Thanks in large part to the meteoric rise of Commander, there’s no shortage of good board wipes in Magic: The Gathering. While these cards are great at dealing with established boards, however, they don’t protect you against future threats at all. This is where forgotten MTG classic Aether Flash comes in, letting you pre-emptively deal with opposing threats while also unlocking some wild combo lines.
Aether Flash MTG
Aether Flash is very much an inverted board wipe, in that it damages everything that enters after it comes down. Against Aggro and Token decks, this is a great way to keep them off the board for good, since their creatures will often have two or less toughness.
You can expand Aether Flash’s scope to hit more general decks, too, by running damage enhancers like Solphim, Mayhem Dominus or Furnace of Rath. Throw in some trigger doublers like Panharmonicon, and you’re really cooking with gas.
If you want to take things even further, animating Aether Flash with Opalescence or Starfield of Nyx allows for some spicy plays indeed. Once it’s a creature, you can Equip Aether Flash with Basilisk Collar, letting it kill every creature on entry via Deathtouch, while gaining you life as well.
For those with few scruples, Aether Flash can actually serve as a potent land denial card, too. Pair it with Living Plane or Nature’s Revolt, and every new land played will immediately be destroyed. Alongside one-sided board wipes like Delayed Blast Fireball, this can leave you as the only player at the table with mana to spend.
Of course, Aether Flash is a symmetrical effect, but that can also be used to your advantage. Pair the card with Enrage creatures like Apex Altisaur, and you can gain a lot of incremental value. It also works as a pseudo-sacrifice outlet for decks like Atla Palani, Nest Tender, which want to get rid of their own small tokens.
Flash Back In Time
While Aether Flash has a good range of fair applications, it shines even brighter as a combo enabler. Interestingly, a number of these combos let you make infinite Dinosaurs, such as the card’s Polyraptor combo.
With Aether Flash in play, bringing out Polyraptor will immediately trigger its Enrage effect, making another Polyraptor, and repeating the loop. By itself, this will result in a draw, but you can add in an Impact Tremors effect to make it a win instead. You can do something similar with Cacophodon and Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker, but you don’t need a way to break the loop in that case.
If infinite burn damage is more your thing, Aether Flash also enables a spicy combo with Ashcloud Phoenix and Yarus, Roar of the Old Gods. With Yarus and Flash in play, cast Ashcloud Phoenix and it’ll die immediately, then return face-down due to its own ability. It’ll then die to Flash again, and this time it’ll return via Yarus’s ability, Shocking the table in the process. This will repeat infinitely, winning you the game if you’re ahead on life.
Despite its broad applications and great combos, Aether Flash is a pretty underplayed card in Commander right now. According to EDHREC, just 8,730 decks run it, which feels criminally low. That said, it does mean the card is very budget-friendly currently, at just $0.61 a pop near-mint, so there’s a silver lining here.
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