Good work, very nice primer! I'm just not sold on your argument against Brainstorm. If your manabase can support Brainstorm it's very strong here. You want to maximize your ability to find pod. In any case, you can dig for a silver bullet, looking for a non-creature tool even if you already have pod in play, and especially get rid of wood since you play a lot of cards you don't want to draw/to see early game. Pod also synergies well with Brainstorm by giving you other shuffle effects outside of your fetchlands.

Originally Posted by death Originally Posted by Worst mana base I've seen. Ever.

Marsh Flats (WB) will get: WU, WB, WG, BU, and BG duals.

Verdant Catacombs (GB) will get: GW, GU, GB, BW, and BU duals.

Windswept Heath (WG) will get: WU, WB, WG, GU, and GB duals.

Seriously though, the manabase is crafted in such a way that you can fetch basics reliably without getting punished. If you want to see a similar manabase, look at the modern Kiki-Jiki pod decks that were successful (particularly, the one that won Grand Prix: Richmond). It may not look pretty on paper but it is quite consistent and surprisingly wasteland-resilient. The philosophy is as follows:We are main Abzan colors meaning that we want basic Forests, Swamps, and Plains. From there we can assume we want Abzan fetchlands. Since we need four colors and don't want to be cut off of any one color, we want to run duals for every possible combination. Knowing this, we end up here:From this we just need to decide what two of the non-fetchable duals are least important to us and play the 7 fetches that don't get those two duals and the fetches that maximize our chances of hitting a basic land. Since our deck is base GWb, we want 4 Windswept and 3 Verdant, giving us a virtual 15 turn one green sources. Normally you would want 16-17, but we can cheat the numbers since Deathrite Shaman can be cast off of black mana.