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.
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- darksteel88
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Member for 12 years, 2 months, and 3 days
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Nov 24, 2013
darksteel88 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, 2013
darksteel88 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.
I also think there are probably some additional constraints we can put on it. All the lists I've been looking at have at least 1 Abrupt Decay / 1 Fatal Push as well. When I look at the lands too, there's probably a minimum on shocks/fetches/manlands that we could write out. The idea for the core would get us to something a lot more fleshed out until we have a list fully fleshed out.
This product won't do well and everyone knows it. Wizards, I think, is going to make the next product a lot better to compensate. I don't ever see the price of A25 ever being justifiable, cards are going to tank. I'm just going to grab IMA stuff I missed and grab A25 stuff in April after cards have gone down.
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/5mxoxw/maro_doesnt_want_fetchlands_in_postmodern/
Here's a post I remember from a while ago where people were discussing exactly this.
I think Masters sets are going to be a little better but not a lot better. Just enough to make us not upset.
The problem Wizards has is keeping everyone happy. It's not an easy task to do but everyone seems to think it is. Masters can print Goyf every other year and have the price stay the same, but how many cards could they do that with? Fetches and then we don't get the other land cycles we want? If they reprinted fetches every year, when are we getting Zendikar manlands or Scars fastlands? If we reprint fetches every other year, they'll stay relatively where they are now and we won't get one of the other two cycles for four years. If you print Goyf at lower rarity, how are we going to sell sets? Eventually we'd run out of cards that can sell these sets, and then you'd be left with garbage product over and over. I don't disagree that they could throw in more value, but there is a limit on these sets if what they want is to sell them every year.
I just don't understand what people want. Do they expect $3 packs with Goyf, Snap, Lili, Karn, Emrakul, Chalice, Jace, Bridge, and fetches, all at rare? Plus a dozen uncommons worth $8 each? Then the set is going to release with like en EV of $30 per pack and drive all the prices of these cards into the ground. Next set, what do you want? The same set would be only a fraction of the price. Everyone keeps talking like this is what they want, but is it actually?
I do agree with the sentiment not to over-prepare. Unless you're very sure about the expected meta, it's better to keep your deck tuned for an open meta. My LGS weekly gets somewhere between 10 and 45 players (taken over the past few months), so the range of decks is huge. Some people bring the same deck each week, some people bring different decks. But with such a large array of players, it's impossible to predict what you'll play against. At most, I'd say you could probably just make sure you had something for some of the popular matchups, but I wouldn't tune my deck specifically against them.
I remember playing at the F2F Open at GP Toronto 2017. I tuned my GDS list for exactly one matchup: the mirror. I played it three times and crushed it all three times. It happened to be good against BGx as well, which I played against twice surprisingly. My losses ended up both being to GW Value Town decks, which honestly I would never have prepared for. So as a whole, it's honestly typically better to just not worry.
BW Tokens is fine, not sure how good it is but it's certainly fine.
Round 1 vs Hollow One:
Game 1 we both mull to 6, Burning Inquiry leaves me with one colourless land. I stumble on lands and just never get anything going. Game 2 he Ancient Grudges my Signet then plays Blood Moon to keep me off of coloured mana. It wasn't close either game.
Record: 0-1
Round 2 vs Turns:
This matchup is just impossible to win. Gigadrowse is hard to interact with because of Replicate, and they just get to go off when you have no mana. Unless you manage to get Gifts on turn 4, you're just never winning. There's also the fact you're trying to do that through Remand/Cryptic/Relic, so it's not even an easy thing to do. Neither game was close, some combination of Gigadrowse/Exhaustion into a bunch of extra turns sealed the games.
Record: 0-2
I dropped at 0-2 with a third round bye. The deck doesn't seem that bad but I just ran poorly, getting a bad matchup or that Burning Inquiry. Probably won't be playing this deck for a while since I'm waiting on some cards for Jund to arrive. I'll probably pick up Jaces in April so maybe the next time I'll play the deck will be in a couple months. Maybe by then the format will be more stable.
GDS is probably going to suffer a bit, but how heavily is up for debate.
I don't see Jund or UWx as being significantly better than the other. Jund is going to be a tier 1 deck but some UWx deck with Jace will also be tier 1. It's more so a matter of what you want to play and how much you're willing to spend. Jund is typically more expensive than UWx so you should expect it to be more expensive to acquire.
Right now, you're seeing better results from Jund just because lists are easier to build. We've had BBE Jund before and people largely just took up old lists, slotted whatever new that made sense (Tireless Tracker, new Liliana, K-Command) and called it a day. Sure, there will be some iterations on it, but largely it's easy to put together a working list. With the UWx decks, people are experimenting with Jace because it's a big change for them. With Jace they're largely trying decks they know won't work just to make sure they won't. You can find more information from failure so it's better to start at places more likely to fail. You could very easily just slot Jace into UW Control on top of some of the Gideons or something and call it a day. But since people know that will work, they're instead trying things like 4c Jace + BBE or Sultai to see if they can make it work.
As far as packs go, because there's no mapping of any sort to a price, they might be okay. I can't speak to how that loot box issue is going to turn out though. A lot of other games, like say Hearthstone, let you buy packs and disenchant cards into dust, then use dust to buy cards. They effectively put a price on packs (average is around 100 dust). Since Wizards never buys individual cards, they get around that. I'm also not a lawyer though.
As long as the packs have value, people will buy them. That much is clear to me. Modern players have money to spend on cards, they just don't have money to waste on packs where they're effectively gambling with an expected loss. Not once have I heard someone I know say "but the packs are $10", it's always "but the set sucks". Give us something good in the packs and we'll buy it. Nobody even cares if cards tank as long as the value is there.
The goal from Wizards has always been abundantly clear to me: make the set affordable without ruining the investments of existing players. There's a range in prices for cards that satisfies this, and I think Goyf/Lili/Jace topping the format is about where they want it to be. Sure, maybe cards could come down like 10-20%, but I think prices are within the window that they're willing to accept. They always want to get more people into the game with the caveat that it can't come at the expense of existing players. If you push someone away who's played your game for 5, 10, or even 25 years, you've done something horribly wrong.