Over the last couple years, Vintage has become less and less a skill-intensive format.  Not only in the sense of the amount of playskill needed to win, but also in terms of design skill needed.  Before you stop reading and start screaming about how I'm an idiot, let me explain why I feel this way.

There have always been incredibly powerful cards in T1.  People label these cards as "broken" because they influence the game in tremendous ways.  Peeling a Will off the top was just as powerful 2 years ago as it is today, perhaps even more so, because games lasted far longer.  Vintage has reached critical mass on broken cards now, however, and because of the power level of many of the cards that see play in competitive T1 today, poor play decisions and poor deck construction can often be negated by lucky draws.  Luck is, of course, a factor in any format in Magic, it doesn't matter how good your deck is if your draws are abysmal.  It is a far more pressing factor in Vintage than it is in any other format, however.  If you don't have a Force of Will and a blue card,  a Wasteland, or a Mishra's Workshop, and your opponent opens with Workshop, Trinisphere, you've lost the game.  It's not that you were outplayed, or that your opponent was a genius of deck construction, you simply got out-mised.

Since Mirrodin was released, T1 broke the threshold of brokeness, turning from a format where "broken things happen" to a format where "if broken things haven't happened for you by turn 2, you've already lost".  Mirrodin heavily pushed the envelope.  I know a lot of the "new school" players scoff at the "old schoolers" because they just can't imagine how T1 could have ever been such a slow format, but rarely do they stop to think about the fact that all of the decks that are currently viable rely heavily on cards from Mirrodin and forward.  Without Forbidden Orchard, there is no aggressive Oath deck.  Without 3Sphere, Titan, artifact lands, Mindslaver, Crucible, etc. brown decks are relatively slow.  Without Spoils of the Vault, most of the aggressive storm combo decks aren't consistant enough.  Vintage has reached a point where restrictions aren't enough to hold the format down, they simply increase the randomness of the format.  It's not "will I draw a broken card this turn?"  It becomes "which of the 20 broken restricted cards this deck runs will I see this turn?"

That's why T1 lost it's appeal to me.  It's not that the players are arrogant pricks, they've *always* been arrogant pricks.  That's always been the price of playing T1.  In fact, those players are necessary for a healthy environment.  They keep things agitated so the format doesn't slow down and die.  It's not the card prices.  If the format held enough enjoyment, the cost barrier wouldn't be sufficient to keep me away.  Hell, I had my entire collection stolen, and went right back to buying pieces that I needed.  Course, back then, moxen were only $100-130 a pop, but I still had around $2000 worth of stuff to replace, and it didn't bother me one bit to do it.  No, the reason I can't stand T1 is because it's a format full of Affinity.  Monkey decks where a good hand on the other side of the table can make it nearly impossible to win.  If I wanted to pilot a deck where my dice rolling skills and luck were more a factor in my wins than my skill, I'd play T1.  Since that holds no appeal to me, neither does the format.

There was no paradigm shift, it was simply a re-evaluation and refinement of popular theory.  It's not like they suddenly changed the rules of the game and it made Gro good.  Gro was good, but people were so caught up in themselves that they dismissed it, assuming that as the all knowning gods, wait, scuze me, I meant "paragons" of Vintage, they couldn't possibly be wrong in their theories.  Although that's not entirely fair.  To give them credit, most of these players (and I was one on the bandwagon, although I was never a paragon of Vintage) had a lot of play time, a lot of experience building decks in the format, and a lot of wins and successful decks to back up their theory.  We've all been wrong from time to time, some of us more than others.

It does not excuse people, however, from looking at an imperfect situation, one that they have absolutely no experience in, and then claiming that "they'd have done better".  Pat Chapin didn't say "the only thing keeping Gro from dominating the format is Masknaught" without ever having played the format.  He studied it, played it, and then made that statement based on his experiences.  That's a far cry from "you suck, my elderly grandmother could build a better deck with 2 hours to study the format than you monkeys have in the last 7 months."  That's just arrogant bullshit.  I have absolutely no problems with new people coming into the format.  Christ, I think it's the best thing that's happened in Magic since they released Invasion block!  I welcome some new innovation, and hopefully, a global metagame.  I do not, however, have any patience for the kind of arrogance that killed BD.  When you've done something with the format, or when you've provided sound reasoning behind your propaganda, then, and only then, I'll listen.  Until then, you're just another Rakso in my mind.


That's a neat way to sidestep the issue.  "I'm honest, and I'd do it, except I think you're dishonest, and blah blah blah".  Well, guess you won't find out then, will you?  As far as me 'picking my horse', I'm not the one making unsubstantiated claims about who I think is going to break the format in half.  You seem to forget, in your fervor, that not I, nor anybody I know, has all the answers.  I'm simply telling you that you, and anyone you know don't have all the answers either.

Edit:

Back to the topic at hand, I'm still curious as to people's opinions on how the outcome of GenCon will affect GP Philly.  Nobody has answered yet, but I'm curious to see people's opinions.  Do you think GenCon will be written off because it's not a "serious" event, or do you think that it will influence the metagame at Philly?  Do you think how seriously people take it depends on who places and what they're playing?

The 1.5 community has always been far less arrogant than the T1 community.  Or perhaps I should just say that people at the Source are far less arrogant than people at TMD.  I've made no secret of the fact that I think 1.5 is not optimized, and that developmental progress has been far slower than I think it should be, but I'm starting to get really sick of having arrogant attitudes thrown my way.  I don't know who's telling you that there aren't any more viable decks out there, obviously, they don't know much about magical cards.  Even in T2, with 1/10th the pool of cards and god knows how many more players, things change a lot over the course of a set, because nobody ever gets it exactly right the first time.  I've tried to ignore the random shit talking from people that haven't done anything with the format, but I think I've had enough.  So here it is, put up or shut up time.  $50 says Steve doesn't make T8 at GenCon or GP Philly.  Another $50 says there will be no Belcher in either T8.  Anyone here got the brass to take either of those bets?

You're absolutely right.  Steve *is* clueless about the cards in Legacy.  The restricted cards have far more impact on T1 then you lend them credit for, specifically SoLoMox+Crypt.  Of course, things like Will, Recall, and Oath are pretty good too.  I'm not implying that Steve isn't a good player, or that he doesn't know T1 well, but despite sharing 90% of the cardpool with T1, Legacy is not T1-lite, now more than ever.  The formats are ridiculously different.  Legacy is more akin to Extended than it is to T1, speaking strictly of the viable genres of decks.  Wizards did a very effective job of neutering combo in the format.  The cards played in Legacy *aren't* played in Vintage.  The cards that are heavily played in Vintage are put in decks with the format in mind.  When I still played T1, years ago, I usually played Sligh.  Not that I didn't have the cards to play anything else, but I liked Sligh and it performed well for me.  Go ahead, talk all the shit you want.  In any case, a couple times, I played Sligh against T2 aggro.  It got raped like a pencil-necked accountant in county.  The deck wasn't designed to beat T2 aggro, it was designed to beat Keeper.  I was playing with a pool of around 6000 cards and losing to a deck created out of a pool of 600.  Doesn't mean I was playing a bad deck(make all the jokes you want), but it wasn't designed with T2 in mind.

There are of course some cards shared between T1 and 1.5, Duals, FoW, FoF, etc.  Thing is, a lot of cards that are good in T1 are good because of the support base T1 has, namely, as I said, decent artifact acceleration.  Mana Drain doesn't hurt either.  You can say all you want that we've got plenty of artifact acceleration, but that doesn't make it true.  With only a few notable exceptions, everyone in the format tried to "break" all the artifact acceleration when the banned list came out back in September.  They all failed miserably, because the artifact acceleration is too weak.  There are numerous cards in T1, none of which make combo viable by themselves, but which all contribute to it's playability.  Ancestral Recall alone isn't something you're going to see enough to make your combo deck by itself, but it helps.  Yawg Win, DT, VT, Lotus, these things all add up.

I don't know how long you've been playing the format, but I'll assume for the sake of argument that you were playing before Mirrodin was released.  Stax was a contender in the field, along with TnT.  Workshop aggro, which we called Tubbies back then, had stopped being viable maybe a year or two before this point, pushed out by TnT.  Stax was not, however, a dominating deck.  In fact, brown decks in general were not in any way shape or form dominating.  You can't point the finger at a single card that came out of Mirrodin block and say "this is the card that pushed brown over the top".  It wasn't Crucible, it wasn't Mindslaver, it wasn't Trinisphere(despite popular belief) or Pentavus or the artifact lands, it was a combination of all these extra cards that finally pushed Stax into the postion of the deck to beat, and made Fish viable again for the first time since 1998.  Of course, things like Pentavus or the ultra-techy Memnarch don't even see play any more, and I'm sure someone has even written an article on why they were terrible cards, but they were slanted towards a particular metagame, and they excelled in that environment.

Shortly after that is when I finally got out of T1 for good, and while I do turn an eye to the format from time to time, just to see where it is, all I see from people is the same "I know everything, and you're wrong" attitude that made us as a community look so foolish back when Pat Chapin labeled Gro the best deck in the format.  Wrapping up, if you want to talk shit about something you know nothing about, go ahead, seems like it's an honored past time in the US, but don't be surprised when you look as foolish as we did when GaT came out of nowhere to lead the format up until the restriction of Gush, or as foolish as Zvi when he claimed he was going to break T1.

We've been discussing decks over at the Source, and come to the conclusion that Solidarity is pretty much the best deck in the format right now.  It's more or less a game of beat Solidarity or beat everything else.  Those decks that are effective against Solidarity are lacking in the Landstill or aggro matchups, those decks that dominate Landstill and the variety of aggro decks out there generally lose hard to Tide.  As far as decks go, it's dirt cheap to put together, if you're not able to buy 4xFoW, there's really no format that you can currently play, a playset of Forces isn't any harder to pick up than a playset of Cranial Extractions.  Goblins w/ black is also very strong, as it's got a fast clock and enough disruption to give it a decent matchup against Tide based Brain Freeze decks.  Both decks are relatively inexpensive to build, consistant, and relatively easy to pilot(as opposed to other things like SotF decks or Nausea).

As far as Steve breaking the format, I think he's going to break it almost as much as Zvi broke T1.

What I'm really interested in is how the results of the Legacy Worlds at GenCon will affect Philly.  Will there be a heavy influence, or are most players going to ignore the results of GenCon and try and "break the format" with their own creations?

I don't play Vintage any more.  Haven't played a single T1 game since the T1 side at Worlds in Frisco.  So I'm not even a little bit up on what's what, and while I've spent a little time reviewing threads here, Vintage is the kind of format where hands on experience is absolutely necessary when it comes to deck construction and metagame theory.  Recently, I've been toying with the idea of running something similar to Angry Ghoul, as there was a discussion(and isn't there always) about cards that could possibly be unbanned in Legacy, and Hermit Druid came up.  I put a 1.5 version of the deck together(with of course, the 4 currently banned Hermits) using a SotF engine, and it was about as solid and consistant as you could ask a combo deck to be.  So I've been thinking about putting the deck together for T1, because I sold off all my power about a year and a half ago, and can't really play anything that's not strictly budget, or fits in a 5 proxy.  I've roughed up a decklist for it, and again, it's remarkably consistant, but obviously much slower than most T1 decks are.  It's usually fishing around turn 3 or 4, depending on how much acceleration you see.  You can fish faster, but doing so requires going sans disruption, and the deck is currently packing 4 Duress, 4 Cabal Therapy(with plenty of cheap critters to flash it with), and 4 Xantid Swarm.  My question is:  Is it worth pursuing something that packs this much disruption and works this consistantly, but isn't going to combo out until turn 3 or 4 every game?

Adam, right?  Sorry about that second round.  Had I known I was going to lose to Stax and Fish respectively in the next 2 rounds, I'd have just given it to you, since my deck wasn't very good to begin with.  60 cards of Stax and Fish hate ya know

Well, I showed up unpowered, with a PoS deck, so I met my low expectations easily.  I would like to give props to the guy from Oslo I played in the 3rd round running Stax, very cool guy, lot of fun to talk to.  Nick needs a severe beating for scaring the everloving shit out of Pat when he disappeared with the van for what must have been a good 23 hours.  Also props to Dave's wife, who provided me with lots of good conversation after I dropped going into the 6th round.  All in all, I had a good time in San Fran, spent some time on Haight, got to stare at Alcatraz while I was out smoking, and played a major T1 sanctioned tournament for the first time in some 2 and a half years, even if I had to play with some random junk I could scrape together.  I would like to point out that Holy Light is the mad tech against Fish.  

I don't see the changes affecting the T1 scene at all.  Fork is interesting, and if Sligh were viable, I'd be masturbating over 4 Forks with 4 PoP, but frankly, there isn't a deck out there that can use 1 Fork, let alone 4, and it's not enough to bring Sligh back from the dead.  Doomsday could've been unrestricted when they released the errata for LED, disallowing the use of it to pay for costs.  I guess technically, you could still use the combo(Lotus, LED, Regrowth, Timetwister, Stroke) by sacrificing lotus for twister and then responding by sacrificing LED, but honestly, I don't see the deck being uber broken.  As far as combo went, it was more on par with ReapLace or Dreams than it was with Academy or Trix.  Still, you might find a few people trying to break it.  It has interesting applications in Dragon, but I don't think it'll really strengthen the deck too much...  Geyser was a little surprising, until I realized how mana intensive it is for a sorcery, and that nobody had played with it in over a year.

No one has yet suggested that Workshop based decks are unbeatable, just that they are stronger than they should be.  For those of you arguing that the metagame is healthy, I want you to sit back and take a look at what you're asserting.  Fish is tier 1.  That in and of itself should be all the proof that you need.  I think Fish is only slightly ahead of ICT in terms of worst T1 deck ever.  Take a look at a listing sometime.  Spiketails?  Daze?  Voidmage?  Cloud of Faeries?  None of those cards are truly T1 worthy.  It's sad that outside of combo, a deck either has to be running Workshops or maining hate for them in order to win.  The fact that Null Rod is a standard main deck card in more than 1 deck is telling.  The fact that even a deck like Fish that's designed specifically to combat Stax still loses the matchup is pretty sad.  If I were to have thrown that much hate against a deck like say Dragon, it'd have no chance of competing.  Rerestricting Workshop would slow the deck's lock down by at least a turn on average, which is probably enough to allow other decks a little breathing room.  It wouldn't remove Stax from the meta, just make it a little more reasonable.

Yeah, this is T1, and broken stuff happens, but I honestly think a lot of you aren't seeing how dominating Stax is, or the kind of strain it puts on the unpowered player.  It used to be that you could get away with playing Sligh, Suicide, WW, Parfait, or mono-U.  Now, if you don't own Workshops, Bazaars, or Moxen, your choice is restricted to playing a deck that's weak even by T2 standards simply because it runs enough hate to beat the top deck.  Semi-powered doesn't cut it any more, unpowered doesn't cut it any more.  That's bad for a format like T1.  I sold off my collection over a year ago, and I've watched prices triple on everything over that last year.  Mishra's Workshop is facilitating a barrier that prevents new blood from entering the T1 scene.

Why the 2 basic mountains?  Why not 2 Great Furnaces?  They're not giving you resiliancy to wastelands, and honestly, with 3 Crucibles plus 4 Bazaars to dig for them, I wouldn't think you're going to have much of a problem dealing with LD.  So Great Furnace, as a welding target and a boon to Academy is strictly superior, unless there's something I haven't taken into consideration?

How well does the deck do when your Welders are taken offline?  Just about anything out there that can be called competitive can kill a Welder out of hand before he gets active, otherwise, it wouldn't be a competitive deck.  With no metalworkers for additional acceleration, it would seem like more traditional workshop decks would be a problematic matchup for you.

No Chalice in main or board?  I realize you've got a great reusable burn spell in Death Spark, since you can just about ensure you're keeping a creature on top of it between welder and bazaar, but do you ever have problems with Fish?  Null Rod can still slow you down, and until you get a spark online with Squee/Bazaar, you're not going to get an active Welder.  In fact, without the lock elements, I would think it'd be hard to get through the permission.

While I realize that most of your creatures are unaffected by Null Rod(Triscuit being the exception), don't you find it hurting your mana base?  I would think that it's often kind of dead, since you're locking down your artifact mana.  Speaking of which, how's the Ancient Tomb for Mana Vault trade working out?  I would think there are few situations in which tomb is better than vault, the most notable coming to mind being the presence of Null Rod.  Still, 2 damage every time you use it is steep, especially for a deck that can't lock an opponent down with Wires and Stacks.

Edit:  Oh, and you don't want to Gamble for Death Spark, if you end up pitching it to the Gamble, it'll be in the grave with a Gamble directly on top of it, and there ain't shit you can do about it.  That nerfs your spot removal pretty hard core.

Yes, but the incident in question, you don't have a spiketail, you have a daze, and they have no moxen.  In which case, you daze the fuck out of ancestral and resign yourself to dropping standstill 2 turns too late.

Fish is a solid deck.  It's not an explosive deck.  Drawing cards is good for fish not because they find stupid broken restricted cards, but because it keeps your hand full of solid threats and countermagic.  On the other hand, your average control deck, tog or 4cc, is an explosive deck.  They're heavy control decks, but you are going to have problems with an early resolved tog or exalted angel.  Not as much, obviously, if you've got mancer in play, but I would say the general rule of thumb is that you would rather that neither of you draw cards than both of you drawing cards.  You've got the threats, they've got the answers.  The less they draw, the less answers they find, and the longer your threats have to win the game for you.

To illustrate this point, let's take it to the extreme.  What do you think your win % would be against 4cc if you both started with 7 cards and never got to draw another one?  Probably about 90-95%, right?

I guess you could call it EBA.  I just called it "Bob".  I should've just went with Sligh, since I didn't have anything tested and tweaked, but I thought Wisdom-based Grow would be fun.  Wisdom is broken Sorry to hear you didn't make T8 on Saturday, I think that game 3 was the most fun I've had in months.  You were just a better player than me, mising those counters off the top.

 :lol: I used to run Sligh religiously, and I always loved it when people called CoP:Red "auto-win" against Sligh.  It's annoying to play around, but you can play around it, easier than you can play around Chill.  CoP: Red is an autowin only if you have Moat and Ivory Mask out...  Otherwise, the moment you play a spell, you're going to die to Price.  If you hold back mana for price, you're just going to end up taking 3 bolts to the dome instead.  Plus, Sligh runs Anarchys in the board.

CSS is right, Misdirection is good for you.  Run 2-3.  They're good in the mirror, amazing against burn, the only time you don't want them in your meta is against ravager.  Also, cut down to one waste and one strip, adding 3 more duals, to strengthen your mana base(like you said, wastes are useless)and add a Zorb.

Rather than siding in CoP: Red, I'd suggest the Sphere of Law and Chill.  If you're really sick, don't run either and run Glaciers instead.  If you're going the glaciers route, be sure to add an enlightened to the board, to help you fetch it quickly.  A turn 3 glaciers against Sligh will give you a lot of breathing room.

Oh, one other thing rapes Sligh, although, not as effectively by itself, but in combination with other hate. Caltrops is effectively a 3cc Moat.  Probably wouldn't be bad against Shadow Weenie either.

I think Keeper is the wrong thing to play in a format with that much Sligh, even if it's bad sligh, but Misdirections and Zorb should give you fighting chance game one.

I'm curious.  I just started playing again a few weeks ago, but it seems to me outside of the strange compulsion people have to play counterspells, there's no reason to play slaver over mud.  I'm far more scared of Stax/MUD than I am of control slaver or workshop slaver, and yet, it seems like a lot more people are playing it.  Can someone give me some insight into what deck wrecks stax but loses to slaver?

I don't think the voidmages are any good.  I tried playing the deck in a similar fashion, with Patron Wizards, and I discovered that the deck really wants to use every ounce of tempo it can muster.  You don't want a creature sitting back, or mana untapped, at the end of any turn.  Hell, Sligh wasn't this tight with it's mana curve.  Not really liking Cloud either, but I understand the synergy with dropping turn 2 cloud and then untapping and dropping standstill.  I don't like it, but I could live with it.

I'm sorry, MD was main deck, as in main deck fire/ice.  Seemed to have caused a little confusion there.  I threw together the wizards version I was thinking of last night and did a little testing v. control slaver.  You ever have an idea that seems good, and when you test it, you want to shoot yourself because it's so bad?  The mages were good, the patron wizards were not.  They force you to sit there with your creatures instead of attacking, which really isn't something you want to do.  So I went back to the more traditional fish build, with the mages still included.  To be honest, I was still only winning maybe 35-40% of the games against control slaver, it just seemed like there wasn't enough damage to finish him off before he got into infi slaver.  Rootwaters were good, and several games I took away his pentavus, only to get burned out by my own grim lavamancers.  It seems like TfK fuels the deck too well, I couldn't even come close to matching him on draw, even with the standstills, and the Yawg. Wills....  Eh, I dunno.

Now my question(mind that I've been out of the scene for a good 9 months now and just got back in about 3 weeks ago) is "what makes fish good?"

I had thought that it was kind of like old mono blue, winning on the strength of one hoser(in this case, null rod, instead of B2B), but your deck only 3 Zerephel.  I figured maybe it was just because it matched up so well against welder decks, but your current version doesn't have the razorfins any more, and no MD F/I.  Also, unlike fish decks back when I was still playing, there's no Lord of Atlantis in any of the builds I'm seeing any more, which leads me to view fish as more of the new Zoo than the new fish.  I mean, you only run 2 actual fish.

I guess the real question I'm trying to ask is what in the deck could be replaced?  Like I was thinking about running an aggro control deck on this scale with Meddling Mages and Patron Wizard, among other things.

What do you guys usually find being your MVP when playing with fish?  What are the bad matchups?

Most Stompy decks run 9 lands, a few run 10.  You're running 4 ESG and 4 Land Grants, it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Traditional Stompy does NOT want Pouncing Jaguar, you really don't want any echo creatures.

I would suggest

4 Rogue Elephant
4 Vine Dryad
4 Elvish Spirit Guide
4 Wild Dogs
4 Skyshroud Elite
4 River Boa
4 Quirion Ranger
2 Ghazban Ogre

4 Land Grant
4 Bounty of the Hunt
4 Giant Growth
4 Briar Shield
4 Berserk

10 Forest

Of course, that listing is Stompy circa Beyond Dominia era(taking into account the unrestriction of Berserk), but honestly, Stompy died shortly thereafter.

I forgot how Memory Jar works.

If you Jar twice in the same turn, what happens to the cards RftG by Jar?  After the second instance of Jar's "at end of turn" trigger, can it find the cards that were originally RftG now that they're in the graveyard, or what?

I mentioned this, but as painful as Force is, I have to believe that it's necessary, if you can force through the last combo piece, it doesn't really matter if you've got to remove fact, or recall, or a drain, or what have you.




Fastbond and a single Horn doesn't "just win", in fact, it stalls.  A lot.  When Gush was unrestricted, you could attempt to win with just Fastbond and one Horn, but now...



I'm starting to decide that the deck is a little too slow to be playable, with WelderMUD wrecking it and the Control Slaver matchup looking to be just as bad.  I think it'd do well against control and aggro, but not well enough to make it worth spending the money on putting together.  No point in constructing a deck you expect to go 3-3 evey tournament.

Well, for one, I'd probably strip all their lands before I dropped horn, just to screw them out of Drain or any other quirky tricks.  Two, you don't always have Horn of Greed, although if you have a method for ensuring a Horn in hand at all times, I'd love to hear it, cuz I'm not sure you could lose in that case  This deck runs precious little draw outside of the Horns, and while it's enough to get by, with the tutoring, you can't assume that you're always going to have everything you need in hand.

Yes, which is why people run Intution and AK, because great synergy isn't as good as independent worth...

I got out of Magic last fall, stopped playing it, stopped selling on Ebay, stopped watching the formats.  I was disgusted with the restrictions that were popping up, and the sets being printed.  After hearing about Crucible of Worlds, however, I decided that I should start taking a look at T1 again.

I've always had a great fascination with TurboNevyn, in fact, despite playing Sligh in almost every tournament I went to, I'd always put it together from time to time, just because it was so fun.  Something about it just screams entertainment.  When Gush was restricted, I figured that was the end of the deck, it cut a core out of it's draw engine, and effectively neutered it for the sake of people to lazy to try and deal with GAT.  Crucible not only gives Turboland it's balls back, it coated them in steel and gave the deck some fucking teeth too.

The only deck I've tested it against so far is WelderMUD, and the matchup is about 70/30 in favor of MUD, in large part due to infinite slaver/smokestack/tangle wire recursion.  Recurring jar can be a problem for the deck too, since one traditional weakness of turboland is it's inability to go off if both regrowth and timetwister are in the grave together.  In any case, on to the decklist:

Draw(7)
4xHorn of Greed
1xFact or Fiction
1xAncestral Recall
1xGush

Tutoring(3)
1xDemonic Tutor
1xVampiric Tutor
1xEnlightened Tutor

Combo Pieces(14)
4xExploration
3xCrucible of Worlds
3xZuran Orb
1xFastbond
1xStroke of Genius
1xRegrowth
1xTimetwister

Counterspells(8)
4xForce of Will
4xMana Drain

Misc. Junk(2)
1xSylvan Scrying
1xTime Walk

Mana Base(26)
7xSoLoMoxen
4xTropical Island
2xVolcanic Island
2xUnderground Sea
2xTundra
2xWasteland
2xFlooded Strand
1xPolluted Delta
1xStrip Mine
1xUndiscovered Paradise
1xTolarian Academy
1xLibrary of Alexandria

Not incredibly sure of what I'd run in the board yet, I'll have to do some more testing with the deck, but given that the deck really only fears counterspells, deed, mindslaver, and Chalice, I'd have to say that 4 REB's and at least 3 naturalizes would probably be must have cards for the board.  Perhaps a few Rack and Ruins, to kill Chalice for two.

In addition to allowing for recurring Strips, and rendering you nearly invulnerable to LD, it allows for recurring fetches, smoothing the mana base.  With either fetches or Zuran Orb, it provides for all the lands you can use in a turn to draw off Horn.  Basically, everything the deck could do with Gush, it can do better with Crucible.  The interaction between Fastbond, Crucible, and Zuran Orb is what caused me to replace Fire/Ice with the older Stroke of Genius as the kill condition, you don't need to even have a Horn of Greed in play to go off, as you can generate infinite mana and life with those 3.  You'd probably still want Fire/Ice in the board to help deal with Welders and other assorted weenies.  Perhaps Slice and Dice as well, for decree.

I know the question is going to come up, so I'm going to try and answer as best I can now.  Why no Cunning Wish?  Basically, there's no C. Wish because I have no room for it.  There's nothing in the deck that bears cutting, in fact, it's been hard enough to find things to remove when sideboarding.  If I didn't think the deck would lose a great deal of consistancy from cutting a Zuran Orb or an Exploration, I would squeeze C. Wish in, but I don't think I could cut either of those safely, and nothing else in the deck really lends itself to being cut either.

I am somewhat iffy on FoW, simply because the deck runs so few blue cards to pitch to it(at a minimum, Twister and Stroke cannot be pitched to it), but I suppose I'm not too opposed to pitching Ancestral to FoW if it means winning the game, so for now, it's staying.