Hawaii 4-4.
Barcelona 3-5.
Indianapolis 3-4.
My last few major events have been pretty mediocre. I’ve gotten enough wins to prove I’m not completely out of my league or anything, but I’d much rather 0-8 and follow it up with an 8-0 if I could.
Coming in to the World Cup I had high hopes. Despite the outside perception, at Pro Tours there are still a large number of very beatable players, mostly coming from winning PTQs in various smaller countries. This tournament was roughly 70% PTQ winners from smaller countries so, because of our team we had, I had to expect we had an edge. There were some mitigating factors, such as the fact that at PTQ players often have bad decks, whereas here almost everyone ran something real. I still expected we would finish in the money.
Our team ended up coming together quite nicely, and was made up of the following:
-Alex Hayne (whom I reluctantly had to call “team captain” *)
-Jamie Blanchette (winner of Montreal WMCQ with Zombies)
-Lucas Siow (winner of Toronto WMCQ with Delver)
-Myself (winner of Calgary WMCQ with Naya Pod)
*Quick aside I have a fantastic love/hate relationship with Alex Hayne. We both take ANY opportunity we get to make fun of the other (which unfortunately for me he has the overall upper hand these days), and it seems to be quite infectious. I knew Lucas well coming in to the tournament, but whereas when Jamie first arrived he was quite quiet, but by the end of the first day he was joining in too.*
With half of us in Quebec and half of us in Ontario we formed a group discussion online but neglected to all meet up beforehand. Knowing that one player would be cut after the first day, we decided to have two players prep for block and two players prep for modern, and everyone prepare for standard and draft (with Hayne, having the most time, also volunteering to practice team sealed). This way, whoever got eliminated would leave a player ready for that format, and the other two could decide amongst themselves who would play what. Hayne and I were assigned block due to having played at the PT, and Lucas and Jamie to modern (with Lucas coming second at the modern GP it seemed to make sense).
I had played various pod decks to some success, and seeing Cedric’s Bant list gave me some ideas. The blue cards seemed nuts, but I didn’t like the idea of giving up what the red cards offered, since Huntmaster and Conscripts both shone in certain matchups. It also meant playing no Caverns since the human count dropped. I threw together a Bant list that used Cavern to support the two allstars, and cut all the double blue cards).
I threw together this list:
[deck title=Pod]
[Creatures]
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Avacyn’s Pilgrim
2 Elvish Visionary
1 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
3 Phantasmal Image
4 Blade Splicer
1 Borderland Ranger
1 Fiend Hunter
1 Deceiver Exarch
4 Restoration Angel
1 Huntmaster of the Fells
3 Thragtusk
1 Zealous Conscripts
1 Sun Titan
1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
4 Birthing Pod
[/Spells]
[Land]
4 Razorverge Thicket
4 Seachrome Coast
4 Cavern of Souls
8 Forest
1 Plains
1 Island
2 Gavony Township
[/Land]
[/deck]
And after testing it for two weeks, came to almost the exact same final list, with the only change being to cut the Thalia for another Visionary, both because I thought my Delver matchup was fine and because even there I fell as though Thalia isn’t THAT big of a deal.
The deck had some insane lines. I was a saddened to find that the week preceding the Cup, Ari Lax had written an article about 4c pod when he won a PTQ with it (congrats Ari) and already went through the extreme and very rare line of turning 1&2 drop into a 7 but I’ll go over the two best lines just in case you haven’t read it.
Scenario 1: it’s the late game and you have a pod out, along with some weenies; a birds and a visionary.
1: Visionary into Exarch, untap pod.
2: Birds into Image, copy exarch, untap pod.
3: Image (now with CMC of 3) into angel, blink exarch, untap pod.
4: Angel into conscripts, untap pod.
5: Conscripts into Titan, return Image, copy exarch, untap pod.
6: Titan into Elesh Norn.
In Ari’s article, the comments were derisory, saying you wouldn’t have that much mana (or life) or whatnot, but the thing is that this chain can be stopped and started at any point. Often the end result is to stop after step four, pod into conscripts, steal a [card]Primeval Titan[/card] and attack for 9.
The other line is more common, and one that I pulled off both in testing and once in the actual tournament. Imagine you mulligan to six and see: 3 lands, [card]Blade Splicer[/card], Pod, and a 1 drop. Pretty common hand, right? Well you don’t even need another card to win on turn four.
Turn 1: Land, Birds/Pilgrim
Turn 2: Land, [card]Blade Splicer[/card]
Turn 3: Land, attack for 3 (or 4), play pod, pod Splicer into Huntmaster.
Turn 4: Pod Huntmaster into Conscript, untap pod. Pod Birds into Image, copy conscript, untap pod. Pod Image into [card]Sun Titan[/card], return Image, copy conscript, untap pod. Pod Titan into Elesh Norn, wipe their board, attack with Golem (5), Wolf (4), Conscript (5) and Image’d conscript (5) for 19 damage. Game over!
The extra [card]Thragtusk[/card]s and Images meant that I really wanted to play against aggro decks, although of the aggro decks, zombies was tougher due to [card]Blood Artist[/card]. Delver was also a reasonable matchup, though I found in testing that my sideboard cards often didn’t match up with their threats. With so many variations, I needed answers to pikes, angels, talrands, heroes and even [card]Quirion Dryad[/card]s and [card]Torpor Orb[/card]s! I ended up adding an [card]Oblivion Ring[/card], and then a second, since it was the only card stopped everything, and was also good against zombies and infect. I actually think [card]Oblivion Ring[/card] is well positioned right now, with a huge disparity in threats it frees up a lot of other slots.
The sideboard I ended up using was:
[cardlist title=Sideboard]
2 Oblivion Ring
2 Fiend Hunter
1 Gideon Jura
1 Garruk Relentless
3 Celestial Purge
1 Slayer of the Wicked
1 Intrepid Hero
1 Melira, Sylvok Outcast
1 Acidic Slime
1 Crushing Vines
1 Dismember
[/cardlist]
The only really radical card that needs explaining is the Intrepid Hero. I board it in primarily against Bant Pod and Travis Woo’s Green Summer deck, where the games tend to stall out and are decided by [card]Deadeye Navigator[/card]/[card]Primeval Titan[/card] or [card]Gavony Township[/card] activations, but he is also “ok” against ramp and infect. I only ever cast him a few times between testing and the tournament, but I was happy enough that I think he deserves his spot in the board.
The draft went well; I had a very good UB deck that I thought could possibly 3-0 but would settle for a 2-1. The cards didn’t fall my way though and I only managed a 1-2 record, with Hayne also 1-2, Jamie at 2-1 and Lucas 3-0. I then beat both my delver opponents but lost to Naya Pod and Peter Vieren, who was running a spicy mono red [card]Trading Post[/card] deck that can be found in the deck tech section of the Wizards site. The rest of team did better, and although we were in third going in to the last round, we ended up 8th, good enough for top seed in the last group, with France, Bolivia and Puerto Rico.
Day 2 was a bust as we opened an awful sealed pool and were quickly eliminated. We did make it on camera as a team (as well as video feature matches of Lucas and Hayne, and a deck tech and draft recap), wearing our matching ManaDeprived hoodies, but I do wish the font had been bigger because you could hardly see it.
We finished with no money but a handful of Pro Points that could come in useful later. If I could have done it again there’s not much I could do about the draft, but I would probably have played Zombies over Pod. Pod seemed a bit too fancy, and was sometimes too easily disrupted with everyone gunning to kill the one drops. Lucas and I weren’t booked to leave until the late Sunday flight back to Toronto via Chicago, so we had some free time to explore GenCon a bit (of course we just team drafted but oh well). Going through the airport on our way to Chicago, some butch security agent made fun of our matching hoodies but with some of the people I saw that were likely heading back on Monday, we definitely paled in comparison.
Thanks,
Marc Anderson
Marc Anderson is the current Canadian National champion. At the most recent World Championship, he was able to add a 12th place finish to his resume.