MTG Salvation

Quote from alpinefroggy »

so much better or so much worse? I love keranos, its more incremental advantage and is downright unkillable

I don't want to gain incremental advantage, I want to win!

Keranos doesn't do a thing about a Siege Rhino or Tarmogoyf on the board. He can't play through an Abrupt Decay from an opponent. He won't beat a Delver player holding Combust. He can't even bolt an opponent who has a Spellskite on the board. Twin doesn't have three Cryptic Commands any more - it can't play that incremental game where you can sit back and counter everything. I liked Batterskull but people are wise to that now and just Smash to Smithereens your card.

Anyway, I'm not here to win converts. I cut Keranos a long time ago and never regretted it. Teferi was a whole lot better at five mana, for that matter.

I came up with Titan a few pages back and I've been really pleased with it. By the time you've attacked the next turn, you've dealt 12 damage + anything you can firebreathe for, so it usually ends the game in a single attack. It gets past Etched Champion, laughs at Dismember, gets value from Vapor Snag, etc. I do find that you need to have one or two more lands in the deck to really feel comfortable with it. So much better than junk like Keranos, though.

Delver is a pretty easy match but it has a big learning curve. Mulligans are really important, threat assessment, etc. The fact that their deck is full of air really helps. You're not really trying to combo that deck but just run them out of cards and have a couple points of life left over. I'm always paranoid about UWR Control but again, you gotta remember that Twin is a huge threat against them. You've got a Sphere of Resistance on them since they have to keep a Path up all the time. They have no combo kill. They have to respect your combo kill even if you board it out and you've got junk like Blood Moon that really mess 'em up, too.

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I'm baffled about why a security camera would help. Do you think it'll make the cops start caring? It sounds like they already have a case of "not our problem." Its only possible use would be to serve as evidence in a court case, if it was useful there. A security camera will do nothing to deter thievery. It'll just give you a weak sense of safety - the end result being "when I get my mail stolen again, at least I'll see a grainy frame of someone who took it."

Your options are limited beyond getting your mail delivered elsewhere.

If you have not already, add yourself to the "no credit card offers" list.

You scry until you hit Birthing Pod most of the time. That way, if they hit your Melira while you are at [arbitrary number] life total, you can Pod back into the combo. You can also Pod Finks out for Redcap for the same amount of mana as just casting Redcap. If your opponent still won't concede or has outs to Redcaps? Umm, Gavony Township beats? Their attack step means nothing to you.

Edit: On the Scavenging Ooze front, I've been running Nekrataal and loving it, but nobody else seems to have room for it. You can actually beat a Deathrite Shaman on the board if you have two Kitchen Finks. Just sacrifice one, let them attempt to remove it, and then start comboing off with the other one. Play to your outs.

The only actual cornered markets I know of are Alpha Animate Wall and Alpha Purelace and friends. There are about 1,100 copies of each card and one or more people own large amounts of each of those cards' print run. The rest of the stuff in this thread is just price running, not cornered markets. Having 20% of the Alpha Animate Walls and buying as many as you see come on the market means that the card's price is way inflated versus its actual value.

Carta Mundi does the printing of Magic cards. And check it out, I actually investigated their presses so I have real numbers to tell you. They use the KBA Rapida 106 Perfector Press, which has a speed of 16,500 sheets per hour.

Since they redeem about 200,000 sets per expansion, we can work from there.

A Magic sheet has 121 cards on it (11x11). Gatecrash had 249 cards in it, so a little more than two sheets' worth. For the purposes of this, though, I'm going to assume that CM can help me fudge numbers and print an extra 7 cards on one sheet to make up for the difference.

That means that CM's presses can run off 8,250 full sets in an hour. They can meet my full order of 200,000 sets in 23.5 hours, or three work shifts. A sheet of Magic cards is very inexpensive and we are dealing with economies of scale here. Since the cost of assembling the packs is the more labor-intensive part, I'll assume away the cardboard costs per set (and we can total them up later).

For each set, you are taking a collection of pre-cut cards, putting them in order, shrinkwrapping them and then storing and shipping them. CM can already do this, since they "randomly" collate and assemble Magic packs already! It's no stretch for them to cut the cards and then have them put into a pack in order, since they do this anyway for things like Duel Decks. But if we're not considering that they do that and I have to take unsorted cards and sort them myself, that's still doable. All it takes is a team of about five people, I'd wager - you have someone sort by color, then then next two people sort the color cards into individual cards, then have the next two people assemble complete sets from those cards. Let's say it takes a full month to do this, which would be twenty man-weeks. If I pay my workers a very generous $13 an hour to do this, it still only costs $10,400! Oh, you say, health care costs are rising and it takes more time to sort cards? Quadruple it. I'm still going to make obscene profits at a cost of $41,600 to sort all of these in a fantasy-land where CM doesn't do the sorting for me. That cost of labor, at $13 an hour for 80 man-weeks? That accounts for 4% of the $5 I'm making from you. It costs me twenty cents in labor to make your set.

To lose money, CM has to charge me $4.81 to print and cut one set (without sorting). And that does not happen.

And here's why I'll still make obscene profits. At $5 processing and 200,000 sets, I'm making $1,000,000 and I don't have to pay to ship them - you, my customers, do. When you order, my employee will take the preprinted label, put it on the preboxed set and mail it. That takes all of four minutes or so. That employee is part-time, no benefits, because I only fulfill orders on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

If WOTC actually turned the "problem" of fulfillment into an opportunity and outsourced it, I would love to bid on it on behalf of my company. I would get rich in short order. I won't, though, because they don't actually have a problem. They don't have any fulfillment issues that aren't caused by being a big and inefficient business. They want to turn that $1mil they make per set on redemptions into $5mil. Like Tom Sawyer, they could have gotten an outside company to pay them to paint their fence. As it stands, there's no justifiable business sense for quintupling the price because there's no actual problem of labor here. So unless someone can show where my math is blatantly wrong, can we move past this hoary chestnut of "rising labor costs?" It's shamefully false.

The ACA penalty for 2014 is $95, $325 in 2015 and $695 in 2016 (or alternately 1/2/2.5% taxable income). Not $2,300. What an absurd idea to toss out guessed numbers when we have Google : \

Raising a price from $5 to $25 is not adjusting to a new cost of goods shipped. It's brigandry. It absolutely does not cost $25 to collate and ship these sets. This is a policy move from WOTC, likely intended to stop redemptions for reasons other than "these cost too much to fulfill." The shameful thing is that they prefer to mislead their customers rather than explain a policy change.

This is also a highly appropriate time to remind people that M:TG is a luxury product, it makes buckets of money for Hasbro and it was largely unaffected by the global recession. If you want to know even more about just how much M:TG makes, Hasbro announces their 2012 Q4 earnings tomorrow at 4:30 or so, after markets close. Close readers should be able to get a handle on how many hundreds of millions the company makes from our little card game.

I think it's so important that everyone has a good idea of what prices are at prereleases. I hear people brag that "I got this guy to trade me his Snapcaster Mage and I gave him a Rakdos! How great is that!" and it makes my skin crawl - that's not ethical in the least and it's not necessary, either!

Anyway, off my soapbox Here's a printable list of all the Gatecrash cards that currently sell for more than $1.

Link

I predict that prices will mostly drop about 25% in the next few weeks, but this is the first reference. I think it's really interesting that even things like the shocklands are only $13 or so - not much over the $10 that the other ones sell for and much lower than the $15+ we saw the first time around. It's pretty cool to see the market work on those.

There was a thread not too long ago that discussed a similar subject that I posted in. Basically, what I said was:

Pure greed.

When I sell cards on here, I examine eBay BIN prices and TCG low prices. Generally they tend to be around the same. Then, I take the lowest price and subtract some more from it- maybe like $.5 from a $5 card, or $1-2 from a $20-30 card. Just enough so there's a noticeable difference but it won't eat into my wallet. Then I list it.

I look at it this way. I sell cards on here because

A. I don't want to pay eBay fees and deal with eBay buyer bullcrap.
B. I want to get my money immediately.
C. I don't want to sell to SCG/CFB or other buylists.

Which means, if there's a card that's going on eBay/TCG low for $20, I'm probably fine getting $17-18 on here due to eBay fees and nonsense.

Now to explain what I meant by pure greed. Other sellers see the no fees and immediately assume they should list their cards for even more so they can make even more profit on top of the generous 15% they're saving from not listing on eBay. I see no problem with it if their prices are at least fairly competitive- if they're close to eBay BIN/TCG low, I guess some people (people above, for example) might be inclined to buy from them anyways.

However, I occasionally see some people posting some pretty outrageous prices. I'm not talking SCG prices- those sellers are just newbies or idiots. I'm talking mid-TCG. Those guys are clearly just greedy. It makes me shake my head every time.

Honestly, if you're a new (or old) seller on here, I'd recommend selling slightly below low TCG/eBay BIN if you want your money at a reasonable time frame. If you price at mid-TCG and see success after a few weeks, do you know what probably happened? A card spiked up and you didn't realize it.

There's also two pillars to remember:
1. Cardboard is a sunk cost. Whatever you paid for it doesn't matter when it comes time to sell it.
2. There is an opportunity cost to waiting. Getting $20 in your hand right now is better than getting $21 in your hand after a month. No, that's not because of inflation. That's because you can do stuff with $20 in your hand during that month of waiting.

Edit: I'm also speaking from a player's perspective, so that might be different. I only sell cards when I need to, thus I'm fine with taking a small hit in order to secure the funds I need. The opportunity cost is much greater in my situation. For stores/sellers it could be much different and as I mentioned, eBay BIN/TCG low is a viable strategy if you're willing to wait.

http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/27015.html#.UmYe_RSFSFQ.facebook

Of note- 80% of MTG's sales occur through local stores.

This is the 5th straight year they've seen 25-30% growth. It seems they're finally taking steps to address the issues with MTGO (they've brought in consultants to analyze/improve the code with the massively problematic Beta.) but this is very very good news, and also explains why the RTR cards are just exploding.

http://imgur.com/a/nEqiw - This was from last year's conference call and was discussed here - Previous year's thread.

Ok, finally got around to doing a tournament report of GP Brisbane, decklist is on the mothership, link to top 8: http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/eventcoverage/gpbri13/welcome#2

Disclaimer: MASSIVE WALL OF TEXT APPROACHING!

I've already talked about a decent number of the deck ck=hoices here, if anything else isn't obvious, feel free to ask.

Round 1 - Infect
So this is my first GP, pretty nervous when I sit down opposite my opponent. I won the dice roll, lead off with a BoP, and he replies with a Hierarch. Turn two he puts another mana dork down, making my turn 3 linvala pretty amazing. Combo killed him turn 5, not much more to say, except, Infect is not a deck, don't play it if you want to win.
G2 he puts down a t2 Torpor orb, so I stall for a while, then land spellskite. Needless to say I won that game (through combo via qasali)

2-0
1-0

Round 2 - Scapeshift
G1 I didn't see anything out of him except RU lands (no spells) for the first few turns, so I put him on control, and held back my hand (I had Thrun in hand, so it seemed reasonable). Figured it out too late to stop him combo killing me.
G2 was uneventful, he durdled and I combo killed him. He sided in the red titan, which was interesting, but I don't think it's that good (too slow to deal with our mana dorks).
G3 Glen Elendra + Gavony Township is a beating. Eventual combo kill, but I misplayed in the process. Had 8 mana, glen elendra on the battlefield, and Kiki + Exarch in hand, with him representing bolt. What I should have done was Cast Exarch, untap a land, then cast kiki, for combo kill with counter backup, but I didn't. He didn't have the bolt, so I won anyway, but food for thought.

2-1
2-0

Round 3 - UWR Control
I'm so nervous my hands are shaking from the pressure of my first real event, and the first real opponent, so my life is mostly unreadable, but still eeked out the win here.
G1 went long and I managed to chord in an Elendra-Counter when he tapped out for a Sphinx's revelation. Obviously I tilt him a little, because he taps out to attack me with his colonade on the next turn (+ some irrelevant electrolyzing), to which I combo kill him the turn after.
G2 Advice against Pod. Never tap out. We generally speaking win on the spot if you do. I think sometimes holding a pod in hand so they don't expect it can be the correct play, especially if you're under no real pressure.

2-0
3-0

Round 4 - Robots (Wee Yuen Khor)
This guy also top 8'd, and we were pretty friendly throughout the tournament. Match was over pretty quick, and I kept a terrible hand G2 (5 land, Bop, Finks), so definitely should have shipped it. Drew some good stuff (Kataki, which met bolt), but not enough to stem the bleeding.

0-2
3-1

Round 5 - Through the breach, ramp edition
I should have won this match, but things panned out in the end, and it was possibly the most fun match I played all weekend. My mate had played him previously, so I figured out what was going on pretty quickly, and was ready.
G1 he ramps into through the breach, slamming emrakul, to which I reply with Exarch tapping it down. Nice 2-for-1/2 Kiki combo the turn after.
G2 is where I screwed up hard. My EOT he hard casts summoning trap, flipping Emrakul. My hand is Exarch, Conscripts, Finks, Resto, I'm on 14, with access to 8 mana (including 2 hierarchs). He's on 17 (even though I thought he was on 18, failed to write down life correctly, let that be a lesson). As you'd expect, I tap down via Exarch, and he passes the turn back. I draw a BoP, play conscripts, and he paths a hierarch when i enter my attack step (see: life totals above). I put him to 1, and was so set on playing Finks to put me out of reach of the emrakul insta kill (he had no other permanents at this point), that I forgot I could chump with the BoP. So I pass the turn back and there goes that.
G3 was quick, he turn 3 through the breach into emrakul for the win. I should have bluffed deceiver (he admitted afterwards having been blown out by it twice he wouldn't have cast into it), but was trying to add to board position so I lost on the spot.

1-2
3-2

Round 6 - Good Stuff.dec (4 colour - not red)
On the bubble now, and get paired against a mate of mine (who's Domri's I was actually using), so we made a promise to each other that the other guy would have to make day 2.
G1 he played horribly via gifts, elesh norn and rites straight into wasting two turns thanks to scavenging ooze (It was in play, with green mana). Combo'd off when I had the all clear.
G2 was fairly quick, Combo win

2-0
4-2

Round 7 - Melira Pod
G1 he got pretty unlucky when my linvala shut down his two deathrites, and proceeded to play 3 BoP's in subsequent turns. Win via Combo
G2 we both had pretty set up boards, and it came down to a turn where he needed to top deck a persister to win, but he didn't and the inevitability of Pod won it for me.

2-0
5-2

Round 8 - Robots
8 Rounds for day 1, so this is my win and in. Fortunately, my opponent didn't know he should aggressively mulligan with Bots, so after demolishing me in game 1, he kept terrible hands in game 2 and 3. Saying that, tutoring for kataki with ancient grudge in hand is devastating. At one point, he Thoughtseized me, seeing a Pod and a grudge in hand. Because of the board state, he had to take the pod. Pretty sure we all know how that finishes off.

2-1
6-2

Day 2
Getting to the real decks now, had a couple of free wins day 1, and misplayed terribly a couple of times (as noted above), but I had acheived my personal goal of getting to day 2, so the pressure was off (at least a little), and relaxed a bit into it. Saying that, got about 4 hours sleep after being incapable of falling asleep.

Round 9 - Robots
G1 slow start from him lead to a combo kill from me.
G2 he dealt me exactly lethal with the last card in his hand, galvanic blast, the turn before I managed to go off.
G3 I kept the first of todays 1 landers (there's a few here :/), with two bops. Would have been fine if he hadn't whipflared. So I had to path my own bop for the land. Drew lands every turn from there to play Fiend Hunter, Resto Blinking Fiend Hunter, and Phantasmal Image copying Fiend Hunter. Eventually I combo kill him, but he had nothing relevant on the board anyway (cept for that pesky Plating :P)

2-1
7-2

Round 10 - Jund (Francis Lam)
One of my mates, I used to work with him in a ****ty part time job, but had only discovered recently that he's pretty good at magic.
G1 we were both on the beatdown plan, cept I don't play Goyf's.
G2 had an awkward situation where I attacked with a dude, and a hierarch play, but because of the recently changed trigger rules, I didn't immediately declare the exalted. He thought that meant I'd missed it, and proceeded to double block accordingly. Before damage I confirmed all the involved creatures power and toughness, to which judge got called because he thought I'd missed the trigger. I told him what the call would be, and why, then the judge told him the same thing, then the head judge (on appeal) said it one last time. I ate a scooze and a goyf that attack, basically for free, so yeah, won fairly handily on the beat down plan (on top of a massive Thrun via township)
G3 he tilted hard and lost to a fairly promt combo.

Felt really guilty about this win, but would like to note to everyone who ever feels bad about this kinda situation. If he was being nice, he could have pointed out the exalted trigger, but he attempted to catch me on it and got burnt. It's not worth trying to be the smartest guy in the room, just play the game fairly, and don't be a dick. (sorry Francis)

2-1
8-2

Round 11 - Grixis Through the breach
This guy was 8-0 after the first day, so he was pretty pissed to be in the 8-2 bracket, while I was near ecstatic. I won't write much about this match because he mulliganed 5 times in two games, kept a one lander (which I kept tapped down with Exarch and resto), and game two I negated his TtB and combo'd while he was tapped out. I did put him on the wrong deck after game 1 (I had him on control) because I saw nothing except for lands, but fortunately the only sideboard card I saw was the negate, which was the only appropriate card I brought in (also brought in domri's, sigarda, and avalanche riders)

2-0
9-2

Round 12 - Robots
Everyone's sick and tired of me writing about the Robots match up now, right? I don't have much to say, he won game 1, but my sideboard makes g2 and g3 pretty handy. Nothing particularly unique came up so that's all I'll write.

2-1
10-2

At this point, if I win won more match, I get to Id into the top 8, not bad after being 3-2 on day 1.

Round 13 - RDW (Sam Sedgman)
Nice guy, is answering questions on his deck over in the RDW sub forum, he ended up coming 10th. This match is covered in the feature match areaso you get the jist of it from there. It was the first GP for both of us, and our first feature match, so we were both pretty nervous (if playing for top 8 didn't make us nervous enough already!). I won't say much more on it, Pip from the coverage team did I better job than I'd do here.

2-0
11-2

Round 14 - Robots (Justin Robb)
Id!!! Woooh!!! Had a chat with him, and we'll be talking further before the PT. But yeah, he did really well, and kudos to him for the win.

ID
11-2-1

The Quarters and Semi's are up on the mothership, so I won't write about the actual games, but I actually really like both our match up against this particular build. Sure, no-one likes getting thoughtseized, but we don't care about Souls, and no bolt makes both our mana dorks and our eventual combo real happy. Red-less Jund I feel is a much better match than with red, so I like that that's how their deck is evolving.

Ok, pretty sure everyone's sick of this now, hope you gained something from it, and the best of luck in all your future kiki pod adventures!

Disclaimer: I've been playing all-in twin (4 Boomerangs, 4 Sleight, 4 Remand, 2 Flame Slash, 2 Spellskite).

I've been playing with Swan Song for a few weeks, including a competitive event (~GPT level).

Ultimately Swan Song is fine against low-pressure decks (mirror, Scapeshift) where it's a "slightly better" Dispel (i.e. the drawback is essentially meaningless).

However, against Jund, Affinity, Melira Pod, UR Delver (essentially the 'fair' decks that pressure your life total) Swan Song is an absolute liability. Looking back over my game history, these games are always close, with my "winning" life total somewhere between 2 and 8 life. In these games, you can "only" justify using Swan Song to protect your combo - hence losing all utility and being merely a Dispel.

If we analyse the benefits of Swan Song, two cases immediately spring to mind:

1. Where countering a Sorcery or Enchantment is exceptionally relevant (e.g. Mirror, Scapeshift)
2. As protection against a discard spell (e.g. Jund)

Clearly against Scapeshift and the Mirror, Swan Song is good. This alone could warrant inclusion in the sideboard, potentially replacing something like Combust and/or Negate. Notably Swan Song does nothing against GR Tron. Arguably Spell Pierce and Negate are comparable in this slot.

Now obviously countering a key discard spell is right some of the time, even if it is a 2-for-1 on yourself (you're -1 card, they're -1 card, +1 2/2 flier). However, in my testing, you need to fulfill multiple of the following criteria to even be in a position to consider casting Swan Song in response to Thoughtseize or Inquisition of Kozilek:

• When you don't have a cantrip
• When you can afford not to play a cantrip on T1 (e.g. nut hand)
• When you're on the play
• When the 2/2 flier is irrelevant
• When countering discard is significantly better than countering removal

Under these kinds of conditions, you start to really challenge the premise of Swan Song - is it really a wider answer than dispel?

Clearly in contrived scenarios (protecting your combo) it's "better" than Dispel. However against decks like Jund, UR Delver, even UWR, with significant ability to disrupt your combo, that 2/2 flier can be an absolute death sentence.

In summary, I've found that Swan Song is strictly worse in Game 1 than dispel for difficult/disruptive matchups. Post-board it could be very strong in combo matchups, but arguably Negate or Spell Pierce are better as they are wider still.

Another tournament report: 3-1 in the DE yesterday (although one of those wins was a pair-down in round four where the opponent was nice enough to scoop to me).

What makes the tournament notable was that all three of the matches were against Merfolk, and they all went three games. So if you're interested in seeing me fight my way through a challenging matchup, head on over to the blog entry. I even managed to record the matches and post them to YouTube; the quality is terrible (I need to rework my recording setup), but they're there anyway so you can see how I approached the matchup and give feedback on where I misplayed (I already know of a couple, but helpful criticism is always appreciated)!

http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/blog.php?b=9092

Highlights include a turn 1 punt that doesn't make itself apparent until many turns later, a questionable sideboard experiment that immediately comes back to haunt me, and variance kicking me in head by making me mull to four, and then immediately paying it back by stacking the deck in my favor. Oh, and lots and lots and lots of Islands. If you like seeing Islands, this is for you.

Quote from HandwrittenHero

The primer for this deck suggests it's good? Shocker ;-)

TBH both the pods have different strengths and weaknesses. Melira is a 3 card combo whereas Kiki is 2, but Melira is lower on the curve. Melira's combo relies on the graveyard making it vulnerable to interaction there but Kiki has to go into combat which is a different set of interaction again.

Whenever I've played the decks, I've tended to find myself leaning more on combo with Melira since a lot of the creatures are individually unimpressive. This has got better with how well the deck can abuse Voice of Resurgence, but that's still a case of finding and exploiting synergy with such as Viscera Seer who frankly isn't an actual magic card in his own right.

Kiki-Pod seems to be better at presenting a midrange Plan A with hate bears and happens to have the combo, which appeals to me because when things don't come out right, you still have such as Restoration Angel that can be difficult for decks to deal with still. Although it's worth mentioning the deck does come out strange quite often - you can't really afford to mulligan the hands without strong plans (i.e. mana dork, lands and something like Glen Elendra, Aven Mindcensor in the dark) so there are games where you are durdling around.

I play both Melira Pod and Twin Pod, and I've actually depended on the combo more often with Twin Pod than Melira Pod. It probably helps that Twin Pod has many speed Pod chains that turn dorks into the combo in 1 turn, while Melira Pod cannot use 1 Pod twice in a turn.

With Twin Pod, I can often assemble Kiki-Jiki + Exarch + Protection swiftly; I cannot assemble Melira + Sac Outlet + Persist + Persist/Protection nearly as quickly.

I'm no longer certain which deck has the better midrange plan--Twin Pod has plenty of big-powered fliers, solid Wall of Roots, and sometimes the Swiss Army Knife named Domri Rade, but Melira Pod has the unblockable (but hungry) Deathrite Shaman, brutal Persist + Gavony Township action, wacky Cartel Aristocrats (especially pumped ones), and significantly better Voice of Resurgences (and slightly better Scavenging Oozes).

I agree that Viscera Seer sucks, though--I tend to make my other infinite sac outlets eat it, and I'm fairly prone to going down to 1 Seer (and, if so, I pull Ranger of Eos--Ranger has gotten so weird that I've even searched for Birds of Paradise with him).

Quote from TakeYourShoesOff

I feel like what people really like about Melria is it gets to play Chord of Calling. Making it be able to combo off at instant speed or find one if its hate bears at instant speed. Other than that I dont know why people like it more. It gets wrecked harder to pyroclasm and is easier to disrupt since it is a 3 card combo.

I have played the Kiki Vs Melira matchup countless times and I would say I am easily 80% against them.

Melira Pod does get wrecked harder by red board wipes, is significantly easier to disrupt, and combos off significantly more slowly, but it has a lower and better curve than Twin Pod. This matters against heavy control and combo--Melira Pod is even capable of Turn 4 non-combo kills as long as it murders its own Voice of Resurgence quickly. Twin Pod may have more Turn 4 combo kills because of speed Pod chains, but as far as I know, it cannot Turn 4 non-combo kill (if I'm wrong, please give me a sample kill!).

Melira Pod also withstands Wraths better (5-6 Persist guys + 0-4 Voice + 0-1 Varolz, the Scar-Striped + 1-2 Reveillark + 0-1 Ranger of Eos tend to do this compared to 2-6 Persist guys + 0-2 Voice), which is good against UWR Control and RG Tron's Oblivion Stones.

Melira Pod also encourages more holding up removal and sorcery-speed removal slops because its combo is lower-curve. This can push their tempo far behind if my board resembles 3 lands-Finks-Scavenging Ooze-Voice and I have 2 cards in hand (and they're still holding up the 2-mana Abrupt Decay).

I'm not as certain that the Pod mirror is that lopsided in Twin Pod's favour (Melira Pod may bring in Game 1 tech, both sides are probably trying to slam down/boot Linvala), but Twin Pod can board in better board wipes than Melira Pod and Twin Pod's Scavenging Ooze also hoses Melira Pod, so I'm inclined to say Twin Pod is favoured.

Quote from Indecision

I haven't been playing the deck for long but the guy I play against the most is a Melira Pod player and I can tell you that game 1 is almost always mine unless i keep a really bad hand or he starts the game with all 3 kill (Redcap, not Finks) combo pieces in his opening hand. Post board the match up is a little less one sided with him bringing in Linvala, Mindcensor and removal but the match up is still in my favor.

As for why Melira Pod is considered the better deck I'd have to assume it has better match up's against more of the popular archetypes though having little experience playing against many of those archetypes I couldn't say.

Melira Pod generally has the better combo match-up, especially in Game 1 (if you maindeck targeted discard/Abrupt Decay). Even post-board, Melira Pod's targeted discard lets it not lose tempo by holding up counterspells like Negate, and its beatdown plan still kills faster (being Grizzly Bears/Centaur Coursers/"2-power" 1-drops.dec instead of 1-power 3-drops/2-drops with Defender/2-3-power 4-drops.dec tends to do this).

Melira Pod has a significantly better Infect match-up for obvious reasons (Twin Pod has such a significantly harder time that it sometimes sideboards Melira). Then again, Infect isn't that popular anymore.

Melira Pod may actually have the better UWR Control match-up than Twin Pod (lower curve, better against Wraths, more Voices, more ways to mess with Tiago's head, Lark and Ranger really screw UWR over).

I'd really suggest breaking it up. The hour you spend listing the stuff would probably earn you an extra 1-2 grand.

Do you regularly earn 1-2k an hour at your job?

Quote from Said-In-Contest

Hi everyone!
Starting from Robert Berni's GP KC list, can someone post a serious and well done sideboard guide?
I mean, the deck is very solid and I'm finding very hard to side something out.

The most common match ups are:
Pod based decks
Jund-Junk
Tron
UWR Control
Control (no red), like Gifts
Affinity
Lately also Mono U Faeries

If someone who's testing the deck on MTGO can post the sideboard guide, I'll be very glad

Thank you very much!!

This is a really tough question, but I'll give it my best. Sideboarding is really tricky with this deck; you don't want to dilute your main plan just to bring in answers. I'm still working on this for my own use, but I do have some (very preliminary) sideboard notes (and I would love feedback from the more experienced/skilled players here).

Jund/K: Mizzium Skin is a strictly better Dispel in this matchup, so a straight swap here is good. Hitting their manabase can be very, very powerful, so I bring in 3 Blood Moons. Right now I've settled on dropping 3 Boomerang for them. I like giving them more targets for their Thoughtseizes; they'll ignore Boomerang in my hand, but they have to take Blood Moon. I want every spell to be impactful, and Boomerang is just a straight tempo play against a deck that's good at making games go long.

Pod: We're actually fairly well set up here. 2 Ancient Grudge upgrades Boomerang. You need the Flame Slash and remaining Boomerangs to answer Linvala. The Dispels become Pyroclasm/Slagstorm.

Tron: It depends upon which Tron. I've found that RG Tron will blow up your Blood Moons really easily, so I wouldn't count on that saving you. That being said, your three Dispel and 2 Flame Slash are desperately terrible, and if they have to blow enchantment removal on Blood Moon instead of Splinter Twin, that's not terrible. So out go Dispel and Flame Slash and in come 2 Ancient Grudge and 3 Blood Moon.

Against U or UW Tron, ugh. In this case, Flame Slash and Boomerang are the terrible cards, so bring in Negate, Counterflux, and the Blood Moons. I'm running Pact in the Clique slot, but both of those are good here for the final piece.

Control: Ugh. So gross. Blood Moon will pretty much just win you the game against UWR if you can stick it, so you want that. You also want additional countermagic, so bring in everything you've got. Flame Slash is actively terrible, and so is Boomerang (even the nut draw won't save you from a Path to Exile), so that's six slots to fill. I also like dropping one Splinter Twin - these games will go long in most cases, and you'll likely find yourself wanting to win by attrition rather than combo. That makes seven slots. 3x Blood Moon, 2x Mizzium Skin (effectively a counterspell against removal), 1x Negate, and the Clique (or in my case, the Pact).

Affinity: If they don't have any of the red spells, you're in really good shape. Just bring in 2 Ancient Grudge for 1 Boomerang and 1 Remand, and your red sweepers for the remaining Remand and you're good. You just want to combo out before they kill you. Just be aware that Galvanic Blast and/or Dismember is probably in their sideboards, so you need to keep those Dispels in the deck (in fact, swap them out for Mizzium Skin since that's better than Dispel against non-blue decks). Remand is decent, but their stuff is so cheap that it's often not more than a cantrip.

Fae: They should have a really good matchup against you. I haven't played this matchup at all, but I imagine that Combust is really good. And if they're mono U, I assume Shackles? So Ancient Grudge over Boomerang. Not sure what else to say, other than good luck.

These are all just my opinion, of course. I'm sure I'm wrong about some of this, and I welcome any criticisms.

Quote from glencastleberry

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