A few strategies exist in this deck to win the game the first one is also the fastest, and is a strategy that has changed the cEDH landscape. It is known as Flash Hulk (
Flash + Protean Hulk
).
Steps:
- Cast
Flash
, putting
Protean Hulk
into play.
- Do not pay the difference in mana that is mentioned on
Flash
.
- Hulk will die, allowing us to get 6 CMC worth of creatures directly into play.
- Get
Phyrexian Delver
and
Viscera Seer
and put them into play.
- Delver will return the Hulk to play from your graveyard.
- Sacrifice Hulk to the Seer’s ability, allowing you to get another 6 CMC worth of creatures.
- Get
Walking Ballista
and
Mikaeus, the Unhallowed
and put them directly into play. The ballista will be a 1/1 due to Mikaeus’ buffing ability.
- Sacrifice ballista to the Seer. It will return to play due to Mikaeus granting ‘Undying’ to other creatures you control, with a +1/+1 counter. It is now a 2/2.
- Remove a +1/+1 counter from ballista to ping an opponent in the face. We are now back at Step 8.
- Rinse and repeat until each of your opponents is dead.
Keep in mind that we have yet another Hulk Pile that should be of note:
- Cast
Flash
, putting
Protean Hulk
into play.
- Do not pay the difference in mana that is mentioned on
Flash
.
- Hulk will die, allowing us to get 6 CMC worth of creatures directly into play.
- We search our library for
Laboratory Maniac
and
Spellseeker
, putting them into play.
- With the ETB effect from the latter we search our library again for
Tainted Pact
.
- We can then cast it, allowing us to exile our entire library and winning the next time we draw a card.
Particular attention should be paid to the following facts:
- The previous Hulk pile allows us to dodge graveyard hate and, with Flash Hulk allowing us to win at instant speed, win on our draw step
Another strategy to victory is through the use of
Food Chain
.
Steps:
- Ensure that
Food Chain
is in play and that you have a cast-from-exile (CFE) creature in your hand or, better yet, in play.
- Cast the CFE creature if it is in your hand. If it is already on the battlefield, remove it from the game with Food Chain. In this deck,
Eternal Scourge
is our card of choice. This will add 4 mana of any colour to your mana pool.
- Cast the CFE creature from exile. You will have 1 mana floating in your mana pool.
- Repeat Steps 2 and 3 infinitely. This will give you infinite mana of all 3 colours. With this mana, you can cast a
Walking Ballista
, making it a 10000/10000 (or an arbitrarily large number) and kill the table using its activated ability. Note that if the ballista is in play, you can use the Food Chain mana to pump it up and kill the table as well.
- If we don’t have a ballista in our hand to cast we can infinitely cast our commander and exile her to the command zone using Food Chain. This will mill our entire library (remember what I said earlier?) and give us a certain number of zombie creature tokens (remember what I said earlier?).
-
Dread Return
will be put into our graveyard. We can then cast it for its flashback cost (sacrificing the zombie tokens) to return any creature we wish from our graveyard to play. We can cast ballista and kill the table. Or we can use our other win condition of
Laboratory Maniac
.
- We can then cast a card draw spell like
Ponder
or activate an ability like
Cephalid Coliseum
to draw a card from an empty library and win.
It may occur that our deck doesn't cooperate with us. We aren't drawing the cards we need, or we're short on land. Being as resilient as we are, we have an easy fix to this problem and his name is
Razaketh, the Foulblooded
. This creature is an instant speed tutor at the cost of another creature and 2 life points. Recall the tokens that our lovely commander made from milling ourselves? Well we can use these tokens as fodder to Razaketh's ability. It may happen that we don't get any tokens from our commander. This is where
Life
comes into play. Turning our lands into creatures essentially feeds our Razaketh, allowing us to tutor and ultimately win the game.
Death
is also really good if we have a juicy graveyard target, such as a
Consecrated Sphinx
. Razaketh is an excellent card that not only grabs the missing combo pieces that we need, but can get ourselves protection or removal as well.
The mentioned combos are easily assembled with little mana and leaves us with resources to deal with any opponent that would try to disrupt us.
If things aren’t going our way, we aren’t drawing the right cards for the situation, or we keep getting disrupted, we can move to our final win condition of combat damage. It’s definitely not ideal and should only be used as a final resort. However it can be highly effective. We have large creatures that can crush our opponents to dust, as well as creature token generation that can be used to keep up blockers, or swing in for an alpha strike.