I've had a love/hate relationship with Birthing Pod. It's such a great card, and I wanted to build something cool with it. I started out with the first build as a G/B waterfall strategy with The Duc de Blangis. It was effective, but it really was easy to disrupt. I only had (1) CMC tier creature and if an opponent dispatched the creature or exiled it, it was very difficult to recover.
So, I did some research and came upon the Melira Combo. I jumped out and purchased a 4x playset of Kitchen Finks and built my own variant. I hated it. I played it once against Belzebozo and I failed to utilize the combo effectively. (Meaning: I was attempting to play Mr. Nice and I only opted to take 100 life addition in the combo, instead of say, a million.) He came back to beat me. It wasn't that the deck was incapable of even answering how he had locked me (It was a token generating machine with a unique enchantment defense), it simply was my dislike for the deck overall. I wasn't playing it well because I wasn't invested in the idea.
I sat on my Birthing Pods for a few more months.
It's only recently that I started looking through my decks, seeing what I could build, coupled with opening an Avacyn Restored booster that contained Zealous Conscripts. The deck that I gravitated to was Running Naked Through The Woods.
I liked the idea of a more aggressive deck, but I needed something more, and all I had was Anger. Which got me thinking.
The second to last piece came in the form of another Avacyn Restored card:
Lightning Mauler
. I was starting to really dig the idea of a hasted pod.
The last piece really was less about my thoughts, and more the collective of the internet. Between reading Brian Kibler's Naya Pod strategies and the plethora of Pod threads on MTGSalvation, I finally started putting together my Casual Legacy approach.
I still need 3x
Lightning Mauler
s to feel like it's where I want it to be (possibly only 2x more...), but here it is.
