The reason I can't put it into the T9 list is that those are the most played/abused spells. FoW will never be. It'll be used only by a few players, and the divide is something that, as a host, I should take into consideration, the same way I should take into consideration what the answers to the poll are telling me: I work for the majority, not for an abstract meta concept. Legacy Tribal Wars and Tribal Apocalypse are two different entities.
FoW is able to change the meta in virtue of showing up more often, so once a player will face it a few times, they'll change their deckbuilding strategies, and this in turn will change the meta towards the safer fast aggro route. And changing the meta in a way that risks to make it boring for most players and new players (assuming that will actually be the case, I'm not doing anything preemptively, the debate was here just in occasion of the FoW promo's arrival) isn't something I want and can afford. Again, Modern isn't saying, "Storm is dominating the meta? Oh well, they will adjust to it". That's not the answer if you want your meta to be healthy. I think they're doing excellent work in Modern, and I use it as an inspiration because the goal is the same: making more players happy, rather than making a few players able to do what they want.
Before getting "serious" allow me to chuckle along with you Kuma at what must have been your reaction to seeing that match replay from my perspective. Nice string of topdecks at the end there, eh? Often better to be lucky than good.
Now onto the main topic:
Force of Will is a broad answer card, and a staple of legacy. Putting it on a watch list is like putting Swords to Plowshares or Wrath of God or Oblivion Ring on a watch list. StP and Wrath are unquestionably more powerful than FoW in this format, and are played in numbers FoW will never even come close to touching.
FoW doesn't enable anything broken or degenerate, it actually fixes the format by keeping degeneracy in check. Paul and AJ and other veterans of the format have repeatedly noted that tribal wars is an "easily broken format", and the only thing keeping people from breaking it every single week is some combination of boredom and the honor system. Well the presence of some number of FoW is an additional check on that, one I find a bit more reliable than the honor system.
Budget aggro players are not going to lose to Force of Will, because it is BAD against them. They might lose to a deck with FoW in it, and they might choose to blame the loss on FoW because it's a "money card", but FoW isn't going to be the real reason they lose. What they ARE going to lose to, what they are already losing to now, is Wrath of God and combo. This week I lost to Chamale's Devil deck, and should have lost to bdgp009's Elemental deck by all rights as it was an equally awful matchup for me (he mulled to 5 in game 3). If I had a sideboard, FoW would have been sided OUT against either one of them in a heartbeat.
Regarding the money issue, I know budgets are a sensitive issue. But the format and the event survived just fine through a period where no less than SIX Cats decks finished 1st place with a full set of Tarmogoyf. Show and Tell is priced at $50 each right now, and we've seen degenerate Turn 1 combo decks using it played in this event. Once you start bringing price into the discussion, it's very hard to draw the line.
I hardly had $220 just laying around to blow on this either, I planned this for a long time, and when I saw that my unused Modern staples were peaking at the same time that FoW was going to be at its lowest, I sold off a big chunk of my Modern collection to do this. My Modern collection was only worth much in the first place because, as I've noted before in comments, those of us who played Overextended before the Modern announcement got a huge windfall when those cards went up sometimes tenfold overnight.
FWIW, my ultimate suggestion is this: just put FoW in with the "Tribal Power 9" and ban it from Pure Tribal, and let that be the end of it. Pure tribal has by far the fewest combo decks, it really isn't going to be missed there. I think it's most necessary in Regular and in Underdog where players commonly tack powerful combos onto weaker tribes to improve their playability.
My rationale is: nothing was stopping Daze to ALREADY be ubiquitous (has been actually less than the 8 tix is now), and yet it's not. Nothing changed re: Daze. Plus, it's not an absolute, you can just combo out with 1 mana open and Daze can't stop you.
I don't think we should determine the Watch list by the "privileged" cards criteria or by the card's price. Yes, FoW is a very effective free spell, but it also has its own drawback. It doesn't generate any game winning option or provide an extra advantage. It's basically a variant of Counterspell. We got Cavern of Souls to protect our tribal base and also got disruption or prevention cards to stop FOW. FOW will change the meta, but we will adapt. Like once there were lots of Combo engines in the Tribal games and now they are much less. This is the purpose of meta.
I don't write these due to reason whether I got Fow or not. Just for the reason that I don't believe FOW is that kind of spell to be put on a Watch list. We can directly put it into T9 list and can ban it for some games, like Swords to plowshares or Lightning Bolt.
Yeah I meant daze but said dash. I Do think Daze is more effective a threat and likelier to be ubiquitous. That was what really shut down my deck Saturday and while I didn't watch the rest of Rex's games I suspect it was key to most of them. And we aren't going to ban Daze I assume.
Being on Watch List only means being monitored. I established the circumstances under which it would be banned, and those circumstances are far from happening as of right now, but they might in future: everything is triggered by the change of price.
And Daze is a) something more people can afford, b) an accessory threat (the same reason why to stop Stom in Modern they didn't ban Seething Song AND Rite of Flame. They just banned one of them.)
Bog, I see what you're saying. The protection granting ability is probably the biggest reason to play him. He can easily slip past non-robot defenders. Unfortunately, he does require some equipment, and you can turn almost any Commander respectable with enough of a voltron theme. Still, White gives you enough control elements that it is a playable deck. But he would be so much better if he even had 1 more point of power.
Rex, the Zirilan deck is pretty old now, and is in the archives. It was created before Conjurer's Closet and Sundial of the Infinite were printed. Plus, there are a ton of better dragons that have been printed since then. But the basic idea of the deck is still pretty playable. Here it is: http://puremtgo.com/articles/conqueror-commander-vol-lvi-zirilan-claw
Did you ever post a list for that Zirilan deck you say you had awhile back? I have one on MTGO, the only commander deck I still ever occasionally play online, and was curious about yours. I've never seen another one.
I don't see how you can put Force of Will on the watch list after all this time. It isn't likely to become ubiquitous and it is no more powerful now as a promo than it was as MED's only worth-while rare. It is definitely a hose to face back to back force of will when you are trying to land a creature (as I tried and failed to do last week) but that doesn't make it bannable. You might as well ban its little pauper cousin Dash while you are at it. I really don't think it deserves to be on the watchlist just because the deck Rex brought steam rolled a bunch of us.
I feel I need to stick up for my boy Jareth. He is the commander of what might be my favorite deck. Everyone sees his defensive ability and writes him off, but his real power lies in his ability to buy protections. It makes him extremely hard to remove, and very hard to block. I run him in a equipment voltron shell with some control and protection mixed in. It might not be the fastest deck around, but once it gets rolling it is very very hard to stop.
Well, the combos DO pay dividends. But yeah, Pod is just a shell, actually. I like to think of it as this generation's Survival of the Fittest/Recurring Nightmare (in one card!), but with more staying power, because Modern is a highly protected environment (you can look at what just happened with Jund and Storm. And Birthing Pod would never be banned; should it become dominating, they would just ban one of the combo pieces). Like I wrote in my article (that the antispam filter doesn't let me link), it's one of those rare cards that appeal to every psychographic profile.
I think that the basic shell is a green deck (non-green Pod builds are more like Johnny experiments) with:
- 4 Birthing Pod
- 4 Kitchen Finks
- 1-2 Murderous Redcap if you have red or black as secondary
- 1-2 Restoration Angel if you have white as secondary or tertiary
And that's it. The rest is as you wish. Of course early mana acceleration is recommended, and I couldn't build it without my 4 Wall of Roots, but that's more of a complement than a required part. I also like to always bring one Garruk Relentless as the 5th Pod (it helped me out of a lot of bad situations, for instance killing an Aven Mindcensor, then fetching an Harmonic Sliver to get rid of Stony Silence).
I completely agree that the Melira combo is much more difficult to assemble that Kiki + Zealous Conscripts or Restoration Angel. This is what makes me believe that Kiki Pod might be the better route to go down. The fact that the combo isn't weak to graveyard is another bonus as you mentioned.
When playing the deck I didn't start thinking about more Aggro/Midrange Pod builds that don't rely on the combo. There are a ton of awesomely powerful creatures to Pod into like Massacre Wurm, Thundermaw Hellkite, Wurmcoil Engine and the list goes on. Frankly, Pod is just a great engine in Modern and it's a bit of a shame that it has been cornered as simply a combo enabler when it's capable of much more.
If what you need to do is only change the size of a picture, you don't even need an external program, there's the option "RESIZE" in the image browser of the editor.
I think I played Pod decks more than anyone else in Blippy's circuit of PREs (winning Eurodrive! 5 times with 5 different builds) and I also wrote one of the the firsts Pod articles on PureMTGO back in 2011 (the first in my Accidental Player series), but I haven't played the Melira version in forever.
The fact is, if what you want is a Pod combo build, Melira has been outclassed by more recent developments in the field. The endgame with Melira is a 3-step process: you need to 1. Pod/Call Melira, 2. Pod/Call Viscera Seer (which you can also have in hand after resolving a Ranger of Eos), 3. Pod/Call Murderous Redcap. All these steps originate from different Pod "levels", so your deck needs to tackle the combo from 3 different directions. Plus, any instant removal along the line stops the combo.
The more efficient combo right now is Kiki-Jiki + Zealous Conscripts. You just need a Pod and a Redcap. Once your board has 1 Pod, 1 Redcap and 2 mana, it's good game. It's infinitely easier to achieve, and you can ditch cards that don't do much on their own in favor of cards that are useful even when you don't combo out. The same goes with the even more popular Kiki-Jiki + Restoration Angel. The Angel is just a superstar in Pod, so a combo that involves her is just exploiting something you would already use. Plus, both those combos don't care about the graveyard while resolving, so aren't stopped by Rest in Peace or Deathrite Shaman.
If you still like the concept of winning via persist (and/or undying), you can streamline the Pod progression and at the same time add something useful for noncombo wins with Mikaeus the Unhallowed. The great part is that he doesn't need an intact Redcap to go. So you can sac Kitchen Finks into Redcap, then the returning Finks into Ranger of Eos (to fetch Viscera), then the Redcap into whatever at 5 CMC, and from there into Mikaeus.
My favorite combo is with Necrotic Ooze, though, because it can't be stopped by instant removal: once you have Kiki-Jiki and Devoted Druid in the graveyard (and in Modern you can use Corpse Connoisseur to put them there, although the Druid comes equipped with a self-destructing ability), you just respond to the removal by untapping the Ooze and start again.
You can easily do more complex (yet satisfying, and unexpected) end combos with things like Reveillark + Body Double + Mirror Entity, or Protean Hulk into Craterhoof Behemoth fetching Madrush Cyclops and a bunch of 0-cost creatures.
But the thing is: lately I'm having a lot more fun, and still great results, by purposely NOT including combo pieces in my Pod builds, and going either Jund (MVP: Massacre Wurm) or Bant (MVP: Glen Elendra Archmage) as color setups. People expect the combo, go crazy with countermeasure in game 2 (often damaging their own battleplan this way), and I have enough room in the decks to have answers to everything.
Long live the Pod.
If you want to annihilate RDW, put 2-3 Kor Firewalkers in the sideboard. I stopped doing it actually, because all my Pod builds have 4 Kitchen Finks and 1 Thragtusk maindeck, and the ones with white have 2 Restoration Angels too. Pod Finks into Restoration Angel resetting Finks, rinse, repeat... RDW concedes, searches for some anti-lifegaining cards in sideboard.
My best all-purpose sideboard card in white builds has to be Runed Halo. I stopped anything with it, from Grapeshot to Pestermite, and even Serra Ascendant and Tarmogoyf in a pinch. Once I see what's the key damage-dealing card in my opponent's battleplan, I just bring 3 Runed Halos in game 2.
Its great article in tribute to Jund. And it clearly shows the efficiency of BBE. Jund will still survive after this ban, but will loose lots of tempo.
I remember when Rise of the Eldrazi first came out...Linvala chased me around every pack I opened. It was like five dollars then. I still have one! :P
I'm not sure if there's a budget way to stop Kiki-Jiki. Linvala is kind of fire and forget. Chord of Calling into Phantasmal Image for the legends rule? Not sure....if you play this deck competitively, Kiki-Jiki will be your biggest problem going forward.
Additionally, you struggled against Jund because you couldn't remove Dark Confidant from the board, yes? If you come up against Rakdos Burn or Blood Artistry, this is one thing to remember: stop the Confidant and you stop their deck. They'll dump their hand and you'll just durdle into your combo. It's as easy as falling asleep.
KaraZorEl - there are certainly a lot of options for Melira Pod and I don't think there is necessarily a right way or a wrong way to go about it. That's one of the things I like about the deck, that you can experiment a lot with it. I think I mentioned in the article that I would like to include Linvala but she's very expensive at around 30 tix last time I checked.
Blippy - Thanks for the positive comments. Melira Pod seems to go back even longer than I thought!
It's a shame that you wrote this article prior to the banning of Bloodbraid Elf. However, this article still stands as a nice testament to history of the Jund deck in Modern and before Modern. Also, I always appreciate your analysis of the Modern meta.
A quick note about large art: PureMTGO will automatically resize extremely large images to 800x600 (max allowed image size), resulting in the "squashed" appearance of your images shown at the top. You may want to consider manually resizing your images (in Paint, or whatever iamge software you're comfortable with) prior to uploading them to the image server.
The reason I can't put it into the T9 list is that those are the most played/abused spells. FoW will never be. It'll be used only by a few players, and the divide is something that, as a host, I should take into consideration, the same way I should take into consideration what the answers to the poll are telling me: I work for the majority, not for an abstract meta concept. Legacy Tribal Wars and Tribal Apocalypse are two different entities.
FoW is able to change the meta in virtue of showing up more often, so once a player will face it a few times, they'll change their deckbuilding strategies, and this in turn will change the meta towards the safer fast aggro route. And changing the meta in a way that risks to make it boring for most players and new players (assuming that will actually be the case, I'm not doing anything preemptively, the debate was here just in occasion of the FoW promo's arrival) isn't something I want and can afford. Again, Modern isn't saying, "Storm is dominating the meta? Oh well, they will adjust to it". That's not the answer if you want your meta to be healthy. I think they're doing excellent work in Modern, and I use it as an inspiration because the goal is the same: making more players happy, rather than making a few players able to do what they want.
Before getting "serious" allow me to chuckle along with you Kuma at what must have been your reaction to seeing that match replay from my perspective. Nice string of topdecks at the end there, eh? Often better to be lucky than good.
Now onto the main topic:
Force of Will is a broad answer card, and a staple of legacy. Putting it on a watch list is like putting Swords to Plowshares or Wrath of God or Oblivion Ring on a watch list. StP and Wrath are unquestionably more powerful than FoW in this format, and are played in numbers FoW will never even come close to touching.
FoW doesn't enable anything broken or degenerate, it actually fixes the format by keeping degeneracy in check. Paul and AJ and other veterans of the format have repeatedly noted that tribal wars is an "easily broken format", and the only thing keeping people from breaking it every single week is some combination of boredom and the honor system. Well the presence of some number of FoW is an additional check on that, one I find a bit more reliable than the honor system.
Budget aggro players are not going to lose to Force of Will, because it is BAD against them. They might lose to a deck with FoW in it, and they might choose to blame the loss on FoW because it's a "money card", but FoW isn't going to be the real reason they lose. What they ARE going to lose to, what they are already losing to now, is Wrath of God and combo. This week I lost to Chamale's Devil deck, and should have lost to bdgp009's Elemental deck by all rights as it was an equally awful matchup for me (he mulled to 5 in game 3). If I had a sideboard, FoW would have been sided OUT against either one of them in a heartbeat.
Regarding the money issue, I know budgets are a sensitive issue. But the format and the event survived just fine through a period where no less than SIX Cats decks finished 1st place with a full set of Tarmogoyf. Show and Tell is priced at $50 each right now, and we've seen degenerate Turn 1 combo decks using it played in this event. Once you start bringing price into the discussion, it's very hard to draw the line.
I hardly had $220 just laying around to blow on this either, I planned this for a long time, and when I saw that my unused Modern staples were peaking at the same time that FoW was going to be at its lowest, I sold off a big chunk of my Modern collection to do this. My Modern collection was only worth much in the first place because, as I've noted before in comments, those of us who played Overextended before the Modern announcement got a huge windfall when those cards went up sometimes tenfold overnight.
FWIW, my ultimate suggestion is this: just put FoW in with the "Tribal Power 9" and ban it from Pure Tribal, and let that be the end of it. Pure tribal has by far the fewest combo decks, it really isn't going to be missed there. I think it's most necessary in Regular and in Underdog where players commonly tack powerful combos onto weaker tribes to improve their playability.
My rationale is: nothing was stopping Daze to ALREADY be ubiquitous (has been actually less than the 8 tix is now), and yet it's not. Nothing changed re: Daze. Plus, it's not an absolute, you can just combo out with 1 mana open and Daze can't stop you.
Kuma great article as always.
I don't think we should determine the Watch list by the "privileged" cards criteria or by the card's price. Yes, FoW is a very effective free spell, but it also has its own drawback. It doesn't generate any game winning option or provide an extra advantage. It's basically a variant of Counterspell. We got Cavern of Souls to protect our tribal base and also got disruption or prevention cards to stop FOW. FOW will change the meta, but we will adapt. Like once there were lots of Combo engines in the Tribal games and now they are much less. This is the purpose of meta.
I don't write these due to reason whether I got Fow or not. Just for the reason that I don't believe FOW is that kind of spell to be put on a Watch list. We can directly put it into T9 list and can ban it for some games, like Swords to plowshares or Lightning Bolt.
Yeah I meant daze but said dash. I Do think Daze is more effective a threat and likelier to be ubiquitous. That was what really shut down my deck Saturday and while I didn't watch the rest of Rex's games I suspect it was key to most of them. And we aren't going to ban Daze I assume.
Being on Watch List only means being monitored. I established the circumstances under which it would be banned, and those circumstances are far from happening as of right now, but they might in future: everything is triggered by the change of price.
And Daze is a) something more people can afford, b) an accessory threat (the same reason why to stop Stom in Modern they didn't ban Seething Song AND Rite of Flame. They just banned one of them.)
Bog, I see what you're saying. The protection granting ability is probably the biggest reason to play him. He can easily slip past non-robot defenders. Unfortunately, he does require some equipment, and you can turn almost any Commander respectable with enough of a voltron theme. Still, White gives you enough control elements that it is a playable deck. But he would be so much better if he even had 1 more point of power.
Rex, the Zirilan deck is pretty old now, and is in the archives. It was created before Conjurer's Closet and Sundial of the Infinite were printed. Plus, there are a ton of better dragons that have been printed since then. But the basic idea of the deck is still pretty playable. Here it is: http://puremtgo.com/articles/conqueror-commander-vol-lvi-zirilan-claw
Did you ever post a list for that Zirilan deck you say you had awhile back? I have one on MTGO, the only commander deck I still ever occasionally play online, and was curious about yours. I've never seen another one.
I don't see how you can put Force of Will on the watch list after all this time. It isn't likely to become ubiquitous and it is no more powerful now as a promo than it was as MED's only worth-while rare. It is definitely a hose to face back to back force of will when you are trying to land a creature (as I tried and failed to do last week) but that doesn't make it bannable. You might as well ban its little pauper cousin Dash while you are at it. I really don't think it deserves to be on the watchlist just because the deck Rex brought steam rolled a bunch of us.
The details for QT #3 of the Classic Quarter League can be found here:
http://www.classicquarter.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=4889
It was.
Pretty creative spam bot.
I feel I need to stick up for my boy Jareth. He is the commander of what might be my favorite deck. Everyone sees his defensive ability and writes him off, but his real power lies in his ability to buy protections. It makes him extremely hard to remove, and very hard to block. I run him in a equipment voltron shell with some control and protection mixed in. It might not be the fastest deck around, but once it gets rolling it is very very hard to stop.
Well, the combos DO pay dividends. But yeah, Pod is just a shell, actually. I like to think of it as this generation's Survival of the Fittest/Recurring Nightmare (in one card!), but with more staying power, because Modern is a highly protected environment (you can look at what just happened with Jund and Storm. And Birthing Pod would never be banned; should it become dominating, they would just ban one of the combo pieces). Like I wrote in my article (that the antispam filter doesn't let me link), it's one of those rare cards that appeal to every psychographic profile.
I think that the basic shell is a green deck (non-green Pod builds are more like Johnny experiments) with:
- 4 Birthing Pod
- 4 Kitchen Finks
- 1-2 Murderous Redcap if you have red or black as secondary
- 1-2 Restoration Angel if you have white as secondary or tertiary
And that's it. The rest is as you wish. Of course early mana acceleration is recommended, and I couldn't build it without my 4 Wall of Roots, but that's more of a complement than a required part. I also like to always bring one Garruk Relentless as the 5th Pod (it helped me out of a lot of bad situations, for instance killing an Aven Mindcensor, then fetching an Harmonic Sliver to get rid of Stony Silence).
Thanks for the very detailed reply Kuma.
I completely agree that the Melira combo is much more difficult to assemble that Kiki + Zealous Conscripts or Restoration Angel. This is what makes me believe that Kiki Pod might be the better route to go down. The fact that the combo isn't weak to graveyard is another bonus as you mentioned.
When playing the deck I didn't start thinking about more Aggro/Midrange Pod builds that don't rely on the combo. There are a ton of awesomely powerful creatures to Pod into like Massacre Wurm, Thundermaw Hellkite, Wurmcoil Engine and the list goes on. Frankly, Pod is just a great engine in Modern and it's a bit of a shame that it has been cornered as simply a combo enabler when it's capable of much more.
If what you need to do is only change the size of a picture, you don't even need an external program, there's the option "RESIZE" in the image browser of the editor.
I think I played Pod decks more than anyone else in Blippy's circuit of PREs (winning Eurodrive! 5 times with 5 different builds) and I also wrote one of the the firsts Pod articles on PureMTGO back in 2011 (the first in my Accidental Player series), but I haven't played the Melira version in forever.
The fact is, if what you want is a Pod combo build, Melira has been outclassed by more recent developments in the field. The endgame with Melira is a 3-step process: you need to 1. Pod/Call Melira, 2. Pod/Call Viscera Seer (which you can also have in hand after resolving a Ranger of Eos), 3. Pod/Call Murderous Redcap. All these steps originate from different Pod "levels", so your deck needs to tackle the combo from 3 different directions. Plus, any instant removal along the line stops the combo.
The more efficient combo right now is Kiki-Jiki + Zealous Conscripts. You just need a Pod and a Redcap. Once your board has 1 Pod, 1 Redcap and 2 mana, it's good game. It's infinitely easier to achieve, and you can ditch cards that don't do much on their own in favor of cards that are useful even when you don't combo out. The same goes with the even more popular Kiki-Jiki + Restoration Angel. The Angel is just a superstar in Pod, so a combo that involves her is just exploiting something you would already use. Plus, both those combos don't care about the graveyard while resolving, so aren't stopped by Rest in Peace or Deathrite Shaman.
If you still like the concept of winning via persist (and/or undying), you can streamline the Pod progression and at the same time add something useful for noncombo wins with Mikaeus the Unhallowed. The great part is that he doesn't need an intact Redcap to go. So you can sac Kitchen Finks into Redcap, then the returning Finks into Ranger of Eos (to fetch Viscera), then the Redcap into whatever at 5 CMC, and from there into Mikaeus.
My favorite combo is with Necrotic Ooze, though, because it can't be stopped by instant removal: once you have Kiki-Jiki and Devoted Druid in the graveyard (and in Modern you can use Corpse Connoisseur to put them there, although the Druid comes equipped with a self-destructing ability), you just respond to the removal by untapping the Ooze and start again.
You can easily do more complex (yet satisfying, and unexpected) end combos with things like Reveillark + Body Double + Mirror Entity, or Protean Hulk into Craterhoof Behemoth fetching Madrush Cyclops and a bunch of 0-cost creatures.
But the thing is: lately I'm having a lot more fun, and still great results, by purposely NOT including combo pieces in my Pod builds, and going either Jund (MVP: Massacre Wurm) or Bant (MVP: Glen Elendra Archmage) as color setups. People expect the combo, go crazy with countermeasure in game 2 (often damaging their own battleplan this way), and I have enough room in the decks to have answers to everything.
Long live the Pod.
If you want to annihilate RDW, put 2-3 Kor Firewalkers in the sideboard. I stopped doing it actually, because all my Pod builds have 4 Kitchen Finks and 1 Thragtusk maindeck, and the ones with white have 2 Restoration Angels too. Pod Finks into Restoration Angel resetting Finks, rinse, repeat... RDW concedes, searches for some anti-lifegaining cards in sideboard.
My best all-purpose sideboard card in white builds has to be Runed Halo. I stopped anything with it, from Grapeshot to Pestermite, and even Serra Ascendant and Tarmogoyf in a pinch. Once I see what's the key damage-dealing card in my opponent's battleplan, I just bring 3 Runed Halos in game 2.
"I'm not sure if there's a budget way to stop Kiki-Jiki"
Mmm... Doom Blade? :)
Blippy, thank you very much for your comments. I'm already on it to correct this case for the next articles. Thanks again.
Its great article in tribute to Jund. And it clearly shows the efficiency of BBE. Jund will still survive after this ban, but will loose lots of tempo.
I remember when Rise of the Eldrazi first came out...Linvala chased me around every pack I opened. It was like five dollars then. I still have one! :P
I'm not sure if there's a budget way to stop Kiki-Jiki. Linvala is kind of fire and forget. Chord of Calling into Phantasmal Image for the legends rule? Not sure....if you play this deck competitively, Kiki-Jiki will be your biggest problem going forward.
Additionally, you struggled against Jund because you couldn't remove Dark Confidant from the board, yes? If you come up against Rakdos Burn or Blood Artistry, this is one thing to remember: stop the Confidant and you stop their deck. They'll dump their hand and you'll just durdle into your combo. It's as easy as falling asleep.
Thanks for the comments!
KaraZorEl - there are certainly a lot of options for Melira Pod and I don't think there is necessarily a right way or a wrong way to go about it. That's one of the things I like about the deck, that you can experiment a lot with it. I think I mentioned in the article that I would like to include Linvala but she's very expensive at around 30 tix last time I checked.
Blippy - Thanks for the positive comments. Melira Pod seems to go back even longer than I thought!
It's a shame that you wrote this article prior to the banning of Bloodbraid Elf. However, this article still stands as a nice testament to history of the Jund deck in Modern and before Modern. Also, I always appreciate your analysis of the Modern meta.
A quick note about large art: PureMTGO will automatically resize extremely large images to 800x600 (max allowed image size), resulting in the "squashed" appearance of your images shown at the top. You may want to consider manually resizing your images (in Paint, or whatever iamge software you're comfortable with) prior to uploading them to the image server.
Other than that, great stuff as always!