Flash Hulk

This is not what Flash is supposed to do. No, no, no. This is all wrong.

In one of the strangest origins of any competitive deck, the Flash-Protean Hulk combo was created by errata to Flash. Because the card was so obscure, and no one had ever cared about it, the rules team didn’t feel it was necessary to publish an explanation of why they changed it to enable combos. Instead, the change was only discovered by an automated script that checked the Oracle database and highlighted anything that changed.

Thus, Grand Prix: Columbus was better known as GP Flash. The combo was destined to have its one tournament to shine before being banned out of existence, but what form would the winning version take? This Steve Sadin-piloted, Billy Moreno-designed version cuts a lot of the fast mana and “turn zero win” gimmickry other builds were using in favor of a control shell, based on the unfathomably boring Sensei’s Divining Top-Counterbalance combo, with Flash-Hulk as the kill condition. This strategy gave it a great matchup against the more straightforward versions that completely folded to anything with more than four permission spells.

The best game of the day happened on day one. Sadin was not experienced with the deck (very few people really were, since it existed only for one tournament), and his opponents had all been conceding when he resolved Flash and showed Protean Hulk. Then a Goblins player trumped him: he said “okay” and had Sadin resolve the spell. Sadin couldn’t remember how the combo actually worked. He ended up with a Carrion Feeder with some counters on it, and passed the turn.

Some might take this as a lesson in knowing how your cards interact before sitting down to play, but there’s something more important here. Sadin won the tournament. His combination of technical play (regardless of knowing specific interactions) combined with strategic dominance worked out better for him than someone with judge-level knowledge and FNM-level skill.

by: Jesse "Barry Allen" Mason