Hi everyone, Pongo here. Today, I want to talk a bit about some new Protean Hulk technology.
First, let’s review the state of Flash Hulk decks in mid-2018. This isn’t meant to be exhaustive and will necessarily leave quite a few things out for the sake of brevity.
At this time, the majority of Hulk decks either relied on the ‘Breakfast combo’ (a combination of Nomads en-Kor and Cephalid Illusionist allowing you to dump your entire library into the graveyard to assemble another, typically sorcery speed, combo) or else one of a few different Blood Artist combos (a combination of Blood Artist with other creatures permitting their controller to loop sacrificing recursive creatures an arbitrary amount of times). The most well-known decks that used these strategies at the time are Breakfast Hulk proper (which uses its namesake combo and additionally gets Grand Abolisher to protect itself from nearly all forms of interaction), as well as a few different decks (e.g. Hulkweaver, Definitely Not Varolz, etc.) that, broadly speaking, rely on either Karmic Guide or Persist combos with Blood Artist to win.
Both strategies are still widespread in the cEDH meta, are extremely powerful, and serve as something of a reference point for all other Hulk combos. However, neither is without its flaws. Breakfast Hulk’s sorcery speed limitation means that you can’t always take advantage of openings provided by other players fighting each other on the stack over another game-winning threat. Blood Artist lines, by contrast, allow you to win while other spells remain on the stack and on other players’ turns but typically require a second Hulk death trigger which provides opponents a window to disrupt your combo.
Alright, now let’s flashforward (flashback? flash…hulk!? :why:) to about 5 months ago. It was around this time that u/SleepyJackdaw inadvertently brought about one of the most important recent innovations to Flash Hulk technology. By bringing everybody’s attention to the existence of a combined “Breakfast + Blood Artist” loop that provides instant speed wins in a single Protean Hulk death trigger, interest in brewing decks with Flash Hulk was suddenly renewed. Thus, the “Shuffle” pile was born. By combining the ability to take advantage of openings at instant speed, along with the inherent protection of needing only a single Hulk trigger (and an additional layer of protection in Memory’s Journey as the cherry on top) it was said that “The Holy Grail of Hulk piles” was finally discovered. Around this time, myself and many others started brewing a few different decks incorporating this pile.
Here’s where things get interesting: whereas brewers such as u/SirOzzsome and u/synchrobot started exploring the space for Shuffle decks with extra combo pieces enabling efficient Hulk piles to beat any single stax piece or card stuck in hand, u/ShaperSavant and myself—put off by bad experiences drawing into combo pieces and lots of graveyard hate—started exploring decks that aim to maximize card quality by incorporating the smallest amount of combo pieces. This approach incorporated a slot-efficient, synergistic backup line capable of beating even the most oppressive board states and unfortunate draws using Spellseeker and Laboratory Maniac in conjunction with Tainted Pact at the cost of some mana efficiency. Additionally, the extra A+B combo of Lab Man + Tainted Pact combined with the super low cmc of the deck (and no eldrazi titan) meant that the deck could play Ad Nauseam to great effect.
It’s in the spirit of this brew that I then started experimenting with even more extreme approaches to improve the card quality of Flash Hulk while simultaneously enhancing the deck’s ability to play Ad Naus and value Tainted Pact. The obvious step to do this was to try cutting pieces that are mostly dead outside of the combo but are also crucial to not have exiled. This ultimately led to a brew I affectionately dubbed “JUMPMAN” that aimed to get around the fact that it’s impossible to fit a draw effect into a Hulk pile with Lab Man and the Breakfast combo. By milling into Radical Idea and casting it from the graveyard, it was possible to reduce the amount of totally dead combo pieces in the deck to just Lab Man and the Breakfast combo (since Radical Idea can, at minimum, be cycled away). With the only card of importance now being Lab Man, Tainted Pact suddenly became a card that could be played for value. Cutting otherwise useless combo pieces made Ad Naus even better. Four mana to win the game at instant speed is an obvious disadvantage compared to the Shuffle pile, but it was hardly a hurdle in my control and stax-heavy meta (where waiting to cast Flash at the end of a counter war is especially useful) and only mildly inconvenient in racing situations. All those freed up slots got converted into more interaction as well as powerful mana and draw engines to help with grinding against the well-represented midrange decks. In other words, a Flash Hulk deck that is also a midrange Ad Naus (MAN) deck.
Almost immediately after brewing this deck, u/elfric brought an easily overlooked, old card to my attention: Sacred Guide. All the loose strings of my previous experiments suddenly came together; Sacred Hulk was born.
Sacred Guide W Human -- Cleric 1W, Sacrifice Sacred Guide: Reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal a white card. Put that card into your hand and exile all other cards revealed this way.
By running no other white cards, Sacred Guide effectively turns into another copy of Tainted Pact for the purposes of exiling our library. Importantly, it only costs 1 mana so it can easily be fit into a Hulk pile alongside Lab Man. This leaves space in the pile for Hapless Researcher for a guaranteed draw. Finally, either Blood Pet or Sylvan Safekeeper can be included in the pile using the last CMC to either discount the win to 3 mana (Flash + activating Sacred Guide for 1UW and sacrificing Blood Pet) or get free protection. The biggest loss is terms of white cards is Silence although Autumn’s Veil does a reasonable impersonation. Eladamri’s Call can be cut for Sylvan Tutor. Finally, losing Enlightened Tutor isn’t so bad as in this shell it mostly a redundant copy of Mana Crypt, Sylvan Library or Mystic Remora.
“But why is this an improvement?” you may ask; the answer lies in the even more elegant layering between the deck’s three pillars: Flash Hulk, Tainted Pact and Ad Nauseam. Compared to JUMPMAN, Sacred Hulk’s Flash Hulk pile can be pulled off for only three mana (again, with no timing restrictions). This puts Sacred Hulk much closer to other Hulk decks in terms of speed and offers a lot of turn 2 and protected turn 3 win potential. Tainted Pact suddenly becomes even more of a viable value play since, like JUMPMAN, we don’t have to worry about exiling much beyond Lab Man while using it. Having the redundant library exiling effect means that we are even more able to play Tainted Pact and not have to worry about recurring it for use later (or about exiling one of two different Breakfast combo pieces). Finally, this redundancy makes Ad Nauseam even more consistent at assembling an A+B combo which, when combined with any cantrip or a Tymna draw, can allow us to win through common Hulk hate such as Grafdigger’s Cage, Rest in Peace, Cursed Totem and Leyline of the Void. The final (and perhaps biggest) appeal of Sacred Hulk is that, compared to other Hulk decks, we have very few dead draws.
Where other decks find drawing into Dread Return, Kozilek, Butcher of Truth or Karmic Guide inconvenient, drawing into Lab Man opens lines where we can use a creature or general-purpose tutor to find either Sacred Guide or Tainted Pact and win from there. Drawing into Sacred Guide opens tutoring Lab Man. Drawing into Tainted Pact is just fine. Basically, drawing into combo pieces is no longer a potential roadblock; an opening hand with one of our combo pieces can be a plan in-and-of-itself. Finally, stax pieces that would force other Hulk decks to scramble for an answer are only mildly inconvenient for us since we can just assemble one of our two card combos that operate through most types of stax.
I hope you enjoyed this trip down memory lane and introduction to some new Hulk shells and technology! If you have any questions or comments (or just want to hang out and chat) don’t hesitate to post here or join us at the Unified Hulk Discord: https://discord.gg/ZaEtFCd
Love,
Pongo