Kiki Pod has never really been as strong as Melira Pod. It was flavour of the month for a while but that's about it.
The biggest thing was UWR rising to dominance. You see, Kiki Pod, at least the second iteration of it that I played, banked really hard on the combo happening. It didn't play generally good creatures, it was just reliant on the combo. The original one had Kitchen Finks, but then CFB came along and said "Finks really doesn't do anything", and they were right. You never won from Finks, it was just a good card for Pod. So they removed it and added in cards like Deceiver Exarch and Phantasmal Image. And then you had this glass-cannon combo deck that required two pieces. It was considerably hard to pull off against a deck like UWR with tons of removal for you.
Eventually Kiki Pod just started fading back into obscurity. It's still a fine deck and has some success here and there but it's not at the level Melira Pod is. It doesn't have all the same options and isn't as flexible. Yeah, more recent versions play cards like Finks and Redcap to trend away from the combo version, but it's still heavily reliant on the combo happening.
Right now I think it's like tier 1.5. I think Affinity, Melira Pod, Jund, BG Rock, Twin, and UWR are all better than it. Now you're deciding to play a deck that you accept is worse than others and realize you should just play a better deck. If you really enjoy the deck and don't want to play at the PT it's fine, but otherwise I'd recommend to play something else.
- darksteel88
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Nov 24, 2013darksteel88 posted a message on Scrolls is brokenSo after they reset the Scrolls ranking I have steadily been going up. I've only lost a couple of games, and honestly, the majority of the games you lose are to poor draws on your part.Posted in: darksteel88 Blog
I remember one game in particular that I lost, I had almost no Growth and it was stupid. When I scooped I'd played probably one Growth card the entire game. Yeah. Those are the games you lose, when the RNG just screws you over and you draw the wrong cards. His deck was also well suited to beat me, being really fast aggro and having haste creatures. Funny enough though, we played each other again next game and I crushed him.
I've gotten up to a 1600 rating now and I'm in the top 50. Here's a pic for proof: http://i.imgur.com/xPzizJT.jpg
I have a feeling that if I'm playing against actual Scrolls pros, the deck will flop on itself. But as the ratings fluctuate over the next few days/weeks and correct themselves, the deck still seems good.
Mojan has talked about indirectly nerfing this deck, by limiting the number of cards you can draw in a turn. I really hope they don't, I like playing with myself (pun intended). It makes people mad that I don't interact with them, and that's, well, delicious. Let me feast on your delicious tears as you cry to mom about how I beat you fair and square.
I think some number of Pothers is potentially good. Someone cast Binding Root on my Golem, making it so it can't move. That was annoying as hell. But I suppose it's not back breaking. Pothers let me win faster but in reality, every non-Growth deck should have adequate answers to kill it on any given turn, meaning it won't live anyways. I do still think that I want to try some other cards out though.
Rigged seems good. I can rig any structure and trade their unit for it, stemming the early game. I'm not sure how good it makes things or whatnot but it doesn't seem awful. It costs only 1 and it does everything I need early game.
I'm also not convinced with Decimation. I rarely cast it for the -1 ability, only to kill an idol. Sometimes I get value in that it kills the row so my Golem can move, but that's a minor consequence when I have Burns and Kabonks to kill the memorials anyways. It seems largely useless outside the fact that it turns a 6-turn clock into a 3-turn clock. It's possible that we lose too fast and I have to just cut it.
Still, it's cool the deck is working. I'm also glad I can post here without fear of people seeing anything. I don't want them to know until I'm like number 1 on the ladder and go "well gee, look at what I have". I think when I get to rank 1, I'm taking a screenshot and putting it, along with the deck, up on a site. -
Nov 22, 2013darksteel88 posted a message on Scrolls is brokenOkay they reset the rankings on Scrolls and I got up to an 800 Rating in like 9 games or something. This deck is pretty good.Posted in: darksteel88 Blog
The deck does have some flaws:
1. Consistency. If you draw poorly early, you can lose. Literally drawing 0 memorial openers without any Summons will lose you the game. You can lose off the opening hand or drawing poorly, so it's somewhat of a gamble there.
2. Fast aggro. If they can kill you before you get to critical mass, it's hard. You rely really heavily on the first End of Reason you cast to wipe the board, and if it's lacklustre you're screwed.
3. One-shotting idols. Even though we basically do the same, they can do it against us. Someone once went Frost Gale into Loyal Darkling into Rat King into Necrogeddon. Two damage to my idol, then 9 power hitting it. I won the game but it was insanely close. Necrogeddon is a really scary card.
This deck makes people mad. I enjoy that. I enjoy watching someone say "damn wtf is this it's stupid". I get a nice warm fuzzy feeling inside. I know, I'm a jerk. But hey, deal with it.
I decided to post the list simply because I want to have evidence I was playing it first. When people start playing it too or people claim who the inventor was, well, you saw it here first.
Without further ado, here is the list:
3 Desert Memorial
3 Woodland Memorial
3 Law Memorial
3 Tribal Memorial
3 Sand Pact Memorial
3 Stone Pact Memorial
3 Summons
3 Eye of Eagle
3 Kabonk
2 Pother
3 Heritage
3 Imperial Resources
3 Burn
3 Sister of the Fox
3 Fertile Soil
1 Faith BLessing
1 Solemn Giant
1 Decimation
3 End of Reason
Basically the deck is a combo deck. You cast Memorials to get stupid amounts of resources and then draw 30 cards in a turn and cast just as many spells. End of Reason being able to sac Memorials means you can effectively Wrath with them. The rest is a ton of draw spells in various combinations.
Your win condition is Solemn Giant + Decimation. You can, for the measly cost of 10, cast and cd the Solemn Giant to 0, dealing a straight eight to an idol. Then you Decimation and it's done. If you end of Reason with Giant in play, doesn't die. The Decimation isn't necessary but attacking 6 times with Giant is inefficient. Decimation proved to be the best card choice for a second win condition since it can kill dudes as well.
Going forward I want to try cutting Pother. Maybe I can add something like Pushback and Tickbomb? I almost never cast Pother and I'd like to have more utility. - To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
This card can somewhat act like a Leyline of Sanctity. It does everything Leyline does but slightly more. It's a flying creature, so it has an added benefit of attacking with a drawback of dying. Probably not better than Leyline because you don't get it for free sometimes, but it's interesting because as a creature you can Gifts combo it. If I had to make a judgement call, I wouldn't play it.
I really don't think anything in this set is that good for us. Karn isn't good enough when it's competing with Gifts/Jace for a draw source, and the ultimate isn't powerful enough. It also has a drawback of potentially losing us an important card. I could be wrong about it, but I would far rather slot in Jace. I think I'd rather play TKS as well. Damping Sphere is a great card, but it's also good against us.
The biggest thing with this set is that it's focused around historic cards. We do play artifacts, but our historic count isn't high enough because our only legendary creatures also win the game (and are few in number). They're also typically not the kind of gameplan we're trying to play, and do things like tap creatures or whatever. They're just not at a high enough level for Modern.
Brave the Elements as a card is pretty narrow. It's obviously good when it's good, but how often is that? Opponents can kill things in response. They might also have blockers in different colours. They might also be playing no colours. Or they might not even care about that card because they win around it.
tl;dr - 5c Humans, D&T, and Soul Sisters are good white decks. They probably don't need it. Brave the Elements can be good but it feels a little too niche.
Yoshi typically ends up around 12th on a tier list. Yes, that's a lot higher than Yoshi was ranked, and yeah aMSa is the reason. Yoshi has a lot of unexplored potential that players recognize. Parry is such a powerful and unique ability that lets him do some crazy things. One big thing going for Yoshi is the fact it's impossible to find good Yoshi players to practice against. Especially since aMSa's from Japan, he can come over and spike tournaments because people aren't prepared for the matchup.
aMSa is a lot like Bogles as a deck. Both attack on different angles than others do, and both are relatively uncommon. They can spike tournaments when people don't expect it, but people always know it's a thing. Yoshi, like Bogles, are never high up on the tier lists. And honestly, that makes sense. Tier lists aren't solely "what is the best deck to play", but also "what decks are my opponent's playing". Up until very recently, you were probably okay playing a deck that would auto lose to Bogles because you wouldn't run into it.
Now, you're basically saying we shouldn't have a tier list until we have perfect matchup data. That requires us to find a perfect pilot for every deck, have the player know how to play against every deck, and then have them play a large enough sample set. That's just completely infeasible. You're basically never going to get data you can feel good about in order to show matchup data. Especially since MTGO has to be one of the primary data sources, you just aren't finding good enough data for it to be reliable.
Ken knows this last point well, as I've seen some of the posts he's made on extensive matchup testing. In fact, I recall one in the 8Rack thread where he did a pile of plays on the play/draw in pre/post-board matchups after they had determined how both sides should play the matchup. It was a great read because he put in a few hours of testing to find the data he needed.
If you want a deck that has interaction, you're typically looking at control, midrange, or tempo. These are the types of decks playing some mix of discard, removal, and counters. GDS is a decent matchup vs Tron, you have some powerful hitters that can get in under them, as well as some good counters. It's also a very interactive deck, playing a great mix of creatures and interactive spells. Another is UW Control. It doesn't seem like the best on the surface, but as it turns out, 4 Spreading Seas + 4 Field of Ruins makes the matchup pretty decent (don't know the exact number, but I'd say it's no more than 40-60 in either direction). It's a little less interactive being a control deck, but still something to consider.
That all being said, maybe 4c Gifts Control might work for you. It's a control deck but it sometimes has the Gifts Combo win condition (it's explained in depth in the UW Tron primer linked in my signature). So even though you're trying to play a normal control game, you just randomly have this combo that wins games much sooner. It mitigates a lot of the drain on playing control when games sometimes end on turn 4. I have no idea if the deck is good against Tron, my inclination is to think it isn't great. The Crucible/Loam + Ghost Quarter plan is solid against them, I just don't know how viable that is in actual games.
I think probably everything you want in one deck isn't going to exist. 4c Gifts seems like the closest thing. If I had a better idea of your priority among the different things you want, then we can go find the best deck.
1. Your list has no sources for information. We need to know where the data is coming from. Ken's old list showed what events it was coming from and had metrics for which share of the amalgamation came from which source. We want full disclosure on how the numbers are achieved. A few GP/SCG Opens doesn't really show enough data to support things, especially since the banlist change invalidates old data.
2. A tier list has to be objective in some way. It's either designed by aggregating MWP or by aggregating meta share. When you say "I think deck X is in tier Y", that's a problem. You don't get to make those decisions, not if you want others to accept your tier list. The only thing we accept are cold hard facts, which are the numbers. You can decide on what percentage makes the cutoff for tiers, but then all decks get placed into tiers automatically by such a cutoff.
3. You gave some really poor definitions of why decks are where they are or even describing decks. You say Ponza is bad because it never won, but it did. Decks don't even have to win either, they just have to place well. A top 8 is realistically the same as a GP win. You describe Burn as a burn deck plus 12 creatures, which is really the wrong thing to call it if it has that many creatures. Even Ascendancy Storm is being listed as a new thing, it died out shortly after the card was printed, but I absolutely remember it being a thing until Treasure Cruise got banned.
4. You skip over a lot of decks and then say that it has 30 decks. A tier list should encompass everything there's data to support. Mono U Tron is something I'm surprised to not see, same with Elves, but Ascendancy Storm is on the list? I don't know where you found data that had Ascendancy Storm on it to support being able to classify it objectively (I'd like to know if you did, it's possible I'm wrong and just haven't seen that data). This sort of suggests the same problem 2 addresses, which is the objectivity of your list. It needs to just show raw data and let people form their own conclusions from it. To decide what decks do or don't make the list from your own opinion is the wrong way to go about it.
If you're gonna make a list, you need to sort out all of these issues. It needs to be objective and have more data that is sourced. Not until the conclusions are drawn objectively can we take the list seriously.
It's far better to encompass the list from tournament results and meta percentages. Like Ken used to do, you compile day 2 numbers, top 8 results, and meta shares, and do it across several platforms (MTGO, GPs, PTs, SCG Opens, etc.). You get a depiction of what the field is playing, because realistically the field is playing what they think is good and that approximates well. If you could get perfect percentages for deck win percentages then it would work out well, but you realistically can't.
To give an example, I completely disagree Affinity is a tier 3 deck. Sure, it has problems, but that doesn't make it bad. In fact, it exactly fits your tier 2 criteria (it's quite consistent and steals a lot of game 1s). You might be an underdog to Jund, sure, but it's not like it's 90-10, it's more like 55-45 or 60-40.
The other major thing is that outside of the discard, there's isn't a lot you dislike. Maybe you think Bolt is bad when creatures like Goyf get big or something, but it's still good at killing other things. Maybe you think Maelstrom Pulse is bad because it kills your things too, but you can force situations where it's good. What I find is that the core is generally not bad and I don't have a lot that I think sideboard cards are better than.
When it came to Fulminator Mages, I didn't think that they were better than existing things. What would I cut? Bolt? Bob? Maelstrom Pulse? These all don't seem worth it to me. Mage seemed like a "good when you have a best case scenario" that I wasn't sure I liked. In some cases it does kill a threat (i.e. manland) but you also have to telegraph it. Opponents can opt not to animate them and play out other cards instead.
My mirror results are very mixed right now, and I think perhaps I'm being a little too active in using removal rather than being selective. I haven't played enough to conclusively determine anything though, and a fair chunk of them were lost by mana issues (i.e. flooding / screw).
Speaking of which, I know the mirror is about getting 2-for-1s and just incrementally gaining advantage that way. Does that make Fulminator Mages good? My sideboard plan today was EE, two Kitchen Finks, Last Hope, and Tireless Tracker, cutting the 5 discard spells I have in the main. I still have three Mages in my board though. Fulminator becomes mediocre later on, but if it means you get to BBE sooner, does that make it good?
As it turns out, when you've got more mana than your opponent you can just instantly win the game with Scapeshift. The most common UGx deck has always been Scapeshift because that's what that colour combination can do.
There's UGr decks that play a tempo style game, akin to the Eternal Command or RUG Delver decks of old. They're not popular right now but they're certainly something using UG. There's also some Sultai midrange flavours that people are trying to make work now.
I guess maybe 4c Gifts Control is closest to what you want. It's every colour except red, but it's a grindy control deck. It has a bit of a combo aspect to it, and doesn't have a ramp aspect, but it's a control deck for sure.
I can't think of any UG decks that are playing things like Rampant Growth and then not abusing the mana. You basically need to combo finish them if you're going far enough into the ramp plan as the control player.