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 and 2 months
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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.
The problem with reprinting in the way Yugioh does is that it completely tanks the value. Rescue Rabbit was over $100 before, now it's $1 and the original is only $10. Magic players would go crazy if they tanked the prices by 90%. It could work only if you did it quickly enough (like on Standard rotation) as opposed to trying to compensate for older cards. How many people would be upset if they got Goyfs at $150 and suddenly they were $20? Wizards can't afford to alienate players like that.
Like every time we talk about reprinting cards, people always bring up the point that they should just slash them so they're affordable. You have to consider the entire ecosystem. There's a balance between printing them so players can have access (i.e. cost goes down) while making sure people with large collections don't feel like it's a waste to buy. If players start feeling like buying cards is a waste because they're gonna get reprinted and destroy the value, they're going to see some loss out of it. It's in their best interest to never completely tank the market and to stagger dropping prices on cards.
The problem with Legacy is that they can't. The reserved list explicitly makes it so they have no control over the ever-increasing cap on the format. The format just slowly prices more and more players out of it, with Wizards unable to help.
There's really no need for a second reserved list. Wizards already doesn't like it, and all non-collectors hate it. The current one has enough things that investors can buy things and watch them increase, without it having too many things on it that make the game impossible to play.
I think a lot of players don't particularly invest into cards, they just feel a lot better about spending so much because of the return. It helps knowing that if I decide to quit, my collection (the playable stuff) could be sold for a minimum of 50%, so I can get back a good amount of money. Even if I go net neutral on card prices, that's still a lot of money coming back at the end of the day.
Wizards actually legally can't add cards to the reserved list, not without contemplating legal issues surrounding it. Their official statement on it says no cards will be added to it. I'm not a lawyer, but promissory estoppel and other legal conditions apply to any changes around it. As much as they might want to change it, legally it's difficult. Usually it's just best to leave it as it is.
As far as reprinting en-masse goes, it really depends on how they want stores/players to profit. Stores obviously have some money to make from more sets, or sets with higher value. They also have stock that they lose on. Since Masters sets never do too much damage, it's never that bad. For instance, Twilight Mire dropped but because Manlands didn't get reprinted, they're going up (and the same for Scars Fastlands).
Future Sight Tarmogoyf is still significantly more expensive than the Modern Masters version, but it's also currently priced half of what the all-time high is. Additionally, the all-time high is right before the second MM reprint. The first reprint actually jumped the value because of more players, but once people saw it was gonna be in all the sets, the value started to plummet. If you got a print of it every year, or downshift back to rare, it'd tank. Who loses out there? Stores clearly to some degree, but they can probably offset it on pack sales. But players like you or me are the ones really suffering, because I lost all value on the investment.
The issue with Masters sets is that you can only print so much per set and you have to be able to sell future sets. If every set has fetches, Goyf, Liliana, Snap, Karn, Chalice, Cryptic, Jace, Bob, etc., then those cards tank. It makes spoiler season no fun, we already know what's in there. One of the things Wizards has to manage is how much stores lose out of this. If tomorrow Wizards abolished the Reserved List, it's not just people with Black Lotuses that lose out, but companies like SCG who have hundreds of thousands in product that are on that list. Every part of the distribution chain is important. They have to make players want to buy sets, so there's always a cap on what they can put in the set.
Tron, Scapeshift (RG), and Storm are all the opposite of interactive decks. None of them care what the opponent is doing, and in an ideal world just ignore them completely. Tron I already explained, but Scapeshift just has to hit the magical land count and then burn you out with Scapeshift, or sometimes just play Valakuts and put lands into play to shoot the opponent. With Storm, you're just trying to get enough of the right cards that you can chain enough things. Usually it's very easy to know if you can manage it, especially with Electromancer and Baral. I think most people don't like this style. Especially the current iteration, you basically always just do the same kind of lines (Gifts for Rituals), etc.
Affinity is the deck that has the most unique lines and interesting gameplay. There are lots of different lines and lots of different ways to approach winning. You always play with the goal of dumping your hand and winning fast, but you always get tons of decisions on which creatures to play (which 1 or 2 drop do I play?), how to utilize them (Arcbound Ravager, Cranial Plating, Inkmoth/Blinkmoth), etc. It's very much a deck that requires some practice to play well, and it seems like the perfect kind of fast deck for you to play.
I definitely think they're going to print powerful Swords again. All 5 Swords aren't that powerful, they're just only good IF we have Stoneforge. Back in Standard, Sword of War and Peace was okay but not even that good. But Skullclamp, Batterskull, and Jitte are probably too powerful. I think Stoneforge isn't safe to unban in Modern because it really clamps on equipment development. Batterskull and Cranial Plating are already super powerful and because we don't develop that many equipments, it's easy to break them accidentally.
Snapcaster is always a powerful card, just never too powerful. Cruise and Snap are non-combos so it's fine to ban Cruise instead. Besides, everyone knew Snap wasn't the problem there. I would guess they won't ban Snapcaster in the future, mostly because they're very careful with the spells they print. Like since Snapcaster got printed, we've gotten K-Command, Fatal Push, and a couple that got banned (including restricted in Vintage). They're very cautious.
I can regurgitate this statement until I go blue in the face: Twin hurt blue diversity in the format, that's why it got banned. It has nothing to do with a power level, though I'm sure Wizards probably justified it a little selling that it was a good deck and could win on turn 4. The biggest thing was that nobody cared to play other blue decks. It didn't matter if they were good or not, everyone defaulted to Twin because it was so obviously good. Even in the current meta, I'm not sure people would play Jeskai, Grixis, or even UW Control over a standard UR Twin. Twin just offers much of the slow, grindy gameplan they do with this option to win games immediately.
Twin also creates this awful gameplay pattern where the games devolve to leaving up mana every turn. As much as I like Twin, that's not fun to play against. You basically don't get to do whatever it was that you were planning to do, and if you decide that you don't care about Twin anymore, you could just lose the game on the spot. It's certainly a consideration when it pushes out decks that aren't blue as well. It kind of reminds me of DRS in that regard, although DRS was a significantly worse offender.
The only way we're ever getting Twin back is if: a) the diversity goes to hell among blue decks, and b) the reason isn't Jace. You'd need to convince people that Twin could live alongside at least one other blue deck (Delver, Storm, GDS, Control) and have them both be competitive. Good luck selling people on that, I think every blue player would play URx Twin.
I'd say in a month or so people will stop experimenting and we'll see where the dust settles.
Twin is also not a safe unban. It was strictly not about the power level but the diversity. It ruins blue because everyone just plays Twin. Especially if you're unbanning Stoneforge, you're just asking the format to devolve into Jeskai Stoneforge Twin. The deck basically builds itself.
Green Sun's was a problem before, and I think it's less safe of an unban than Birthing Pod is. The fact of the matter is, we already have replacements for both Pod and GSZ that are acceptable in the format. No need to unban things when those decks are perfectly fine.
Mox has to stay on, it will break the format. Fast mana is a problem and it's a really good fast mana card.
Dread Return is the sort of card that could go either way. It may not seem like it's broken but I'm positive there are good ways to abuse it. There are all sorts of ways to play Dredge and load up the board, at which point you're just straight asking for trouble.
Blazing Shoal might break the format, Infect was insane with this card. Sure no Probe, but that doesn't make enough of a difference. I'd play Infect if they unbanned it.
BGx decks are going to be very tiring like Control decks are. The decks are very grindy and cause you to play long games of Magic. Maybe not quite as long, but still long. If the tiring aspect is an issue for you, Jund isn't going to be the deck for you. You may want to try some faster combo decks, or even some aggro decks in that case. I'll put it as blunt as I can: if you're basing this decision on Jeskai being too gruelling due to game length, don't get Jund.
Jund will be competitive for sure. It's probably a tier 1 deck now. It was never that bad, it just was missing one piece to make it good. The BGx archetype has always been good, and I don't think you need to be worried about this aspect. Even if for whatever reason it isn't good, Liliana and Goyf hold their value, and you can move a lot of the pieces easily enough.
I absolutely would avoid Tron if I were you. It's pretty far from interactive, it just tries to ignore what the opponent is doing and hope that big dudes is enough. Seems like a mistake for sure, you're not gonna like it.