I’m not doing anything too creative this week. Instead, I’m focusing on something more competitive. Adam Prosak U/W Flash deck is one of the better decks in the format, so I’m going to play my take on that shell.
I haven’t changed a lot from his list, but I want more Sphinx’s Revelation, as you might have guessed. I think the deck is naturally pretty well positioned against the control decks in the format and can struggle with the aggro decks (although it seems to be very good against Mono-Red Aggro), so I’m hedging the sideboard more toward shoring up those matchups.
My list:
Creatures (12)
Lands (24)
Spells (24)
I’ve preferred Dissipate to Syncopate in this format. I switched to four of those, which seems particularly justifiable given that everything in this deck already costs two. I added a land to account for the extra Sphinx’s Revelations.
My changes to the sideboard are playing more Supreme Verdict and adding Rhox Faithmender to help against aggressive decks.
Round 1: Epic Experiment
This is the kind of matchup that should be almost unwinnable for Epic Experiment. It isn’t the kind of ramp deck that has any real plan to fight early pressure and hard counters. Moving away from Syncopate also helps a lot, as it means I don’t have to worry about the deck’s ramp making its spells uncounterable the way one might have had to when Mana Leak was in the format.
Round 2: Junk Tokens
That second game was close, but it also demonstrated how powerful having Pike with some tricks can be. Also, I think it’s worth taking note of how I interacted with Intangible Virtue there. The fact that it only does something if creatures are on the board meant that I could just to ignore it and interact with other cards. Understanding that I could and would take this line, there’s a reasonable chance that my opponent should have just sided them out.
The lesson is that if your opponent is good at trading with some large portion of your plan and generally disrupting your synergies, it’s a good idea to side out cards that depend most on those synergies to do anything.
Round 3: Mono-Red Aggro
While my opponent’s second hand was horrible, this was still a reasonable demonstration of how this matchup plays out. I haven’t lost a game yet against this deck yet, and they generally haven’t been very close. The two for ones are hard for them to deal with, Augur of Bolas is a huge problem, and on top of that, you have a relatively good amount of life gain, particularly thanks to occasional big swings from Azorius Charm.
Round 4: Five-Color Control
Another match that was essentially against a ramp deck. I followed the same basic principle as the Intangible Virtue thing I talked about. When so many of their spells are dedicated to ramping, I can just ignore those and counter the big spells, which makes things very easy for me. If my opponent was ramping to something like Griselbrand with Cavern of Souls, it might have been different, but when it’s just X spells that I can counter, it doesn’t do a lot.
I was impressed by the impact of Rest in Peace in game 2. Combining that with Curse of Death’s Hold made it very hard for me to kill him and helps explain why Adam Prosak had Erase in his sideboard, but the rest of my deck was still positioned well enough against my opponent that I was able to use almost my entire deck to finish him off.
I like my Bant deck, but this deck is very hard for it to beat and might be the real deal, though it can have some problems with aggressive strategies (particularly those that use Loxodon Smiter). I kind of feel like Bant beats everything except U/W Flash and U/W Flash beats everything except Smiter, but I know that’s oversimplified and likely not entirely accurate.
Thanks for watching,
Sam
@samuelhblack on Twitter