)

Lands (14)

Spells (34)

Sideboard

To give you an idea of how powerful the deck was, Steve Sadin won the tournament against Owen Turtenwald (who was playing Goblins) despite losing to
him earlier in the tournament. The reason? Steve literally did not know how his deck was supposed to kill his opponent, just that he cast Flash, showed
them Protean Hulk, and they conceded. When Owen made him go through the motions, Steve messed up the combo, ended up with a Protean Hulk in play with
both his Kiki-Jiki and his Karmic Guide in the graveyard, and tried to beat down with his 6/6. Owen was able to make a stream of blockers long enough
to take the match in comical fashion. Of course, Steve immediately found someone to give him a tutorial on the deck’s kill mechanism and executed
the rest of his kills flawlessly for the rest of the tournament, but the story is illustrative of the deck’s raw power.

For those of you curious about how the deck kills an opponent, it goes like this:

Step 1: Cast Flash, putting Protean Hulk into play. Don’t pay. It immediately dies, giving an opponent no window where they can cast a removal
spell on the Hulk.

Step 2: Get Carrion Feeder and Karmic Guide with Hulk’s trigger. Return Hulk with Guide. Sacrifice Hulk to Feeder, triggering it again.

Step 3: Get Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker. Copy Karmic Guide a million times and attack with your army of 2/2 fliers.

Step *: If Karmic Guide or Kiki-Jiki is in hand, get Body Snatcher instead. Discard your relevant card to Body Snatcher, then sacrifice Snatcher to
Feeder to return that creature to play. Continue on normally with killing them.

The Flash deck was a very well-known quantity at the Grand Prix, however. What put it over the top was the addition of Counterbalance and
Sensei’s Divining Top. This combo was not particularly well-known or well-respected in the format and so very few decks played it. By playing
Counter/Top in his combo deck, Sadin was able to crush all of his mirror matches and protect his combo against removal spells, obviating the need for
an extra slot like Benevolent Bodyguard or Sylvan Safekeeper. This element of deck design was both the most brilliant decision of the tournament and
the most staying—even though Flash was banned shortly after the tournament, Counterbalance and Top went on to form a formidable team, dominating
Legacy for stretches of months after that.

Still, even with all of the amazing Counterbalance decks that have come after the Hulk Flash originator, nothing quite lives up to that winning deck.
For a brief moment in Magic’s history, Legacy as a format was broken in half, and a very smart deck designer was able to figure out how to win
all of the mirror matches.

That’s pretty sweet.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts as well as what you think I missed. Until next week!

Drew Levin

@drew_levin on Twitter