Summer Afternoon On A Lake (1895) by Jean-Leon Gerome. Protean Hulk by Matt Cavotta.
Everyone has their moments of saltiness and even though I've had a pretty good amount of success playing EDH, I'm not immune to the occasional bad mood. I tend to get the crankiest when my own decks aren't behaving, especially when a frustrating game is coupled with an opponent making strong plays that are getting a little too familiar. They say familiarity breeds contempt. The occasional combo loss is fine. When it feels like every game is just a race against the same opponent landing the same tired old wincon AND my deck isn't putting me in a position to even try to do anything about it, I can get as tilted as any other EDH player.
I do my best to take losses gracefully, and for the most part I think I succeed. I've been known to high-five or first-bump an opponent who just screwed me over and I'm usually pretty happy to see other folks win games if I'm not in the midst of a long stretch of losses.
I've got a couple of friends who both have Mikaeus the Unhallowed combo decks and I'm getting pretty familiar with their wincons.
When they decide to whip those out and race for a combo win I've been finding myself struggling to be pleasant about what feels like an inevitable loss. I've got good decks but they aren't fast enough to keep up and if I run my Narset deck, she happens to have a minor issue dealing damage to a Mikaeus player if she isn't indestructible. Mikaeus has the wonderful text "Whenever a human deals damage to you, destroy it."
After yet another night last month where I felt like I had to deal with the same fast combos that I couldn't keep up with, I decided it was time to try to find some answers.
Tweaking Nazahn
My first step was to take a look at one of the cat decks I wound up with after reworking the 2017 Feline Ferocity precon. I had built a Nazahn deck that still hasn't won a game, though I haven't really played it that much. I took some inspiration from a friend who started playing some random color-hate cards in his decks. The idea was to keep the deck as an equipment deck centered around Nazahn and the better equipments I had lying around, but to add some anti-black and anti-blue enchantments. I scrounged up the four cards shown below, to the right of Nazahn.
Drought is a nasty little enchantment that forces players to sacrifice a swamp for every black mana symbol in their mana cost. A friend started playing it, and was able to shut down a very strong Gonti player several weeks in a row. While it wasn't much fun for the Gonti player, that guy had run away with enough games that a little pushback didn't feel overly mean to anyone (except maybe him).
Choke is an enchantment that basically does the same thing in a different way. The islands stay on the field but aren't going to untap until Choke is removed. This was a card I picked up for my Saskia Screw Blue deck and when I took that apart this past summer, my copy of Choke got filed away with the rest of my commons and uncommons. Given how badly blue spells can wreck a Selesnya player's day, I felt no compunction about throwing this into Nazahn so I can have a way to shut down blue as well as black decks.
Card draw is something I always struggle with, so if I knew I was going to be playing this deck against Mikaeus decks and possibly a Gonti deck every now and then, Compost also seemed like a good add. This cheap enchantment will let me draw cards whenever a black card is put into one of my opponents' graveyards. Any black deck running a recursion strategy should go a long way towards helping me dig my way to finding Drought.
Possibly the best anti-black card I was able to find was Lifeforce. For the meager cost of two green to cast, I can then counter any black spell for two green. If you play in a meta with a lot of black spells, this should be able to pull its weight if you're running enough forests and don't mind keeping two mana available to counter occasional black spell.... or to completely shut out a commander with black in its mana cost.
If you're concerned about the ethics of building decks specifically around stopping other decks, I hear you, but this is really the norm in EDH. One player's deck gets better and other players start losing more. They up their game, find answers, and the meta evolves. I'm not building decks with so many tutors that I'm going to try make the game feel unfair, but I do want to have a deck that feels like it might have an answer to some of the fast black combos I've been losing to lately.
Having one of my many decks get touched up to be able to try to have better answers for my local Mikaeus and Gonti players is one thing. It should be noted that Mikaeus combo is a very different deck when compared to Gonti. Both are trying to win, but the approach a Mickey Combo deck takes is much more aggressive. Gonti generally just wants to grab a few of your better cards to see what can be done with them. If a game goes long, a well built Gonti deck can sure pose problems, but from my experience if a good Mikaeus deck is at the table games end pretty quickly.
I never like having only one answer for a deck, so just tweaking Nazahn isn't enough. Nazahn may be able to slow down fast combo if it's in blue or black and hopefully beat it through combat damage but I'm not going to only play that deck as a response to someone playing Mikaeus. I decided I should also try to also rebuild a deck to try to beat them with my own fast combo.
Rebuilding Mimeoplasm
I've got other combo decks, but there is one combo engine so good that the main creature it works around spent most of the time I've been playing EDH on the banlist. Earlier this year I picked up the little fellow, figuring it must be pretty good if it was on the banlist.
That creature would be the one and only Protean Hulk.
I've read up on what you can do with this beast, and I decided that my next project would be to rework Mimeoplasm as a Flash Hulk combo deck. Sultai (Blue/Black/Green) allows me to play "Flash Hulk" and those colors provide lots of options for recursion and protection.
My current Mimeoplasm deck has its share of issues. It's not very fast or consistent. The current build is focused on trying to win using Mimeoplasm as a voltron commander. The goal is to self-mill so you can play Mim as something nasty or unblockable with a bunch of +1/+1 counters on it.
Using the cards above as examples, my old Mimeoplasm might enter the battlefield as a copy of Skithiryx or Blackcleave Goblin with either thirteen or ten +1/+1 counters on it from exiling either Death's Shadow or Skhyshround Behemoth from my graveyard. Casting my commander after a boardwipe with a setup like this means someone is going to die unless they have some removal and open mana.
Of course, the trick with the old build of the deck was actually filling up the graveyard. I can use anyone's yard when casting Mimeoplasm, but I know what's in my deck so the goal was usually to mill myself and then hope I milled something good. I would use cards like Tunnel Vision to mill myself to a named card, hoping that card was somewhere in the bottom half of my library. I could also play and tap Hermit Druid to mill myself until I hit a basic land. The deck runs 6 basic lands, so that would usually do pretty well to get stuff in the graveyard.
The problem was that it would take too much work to get to the point where I could cast The Mimeoplasm and have any decent result. Some games I might luck into a good graveyard or an opponent with something spicy in their yard, but when compared to my best deck, Mim was a lot of work for inconsistent results. Of course, I'm comparing Mimeoplasm to Narset (my best deck) so that might not be a very fair comparison.
A Look at Flash Hulk
If the plan was to rework my Mimeoplasm deck as a shell to try to run the Flash Hulk combo, what does that even mean?
I'm not a cEDH player by a long shot, but I am interested in expanding my skills and my repertoire, and adding another higher tier deck to my collection should be fun. Two weeks ago I was writing about Karona, False God. This week let's look at the other end of the spectrum.
When Protean Hulk dies, you get to tutor up creatures with a combined total CMC of 6 and put them onto the battlefield. While that might not seem game-breaking, there are clever folks who have devised ways to win the game if you are able to pull this off. All you need is Protean Hulk and Flash in hand. I got most of my information from the good folks at Commander Society, who wrote an article about this combo: How to Protean Hulk. You should definitely give it a read.
The first step is to play Flash and put Protean Hulk into play from your hand. You fail to play the extra 2 so that it dies. When it dies you tutor up Phyrexian Delver and Viscera Seer. When Delver enters the battlefield, you return Hulk to the battlefield and lose 7 life. You sacrifice Hulk using Viscera Seer to tutor up Mikaeus, the Unhallowed and Walking Ballista. You then sac Ballista to Seer, returning it to the battlefield with a +1/+1 counter thanks to it getting Undying from Mikaeus. You ping someone for 1 damage, sacrifice Ballista again and kill the table.
So if you have Flash and Hulk in hand and nobody has any removal, for the cost of 1U and 7 life, you win the game. This is called fun, at least in cEDH circles. In casual circles this is either being tone-deaf to your meta, or showing off a dumb party trick before you shuffle up a "normal" deck to actually play EDH.
There are other cards you can throw in to help to get the win easier, over and above tutors which I plan to add over time.
If you already have a sacrifice outlet on board, you can go get Sylvan Safekeeper so you can protect your key pieces. There are lots of ways to get this combo off or to restart it if you get interrupted. Eternal Witness can get Flash back if it gets countered. Footsteps of the Goryo will help you get another Hulk trigger if your Hulk is in the graveyard. Body Double and Mimeoplasm can both enter the battlefield as a copy of a creature in your graveyard. Mimeoplasm will exile any creature he targets so he should be a last resort if you're trying to target a creature that's a valuable combo piece. Any combo that wins with Walking Ballista can win with Triskelion, so we'll definitely want to run both.
The old Mimeoplasm
It might seem like building a new deck from scratch would make more sense if I want to build Flash Hulk. For me, it makes sense to build a deck that can function even if the Flash Hulk plan doesn't come together. My old build has lots of ways to get cards into the graveyard and then ways to get cards back out again. While that didn't necessarily make for a fast Mimeoplasm build, it might work out nicely as a way to try to dig to our combo pieces.
Tunnel Vision, which I mentioned earlier, will let us mill ourselves until we get to a card of our choosing. Hermit Druid will simply dump as many cards into the yard as it takes for us to reach a basic land. Treasured Find and Wildest Dreams will then let us pull that card back out, hopefully making it easier to assemble our combo. Crucible of Worlds makes sense in any deck that will be aggressively milling itself, and this could still be one of those kinds of decks.
The old deck also had a ton of creatures with activated abilities and Necrotic Ooze as a possible threat. For the paltry cost of 4 life Trespassing Souleater and Pestilent Souleater could give my Mimeoplasm unblockable and infect. Cards like Aetherling and Morphling give incredible flexibility with a Necrotic Ooze strategy but it never really came together with any consistency in actual play. If you want to win by commander damage, there are just way too many easier, faster options than a card like Mimeoplasm. It was fun, but just took too much work to even kill one opponent.
If you want to look through the old build so you have a better idea of what I was starting with, I've included a link to that deck below. It's interesting but I think of it as a deck with a "low ceiling", meaning that at its best it's a threat to kill an opponent or two but not reliably clear a whole table.
My old Mimeoplasm Decklist on TappedOut.net
The new Mimeoplasm
The first step of this build was to pull out Necrotic Ooze and a whole bunch of cards devoted to supporting that strategy. I removed Mortal Combat because I now had way too few creatures for it to be a viable wincon. Sultai Banner was out, as were 3 equipments devoted to supporting a voltron strategy (Whispersilk Cloak, Fleetfeather Sandals and Haunted Cloak). Crawlspace also got the axe. Varolz and Vampire Hexmage were also shown the door. All in all, I had to swap out 25 cards to make room for Flash Hulk and a slew of cards devoted to supporting that new strategy.
So what did I put into the new build? Let's start with recursion.
We never want key combo pieces stuck in the graveyard with no way to get them back, especially when we're going to be milling ourselves. Archaeomancer, Eternal Witness and Mnemonic Wall all put something back in our hand. That's not as good as putting something back onto the battlefield, but we're now running enough non-creature spells that it's fairly important. Animate Dead and Stir the Grave will go get a creature for us, so if we need Hulk or another combo piece we should be able to occasionally bring it back and combo off right then and there.
The new deck is also going to need more sac outlets, so Ashnod's Altar and Viscera Seer aren't our only options. We want some redundancy. Altar of Dementia will do nicely as a free sacrifice outlet and also help us fill up our graveyard. Bontu the Glorified has a low enough cost to sacrifice creatures that it's also worth including. Fleshbag Marauder doubles as both a sac outlet and a way to help keep our opponents in check. Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord also works, and can be a game-ender if we've got big enough creatures on the table. Deathrite Shaman may not be a sac outlet, but it is an auto-include for any deck that wants to be able to deal with graveyards, and as a 1-drop there's little reason not to throw him in.
The new Mimeoplasm Flash Hulk still has a bunch of the old Mimeoplasm cards, so if someone is on to our strategy and does something clever like casting Nevermore and naming Protean Hulk, we still want a viable way to try to win. That means we're still running 4 cards with 10 or 13 power and we're keeping Blackcleave Goblin, Primordial Hydra, Hydra Omnivore and Silumgar, the Drifting Death. I've won games off the back of some of these cards before and I can't assume our opponents' graveyards will have something good for Mim to target.
If you want to look at what I wound up with, the link is below. I often don't post links to full decklists but when I've got one it seems silly not to share it.
My Mimeoplasm Flash Hulk first draft on TappedOut.net
Flash Hulk's First Day Out
Yesterday at EDH league we played a few games before our league games. The three other players were playing "bad decks" and I had brought a bunch of decks that were all pretty good. Thinking that my first take on Mimeoplasm Flash Hulk would probably fumble around for 45 minutes and fail to hit or even get close to its main combo, I decided to play it.
Oh boy was I mistaken.
I started with Flash in hand, drew into Diabolic Tutor, used it to grab Protean Hulk and won on Turn 5.
I then apologized and explained that I really didn't think it was going to work. Still - it felt pretty darn good and I'm excited to spring it on my friends who delight in playing Mikaeus and trying to combo off as quickly as possible. I really prefer long, winding, durdly games with dramatic twists and turns but when one player is going to combo off as fast as humanly possible (cEDH mindset) I want to be able to play at that level so I have some chance at winning.
I don't have any reason to think that it will always work so well. Turn 5 seems crazy fast to me. It will be nice to feel like I have a deck that might be able to occasionally beat them at their own game. The hilarious part is of course that I'll be winning (hopefully) with Mikaeus the Unhallowed against two Mikaeus the Unhallowed decks. I don't think they read my blog, so hopefully this will be a nice little surprise for them!
Final Thoughts
I sincerely doubt I'm going to turn into a cEDH player but winning on turn 5 with Flash Hulk sure was fun.
We wrapped up our last week of October EDH League yesterday and I was able to eke out the top point total for the month. Apparently Marath is pretty strong. Who knew? Well, I guess all the Marath players knew, but it was a pleasant surprise to go into the month planning to have fun with a new deck and wind up winning the month. This is the second time this year that I've written about a deck build and have seen it win me a month of EDH league, so while I'll never pretend to be the best deckbuilder out there, I must be doing something right.
So what's in store for November? In the past few weeks I've had the chance to watch my Zedruu deck win a game off of Leveler and Fractured Identity and then a week later kill an opponent at over 600 life by giving them Immolating Souleater and using Mindslaver to take their turn and force them to pay their life down to zero. I've got other tricks in that Zedruu deck I'm dying to try to land so I am thinking next month I'm going to play Zedruu and see what kind of shenanigans I can get away with.
I doubt I'll be completing for the month's top point total but I hope to have the kind of fun you don't often see when playing more serious, competitive decks. Last year I had a fairly miserable month of EDH League where I played Zedruu Morph tribal and never truly stood a chance at winning a game. This year I'm going to see if I can tune the deck up, maybe add in enough good cards, draw, nasty wincons, removal and answers to be able to win a game over the course of the month. If I can land the Enchanted Evening / Aura Thief combo finally, it will all be worth it.
As always, thanks for reading and see you next week!