I dont know much about competitive EDH because I am a casual player myself, this seems like a super strong rounded deck. I saw you have Neoform in your maybe cards have you thought about Eldritch Evolution ? its basically the same just costs 1 more mana and has a range of +2 instead of +1 but you don't get the +1/+1 counter. the redundancy might be useful if you decide its something you want. plus Eldritch Evolution can hit any creature in that range as opposed to having to pod up like Neoform does.

Shana42 Eldritch Evolution and Neoform are no longer as viable as they were in the Breakfast Hulk version. Sadly, we don’t have creatures that will allow us pod up to Protean Hulk. I also don’t think we can assemble all four creatures needed to combo off outside Flash Hulk. Thank you for the suggestion though.

So what exactly do you do when you get turn one Extracted or Praetor's Grasped and your Narcomeba or Eldrazi is exiled?

Leave the game and go out for lunch?

File your taxes?

Complete an automated telephone survey?

You're devoting literally 20 card slots to a single combo line that has a single point of failure and prevents your deck from actually being able to establish a board state on turn 1 or 2 in the event you don't have your turn 0 win (as ever tapping out starting on turn 1 you open up the possibility of being unable to defend your inefficiently constructed combo barring having Force of Will in hand) which will prevent you from either playing the combo early or interacting with any opponents who have early action that needs to be interacted with, all of which defeats the entire point of playing such a combo in the first place.

Eventually the cEDH community will wise up and get smart to the simple fact that single point of failure combo lines are not competitively viable against true competitive decks and players. Flash Hulk is a dead concept in my group as it's simply too inefficient in terms of card slots to be anything but UBER vulnerable to these kinds of angles of attack that take such concepts completely out of the game starting on turn 1 with much, much, MUCH greater consistency than a concept like Flash Hulk will be able to go off on turn 1 or 2.

Sure. Remind us how many notable tourneys your highly advanced gameplay has won? None. You need to start winning to force the cEDH community to “wise up”. Until then, I wish you the best.

I did notice that you were only running Zulaport Cutthroat , but not Blood Artist . Since this is used as the main outlet for both your combo lines (both shuffle and cat), have you considered bolstering the redundancy there? I know Altar of Dementia mill is a backup line, however you can't deploy it using hulk.

I'm pretty sure this individual is of the opinion that hopes and prayers will keep his solitary combo win line from being disrupted in an irrevocable fashion and that these hopes and prayers are more than enough redundancy, enpc. Hopes and prayers and playing against casual players with casual decks is more than justification to devote 20 card slots to a combo win line with 2 separate single points of failure. Justification to call the idea competitive? Meh, not so much.

I was running some redundancies in the earlier versions but the deck seems to work fine without them. I chose to run multiple sac outlets since I am running Rector lines. And it allows me to go around Linvala, Keeper of Silence .

jaymc1130 What you're asking me to do is to change my deck to address a threat that isn't even on my meta (yet). You have a good point. I've told you that numerous times before you blocked me (because you can't handle a person having a different opinion). But having a good point is not enough to actually shift the meta. You need to join big tourneys and win. Your deck might work well against "solitary win combo lines" but it has yet to prove it can consistently win at a higher rate against a cEDH pod compared to Flash Hulk and similar decks. You need to stop being a hypothetical threat and actually be on

jaymc1130: Actually I have known Megalomania (on the forums at least) for a while and the deckbuilding decisions I have seen from them are sensible. Sometimes not my particular kettle of fish, but they work. And it's worth not presuming that every playgroup runs lots of Extract -esque cards.

Megalomania: Fair enough. Lots of blood pod lists appearing in your playgroup then?

enpc: thanks! you've actually come up with a lot of very useful suggestions it the past. I've been playing less nowadays but my usual pods are composed of Daretti Stax, Narset, GAA IV and a couple Flash-Hulk decks with occasional Shimmer Zur and Blood Pod guys playing every couple of weeks.

@ ArthurDayne Every competitive deck should be running 2 or 3 basic lands and wants to try to squeeze in each of it's colors as a basic if at all possible (sometimes it is not). This avoids a number of stax pieces being relevant against the deck (Back to Basics, Blood Moon, etc) as well as gives the deck targets to ramp off opposing player's Assassin's Trophy, Path to Exile and similar cards. If your deck is running zero basic lands it probably is not going to be competitive against the top decks in the format and will have difficulty against a wide range of tier 2 and 3 strategies that often include various hate pieces.

ArthurDayne Thank you for the upvote. The deck no longer runs Hermit Druid so there is no real reason for me to stick to zero basics. If one of each is too few to be reliable against Bad Moon then I think they are also too few for the downsides to be noticeable. Jaymc1130 pretty much sums up the other reasons why running basics is a good idea. Besides, our win cons are very mana efficient so fetching for an Island early in the game is usually enough to negate Blood Moon effects.

As for Reanimate, the deck runs a Spellseeker + Reanimate line that allows us to deal with Cursed Totem . Using the said line, we use Flash Hulk to put Carrion Feeder, Nomads en-Kor, Leonin Relic-Warder and Spellseeker into play. Warder takes care of the Totem, Spellseeker tutors for Reanimate. We then Reanimate the Hulk for a second Hulk trigger to assemble the missing pieces to win the game.

Carrion Feeder, Nomads, Warder, and Spellseeker is 1+1+2+3 cmc, leave out the Nomads as it can be part of the second pile. The line also insta loses to targeted removal in response to the Warder trigger on the stack when Carrion Feeder gets axed in addition to being vulnerable to any form of countermagic making the line probably the least effective it can possibly be. That kind of play is entirely dependent on every opponent being completely and entirely unable to interact favorably or put up any form of resistance, in which case an inefficient combo line won't matter if your opponents can't play. This makes the line irrelevant, and the only relevant aspect is the game state: one in which attrition completely depleted all opponents abilities to take relevant action. The bigger focus should be on reaching that game state efficiently rather than hoping and praying opponents blunder into it and you can then employ an inefficient win line.

I know that the "traditional" Reanimate line is:

Flash + Protean Hulk into Spellseeker getting Reanimate , Viscera Seer (or Carrion Feeder ) and Grand Abolisher .

While you can exile Hulk in response to the tutor trigger going on the stack, Grand Abolisher locks out most (and I say most, I am aware that ther are still cards that play through GA) interaction so that the combo can happen comfortably.

jaymc1130: If your meta is full of proactive stax leveraging hate cards like Cursed Totem , I don't think its blundering to have a backup line which can take deal with these threats for the sake of one card slot in addition to your main combo. Yes, this creates other vulnerable spots to attack the combo however that's just how it goes.

enpc the point is this at a fundamental level: in the event you are playing toward reaching a game state where no one can do anything except you then what line you take to win the game isn't important, only that you reached a specific game state required to enable any number of lines. Secondly, from a fundamental standpoint again, Stax concepts (while horrendously ineffective in competitive multiplayer) tend to be the concepts that profit most from reaching the game state we are discussing being achieved. This makes the requirement to initiate certain lines more beneficial to certain opposing strategies and there will still be no assurance that the line can work if such a stagnated game state has been achieved as there will often be multiple redundant similar effects prohibiting such lines of play.

There are other concepts in competive EDH however that excel at both reaching and abusing that type of game state and these concepts rely on being more efficient about the actions they take and reaching/maintaining that game state in an advantageous position. All of this makes it rather pointless to play lines with requirements of that sort without the means to directly, efficiently, and more profitably achieve the desired game state as it dilutes the resiliency of the strategy being employed in deck building terms to devote even more card slots to an already inefficient game plan that will get blasted by more competitive efficient strategies.

Just think about it from a pure fundamental standpoint: if you're building in a line requiring three additional card slots (Warder, Spellseeker, Reanimate) to utilize in a niche scenario that still has low odds of success in a competitive setting then you've made your deck less consistent. Keep repeating this over and over and over and you get the mega flawed standard meta decks we have today that all suffer from this same dilemma, they kept adding lines for niche scenarios and have become too inefficient to handle new, emerging competitive concepts that specifically prey on these exact weaknesses.

jaymc1130: while I can kind of agree with your points, I also think that you're off the mark on the whole, sorry.

In this case, the addition of the three cards don't end up diluting the deck, as all three cards serve a purpose outside of the aforementioned line. In the case of Spellseeker - the card acts as a tutor (which can get either side of the hulk combo (either directly or as a tutor tutor), Leonin Relic-Warder actas as both removal (which can be deployed as part of the combo, making it valuable) and also forms a backup combo for the deck which does not require the hulk line at all. Lastly Reanimate , while being a weaker card outside of combo, still works with Entomb or can provide you with extra value from cards like Gilded Drake .

but the key thing to take away here is that these cards haven't been included because of a niche line they can form - they have been included as a direct response to the evolving meta (not at large, but specifically within Megalomania's playgroup). And this is entirely it - stock lists will often times run a small amount of redundancy in combo lines, however thiese stock lists are never properly representative of diverse metas amongst playgroups (as well as individual play styles).

I can clearly see from your comments that you're chomping at the bit to make reference to your list, however you need to remember that your list is a response to a specific meta, just like this list is. Similarly, my Thrasios/Tymna list is exactly the same - a resposne to my meta (and playstyle). That's why you see a bunch of cards that I run that neither of your lists do. An looking at your list, I would say that it would struggle more in my meta that it does in yours. I run a lot more redundnacy/overlap in my combos, as well as a fair chunk of counterspells and universal removal, becuase that's how my deck has evolved to cope with what I play against. And the attitudes of the players would work against you, not because of a lack of experience or skill, but because that's what you get when you have different metas.

So back to this list - sure, you might have responses to the combo lines in specific ways however it's clear that Megalomania's playgroup has gone down different paths. I'm sure if the playgroup started runnign more Praetor's Grasp effects, the deck would look different. But it's important to assess a deck in the context that it's being played in.

jaymc1130 Again, your points are valid in as far as weaknesses in the deck's design. I have reiterated this a million times. The problem with you is that you want people to adjust their lists just because you have a deck that is designed mainly to go against ours. Until such time we start playing against you or deck's with a similar design, your points, while valid, will remain irrelevant.

Lastly, I am not a qualified representative of the Flash Hulk community. If you have a gripe against Flash Hulk decks, try posting your comments here: Breakfast Hulk or here: Shuffle Hulk.

enpc Here's where you're wrong about the card inclusions: all three are additional inclusions that aren't required for the primary combo and that are only included because of the combo they interact with. There is no reason to run Relic Warder over Disenchant in a vacuum, it is only and specifically included because of the primary combo line. There is no reason to run Reanimate for any additional purpose with literally zero game plan based around recurring creatures aside from Protean Hulk. There is literally zero reason to run Spellseeker over any number of similar and less restrictive tutor effects except as a means to synergize with the combo line based around Protean Hulk and the other utility cards included in that line (creature tutors). Three additional card slots are being devoted to a niche scenario, three card slots that all still don't do anything about the most glaring weakness of the combo itself (which is not ever going to be a card like Cursed Totem): the combo has 2 single points of failure and each is unique and irreplaceable. 3 additional card slots are being devoted to a line to shore up an imagined weakness instead of an actual weakness. It's like fighting a phantom, no matter how hard you swing at you're still not hitting anything or preventing the spooky ghost from spooking you. It's treating the symptoms of a disease without addressing the cause of it. Leonin Relic-Warder is the only one of those 3 cards that will be even remotely relevant in the majority of games where Narcomeba or the Eldrazi is exiled from any number of effects, and in such a situation it's really most useful for it's ability to apply pressure via combat damage as this will be the only win condition the deck has left.

This is a list devoting more than 20 card slots to a single combo line that all goes up in smoke if either of 2 critical elements is exiled. The same is true for every single standard meta deck in the format that is considered top tier (when they are not). The reason people keep playing these decks is because for half a decade no one has found a truly good way to shut these decks out, and these standard meta decks beat basically everything else that appears in the format. Except the solution to those decks has existed pretty much that entire time and not a single person ever realized it until a random day over a year ago where a buddy of mine playing Food Chain Tazri cast his Extract on our Shuffle Hulk player on turn 1, and Praetor's Grasped the Doomsday Zur player on turn 2, leaving him playing against only 1 opponent with any win condition left at all. At that moment in time everything everyone thought they knew for certain about the competitive format was undone wholly and completely, the community at large just didn't know it and won't know it until they come to understand the same fundamental principles I was forced to learn in this new meta landscape.

As for your specific meta, an Inception based strategy would thrive in it. We tested this concept for thousands upon thousands of games collectively at this point against very nearly every possible potential opposing concept and it succeeds against everything better than any other concept in the entire format. The decks like yours that rely on slower paced games lose handily to the attrition plan, glass cannon concepts lose handily to the disruption plan, and stax concepts actually benefit Inception strategies more than they benefit themselves. All this because of one real core fundamental principle: in multiplayer, all that matters is efficiency. If your deck is more efficiently constructed, can more efficiently utilize the resources available to it, can more efficiently reach advantageous game states, can more efficiently control the pace of play, it's simply going to be more competitive much more consistently than splashier, less efficient concepts will ever be capable of.

Megalomania Inception isn't a concept designed to just beat glass cannon style concepts, it's specifically tailored to address every potential threat concept that might oppose it. The list I have even has a primary construction with card inclusions tailored to matchups including other opposing Inception strategies, cards that I don't include when playing against much weaker standard meta decks as the extra redundancy isn't required.

Siggy and SickRobot have refused to address the points for over a year now. They were brought up long, long, long ago. Neither one had any way to refute them or the desire to even discuss them after their flaws were exposed. They preferred to ignore it.

The points being discussed are certainly relevant, as they completely negate the point of playing the kinds of concepts currently dominating the format. How little you or others know about this is what is irrelevant, the concepts in question are valid at all times regardless of how long it takes for people to come to realize it. Same was true of evolution and gravity.

This again. You have no proof of these claims and more importantly, no proof that it would work the same way it did inside your playgroup of FOUR people. Telling me (again) I don't have proof that it won't work is logically flawed (burden of proof fallacy).

Maybe because there is no need to address them. A concept works until it doesn't. Make it not work instead of telling us it doesn't.

We've already made your concept not work... Whether or not you want to accept that is what is irrelevant mate. I don't have the kind of free time to sit here and play with the entire community for a year to make them all understand something this simple, what I DO have the time to do is tell you and allow you to test it yourself, which the entire community refuses to do out of pure arrogance and stubbornness.

Let me tell you what is simple. Your design isn't relevant unless we start playing against it. Flash Hulk decks and other decks in the meta became relevant and part of the meta because people actually use them and adjustments need to be made based on the likelihood of playing against them. So until the time comes when your design is no longer a hypothetical threat to the meta, i'm afraid you will stay irrelevant.

Imagine that, more arrogance, stubbornness, and now stupidity with a side of jerkishness.

The only irrelevant one is you mate. One more mindless sheep among other sheep. Bah all you want, it won't change the fact that nothing you ever do will progress any part of human society with your attitude.

Says the guy who, despite having already blocked me, goes to my page and basically tells me my list is terrible and that he has the best deck in the history of decks but doesn't need to play it against anyone outside his playgroup because he can "explain" why it's the best. lol