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Jund Pod

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Birthing Pod
I’ve become somewhat obsessed with Birthing Pod lately. When the card is combined with the right collection of creatures with enters-the-battlefield and leaves-the-battlefield abilities, it owns games, allowing you to ask the right questions and find the right answers. As my past history indicates (Survival/Recurr, 5CKastle, The Rock, The Claw), I love multicolored green decks that use cool, utility creatures and 187 creatures.

This is the perfect type of deck for Birthing Pod. It allows your green mana and mana ramping to power the Pod in addition to giving you a great selection of creatures from which to choose when building your deck. For the most part, I have been working on various versions of Naya Pod. White gives me the crushing power of Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite at the top end of my curve. It also gives me Restoration Angel. Restoration Angel is just a really good creature—a 3/4 flash flyer for 4 mana! Yet on top of that, it’s also great for reusing my various 187 utility creatures. Red gives me Huntmaster of the Fells and various cool sideboard cards such as Zealous Conscripts.

As I’ve been tuning and testing my toolbox version of Naya Pod, I’ve had the nagging suspicion that perhaps there is another color combination and another direction I could go with Pod that would be even more exciting. Those thoughts have finally coalesced into a deck. Something a little darker . . . 

More on that later . . . 

I finally had a good opportunity to run my latest version of Naya Toolbox at a 5K in Rhode Island. I ran four Angels to help against Delver and because they’re just awesome, as previously stated. The other reason to run four is that while I love casting them, I rarely Pod for them. I prefer to Pod for things that I use Angels to reuse. I also added Gavony Townships—in part just because they’re good and in part to give me more to do with my mana on my opponent’s turn. I also tried incorporating Magic 2013 by adding Elvish Visionary and Thragtusk:

I started by playing it in a Standard Friday Night Magic the night before the 5K to get some cards I needed and to give the deck a test run and myself some more experience with it. That part went great. I played against W/U control, White Kastle (W/B tokens) and Red Kastle (red deck wins). I defeated all three pretty easily and then went home to rest up for the next day. I was a little bummed I didn’t get to face either of my two previous nemesis’—Delver or Zombies—but I still felt good about getting some experience and some wins with the deck. The 5K didn’t go quite as well.

The Good News

Thragtusk
I played against one Delver deck and one Zombie deck. I smashed them both. Being able to sideboard up to two Huntmasters and three Thragtusk helped a lot against Zombies and their Blood Artists. Being able to pass the turn against Delver with Huntmaster in play and either an Angel or a Township to give me things to do with my mana on my opponent’s turn was pretty incredible. The extra life-gain was also good against Delver—that deck is basically a tempo deck in the matchup, and I was the deck with the better late game. Stingerfling Spider was fantastic against Delver.

I won four out of five Game 1s I played. In one of my losses, it looked to me as though I was going to win Game 2 as well . . . before something awful happened and I ended up losing a tight three-game match. The one draw I had looked pretty favorable in Game 3 before we ran out of time and turns.

The Bad News

Mindslaver
I went 2–2–1 drop in a nine-round event. I ran into big trouble against rogue decks. I lost Game 3 in extra turns against a Grand Architect/Heartless Summoning deck. I thought I was in control in Game 2 after winning Game 1 when he fetched a Mindslaver with a Treasure Mage and was able to both play it and use it that turn. Let’s just say he did unspeakable things with my turn and leave it at that . . . I also lost to a mono-green deck. Both games, I thought I was in pretty good shape before a Revenge of the Hunted turned the tables on me. Finally, I drew with a mono-black control/artifact deck. These weren’t really the decks I was expecting to run into, but at least it means the metagame is starting to diversify again, which is a good thing in the big picture.

Based on the 5Ks in Providence and Buffalo, Naya Pod probably wasn’t the most successful Pod deck of the weekend—Bant Pod was. According to Cedric Phillips, who won a Pro Tour Qualifier with it, Bant Pod is the most powerful deck he’s ever played. While I may yet give Bant Pod a try, I was reminded of the value of rogue decks this weekend, so I want to try something a little different. The beauty of most base-green Pod decks is that they are able to find powerful answers to the questions being asked by other decks. Given how wide open the format seems to be now, I thought perhaps a Pod engine could be used more for asking tough questions rather than trying to have an answer for every possible deck in the metagame. So, I decided to explore the possibilities of Jund Pod.

Entomber Exarch
Like most good decks, this one is all about synergy. This is an aggressive deck that’s good against aggressive decks. With four Blood Artist, two Huntmaster, a Disciple of Bolas, and a Thragtusk, the deck is full of life-gain. The four Artists and the Rage Thrower not only make mass removal painful to use against me, but they make sacrifice outlets such as Bloodthrone Vampire, Falkenrath Aristocrat, Disciple of Bolas, and Pod more exciting. Entomber Exarch can be fetched to remove a Mana Leak before casting a key spell or just to take the one card that was going to allow an opponent to deal with the gross things I’m doing. It’s also great to bring back an important utility creature. Geist, Huntmaster, and Thragtusk go great with the creature-sacrifice theme since they represent multiple creature sacrifices. Disciple of Bolas is great with Bloodthrone Vampire, Geist, and Thragtusk.

With two main-decked Conscripts, I’m often happy to see my opponent drop nasty creatures . . . because I’ll take them. Thanks to my many sacrifice outlets, I probably won’t give them back either. Rage Thrower, Conscripts, and Hellkite all represent powerful and sudden game-enders. Having eight creatures with haste also means that I can recover quickly from mass removal and that the deck is great at keeping pressure on and increasing the pressure. Like most decks of three or more colors, the mana won’t always be completely smooth, but having four Birds of Paradise and three Borderland Rangers should definitely help. It should also help that you don’t need any red mana in the early game. The main reason I’m not using any B/R dual lands is that I want to keep those sources separate for Falkenrath Aristocrat.

The current Standard environment is pretty wide open and full of rogue decks. What I’m looking for is a powerful, unforgiving deck that doesn’t really care what my opponent is trying to do. With the massive quantities of life-gain and card advantage combined with intense aggression and brutal direct damage, I hope to have a decent matchup no matter what I run into with Dark Pod. Perhaps you too should join the Dark Side . . . 

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