While for the past two months I have been trying to write this very article, the words have eluded me and I’ve found it an impossible task to sit down and start. There are so many possibilities and so many facets of this article that need to be explained that I do not feel that the time has come to unveil the true potential of this deck. I am of course talking about Birthing Pod— the card, the deck, and the strategy.

This story starts about two months ago in the little town of Binghamton, New York, at Jupiter Games. I was hanging out and spending a few weeks crashing at Ken Adam’s house alongside Mike Pozsgay. We had just gotten back from the Grand Prix in Rhode Island and had Standard on our minds because we wanted to show the world something new for the invitational, as we were all sick of seeing Caw-Blade. We looked back at a deck that I had been playing a few months back and had had a large amount of success with, and saw that the format was correct again for a Fauna Shaman/Vengevine deck, somewhat like the Jumanji deck that I had made a name with:

"Jumanji"

• Creatures (31)
• 1 Acidic Slime
• 1 Baneslayer Angel
• 1 Obstinate Baloth
• 1 Soul's Attendant
• 4 Birds of Paradise
• 4 Fauna Shaman
• 4 Llanowar Elves
• 4 Lotus Cobra
• 4 Squadron Hawk
• 4 Vengevine
• 1 Molten-Tail Masticore
• 1 Phyrexian Revoker
• 1 Linvala, Keeper of Silence

• Spells (5)
• 2 Overwhelming Stampede
• 3 Lead the Stampede

• Lands (24)
• 2 Plains
• 4 Forest
• 2 Marsh Flats
• 2 Tectonic Edge
• 3 Stirring Wildwood
• 3 Sunpetal Grove
• 4 Razorverge Thicket
• 4 Verdant Catacombs

Buy This Deck Export text format

This was a G/W midrange deck that took advantage of Caw-Blade’s inability to deal with recurring Vengevines and also its lack of ways to deal with a resolved Fauna Shaman. Eventually, the format changed and all of the Caw-Blade decks were running things like Oust and Condemn to battle this style of deck, and ended up hating this deck out of the format. Fast-forwarding a month in which Caw-Blade decks had taken all Ousts/Condemns and Gideons out of their decks, playing a max of two Gideons and two Day of Judgment in the sideboard, it was time to bring back out the heavy artillery in my favorite 4/3.

The Build

When brewing a new deck, the first step is to list the cards that you want your deck to include: in this case, it was Fauna Shaman, Vengevine, Birds of Paradise, Llanowar Elves, and Lotus Cobra. From there, a card was mentioned that was known to be strong, but had not been tested or used since its release about a month earlier: Birthing Pod, the new Survival. We took the card and ran with it, as we knew that we could figure out the correct shell to put it in if we tested enough. So we started our journey through about a dozen lists of all colors, finding some fairly strange cards to add in order to make this deck work. The final result was this list, which I played in Indianapolis at the Invitational.

[cardlist]

[Creatures]

1 Entomber Exarch

1 Grave Titan

1 Massacre Wurm

1 Trinket Mage

1 Viridian Corrupter

2 Vengevine

3 Acidic Slime

4 Birds of Paradise

4 Fauna Shaman

4 Llanowar Elves

4 Lotus Cobra

1 Memnite

1 Pilgrim's Eye

1 Spellskite

1 Wurmcoil Engine

2 Phyrexian Metamorph

1 Sheoldred, Whispering One

[/Creatures]

[Spells]

1 Voltaic Key

4 Birthing Pod

[/Spells]

[Lands]

5 Swamp

9 Forest

4 Misty Rainforest

4 Verdant Catacombs

[/Lands]

[/cardlist]

Going only 2–2 with the deck and everybody else playing the deck having the same result, I knew that I was onto something, but I needed quite a bit more testing to be able to perfect this deck. As I headed back to Orlando, the only testing that I could do was to brew in my own mind and just think the deck over and over, as I had nobody here to sit down and test with me for hours on end.

The Changes

As time went on, I realized quite a few things that the deck needed to change to be good. Once M12 came out, I realized the direction that the deck needed to go. I would also like to give credit to Brennan DeCandio, who won a PTQ this Saturday with a B/U/G Birthing Pod deck that was much to my liking.

• Llanowar Elves wasn’t good enough, and the deck didn’t need all that much ramp.
• Sylvan Ranger was better than Lotus Cobra in the deck and needed to be switched.
• Vengevine was cute in the deck but nowhere near powerful enough for the 4-drop slot.
• Solemn Simulacrum was a card that needed to be put in the deck and could possibly be the card to hold the deck together.
• Fauna Shaman was not as good as it could be in this deck and didn’t have a place for more than one or two.
• The deck needed to be three colors and add Blue for Phantasmal Image, Frost Titan, and Deceiver Exarch.
• There were cards that I missed such as Cadaver Imp, which adds a great 3-drop spot in the deck.

These were just a few changes that I saw could be made to the deck, and I felt that these changes could make the deck viable and worthy of beating most if not all of the decks in the format given the right pilot.

This is Brennan’s deck that he won the Orlando PTQ with on July 23, and I am proud to say that I witnessed the best deck in the room win the tournament without any struggle as Brennan went 9–0 in matches and breezed his way to this victory.

[cardlist]

[Creatures]

1 Cadaver Imp

1 Deceiver Exarch

1 Frost Titan

1 Grave Titan

1 Obstinate Baloth

1 Phantasmal Image

1 Sea Gate Oracle

1 Skinrender

1 Sphinx of Lost Truths

2 Entomber Exarch

3 Sylvan Ranger

4 Acidic Slime

4 Birds of Paradise

1 Phyrexian Metamorph

1 Spellskite

1 Triskelion

1 Wurmcoil Engine

2 Solemn Simulacrum

1 Glissa the Traitor

1 Sheoldred, Whispering One

[/Creatures]

[Spells]

2 Dismember

4 Birthing Pod

[/Spells]

[Lands]

3 Island

6 Swamp

7 Forest

4 Misty Rainforest

4 Verdant Catacombs

[/Lands]

[Sideboard]

1 Blood Seeker

1 Brutalizer Exarch

1 Deceiver Exarch

1 Massacre Wurm

1 Obstinate Baloth

1 Pelakka Wurm

1 Viridian Corrupter

1 Sylvok Replica

3 Nature's Claim

2 Memoricide

2 Ratchet Bomb

[/Sideboard]

[/cardlist]

Playing the Deck

While the deck looks like a hodgepodge of miscellaneous cards that were just thrown together so that the deck could get itself out of any situation . . . you would be correct in saying that, as when building this deck, that is exactly what you’re aiming for. This causes the problem of playing this deck correctly, which is nearly impossible. Testing with a deck such as this is the most vital part of the deck, and knowing what lines of plays you need to take against every situation against every deck is important in a deck that has so many close calls and so many lines of attack on a game. If you are interested in playing a deck such as this, you need to sit down with a group of your friends and test, test, test, and then when you think you know and understand the deck, test it some more to ensure that you will not mess up, because a single flaw in a game could ensure a loss instead of an easy victory.

As for this article, there are many different stances about a Birthing Pod deck, and many opinions of how the deck should be built and played. I encourage everybody who reads this to let me know what you think about this deck and cards that you would want to see added—and maybe it will help all of us create a more streamlined deck so that we can create the Birthing Pod deck—rather than a Birthing Pod deck.

Until next week, I hope you enjoy throwing your creatures into the pod.

— Harrison Greenberg