I prefer going with Rector if you want to go TPS. For instance:

http://www.morphling.de/top8decks.php?id=245

check out number 7 there. It's unpowered to boot. I think it has tons of potential.

As requested, here's my list.

// Lands
    7 Mountain
    4 Wooded Foothills
    4 Taiga
    3 Ancient Tomb

// Creatures

    3 Siege-Gang Commander (or two, not sure here)
    4 Goblin Lackey
    4 Skirk Prospector
    4 Goblin Warchief
    2 Goblin Sharpshooter
    4 Goblin Ringleader
    4 Goblin Recruiter
    4 Goblin Piledriver
    2 Goblin Matron
    2 Gempalm Incinerator
    1 Elvish Spirit Guide

// Spells
    4 Food Chain
    1 Mox Emerald
    1 Mox Ruby
    1 Black Lotus
    1 Mana Crypt

In comparison, I run a LOT less mana. Haven't encountered a lot of screw so far.

You're running 9 colourless mana sources to my 4. As a result, you need to run substantially more mana sources. In doing so, you trade threat density and some consistency for the ability to try disruption by mana denial.

It sounds plausible at first but I think the concept is flawed in the current metagame where everybody and their brother has strips/crucible or is preprared to deal with it. In other words, I think that the disrutpion offered by the strips isn't worth the cost.

I hate to say it but you brought this onto yourself by building the deck wrong.

As you noticed yourseld, the prospector is indeed needed and I go so far as to run 4 of them. Sometimes, you just need that red mana.

Also, imho, you can't run both strips AND ancient tombs. In my experience, it's an either/or thing. Go with speed and tombs or disruption and strips.

I also like to run 2 sharpshooters (or 3 if I expect lots of fish). They don't just speed up your non-combo kill, they also deal with welders and other such nuisances.

Kudos for sticking with the green men though.

Fair enough. Perhaps Extraction really IS a sideboard card.

Ah, nostalgia...

Started playing at university, must have been 1994. I picked up tons of cards back then, including my first set of power (parts of which I then sold a few years later only to buy them again, then upgrade to beta). But was I playing killer decks with those? Nah, course not. My favourite deck at the time was a 120 card monstrosity that managed to (reliably) cast all 5 Elder Dragon Legends. Many an evening was spent playing hilarious multiplayer games with that deck.

My first "tournament" deck, meaning the first deck I played at a tourney was a R/G thing with some very weird beaters like Two-Headed Giant, AErathi Berserker etc to complement the more reasonable Kird Apes etc. It did surprisingly well.

I moved on to a more competitive Zoo deck (Serendib Efreet, Kird Apes, Ernhams) and then to B/W Necro. Those were the days indeed.

As for the trade binder issue, yeah, I can relate. When you have a Lotus, a few moxen and drains in there, people kinda assume that you own every card under the sky.

And yeah, I do giggle at times when the kids in my local shop take out their "Type 1" decks. I stopped taking my 4CC along btw, it's just no fun (plus I'm a bit paranoid considering the value). I do have a powered FCG on me most of the time though, just for laughs. If I get around to it I'll make Bazaar Madness too.

You worry me Kronofear, Meloku is male.

I haven't actually tried him in Vintage but I'm heavily testing a Standard U/W deck and he's GOD in there.

Thing is, as I said in my initial assessment of ChK over at the Wizards boards, Melokus is a good card, no doubt, but there's no deck out there atm that can really use him. Think Anurid Brushhopper, think Razormane Masticore etc. All decent cards that never found a home.

Mmh, if a 4CC player in the top 4 was playing it, it can't be that outrageous a choice.

I'm not saying that resolving the extraction will necessarily win you the game but neither will twist. If, in that situation, he had twisted you for 3, would that have caused you more or less trouble? (because that's the question we're asking here, should it replace twist?). IMHO, twist would have been worse for the the 4CC player, landing you your weldables in the yard.

Note also that the clamp doesn't help vs the next most common removal, STP.

An ok article but I strongly disagree on the pimping a deck issue.

To me, there's two aspects to Magic: playing the game and collecting the cards and I enjoy both of those. Seriously, I do take pleasure out of admiring my all-beta/foil/signed/altered/whatnot 4CC (no, not that kind of pleasure you sicko!). I'm full well aware that it doesn't make me a better player but if I can afford it, why not? Face it, if you can afford Beta power you're not going to stumble over a $15-20 fee for a tourney. BTW, until they rotated out I also played an all-chinese Goblin-Bidding deck in T2 (except for CoB because it's nigh-impossible to find black-bordered chinese cities). The idea behind it, btw, was not to gain unfair advantage, I simply liked the idea.  

But yes, it does help to intimidate people. Despite the fact that I've only taken up competitive magic less than a year ago, people who don't know me automatically assume I'm a veteran when they see such decks. (I used to play in a lot in the 1990s and always owned a set of UL power but a 5-6 year hiatus has kinda voided that).

I'm running two matrons and they do come in handy. What do you sugges we replace them with?

The clamp has no place in FCG and I'll tell you why:

FCG isn't a pure combo deck. In fact, it's more like 65% aggro and 35% combo. As a result, the gobbos that are on the table are used to swing with and put the opponent on a tight clock. My build goldfishes turn 3-4 (bad draws turn 5) with or without the combo. So we want to drop dudes fast and the mana-intensive clamp slows us down.

For instance, if you spend two mana on turn 2 to cast the clamp and apply it to, say a prospector, for two cards, what have you achieved? Nothing at all. You have no card advantage (gobbo + clamp = 2 cards for the 2 you draw) and you've spent two mana and a turn. It's easy to see how that goes against the aggro nature of the deck.

Now, you might say that you can clamp piledrivers and warchiefs but I'm not keen on putting those dudes in Fire/Ice Range. Imagine you have a lackey and a piledriver so you clamp the piledriver. On your attack, your opponent fires both of them. Again, you have little card advantage (lose two, draw 2 + the fire/ice) but you lose tons of tempo.

Long story short: Yes, the clamp makes it more likely that we draw into the combo but at the cost of weakening the aggro aspect. Not a good deal if you ask me. There is enough draw in the form of Ringleaders imho.

If you really want to find Food Chain faster I'd suggest you run 4 Plateaus and perhaps a CoB or two and add in Enlightened Tutor. But that's still not a good idea since it messes up an otherwise pretty stable manabase and I can't think of any gobbos I'd remove. It would, however, open more sideboard choices.

(The clamp worked well in Bidding because the deck got all it's clamped dudes back in the end. It works in raffinity because that deck can drop dudes for free. It won't work in FCG)

I'm certainly going to try one extraction main instead of the twist. They do pretty much the same thing: strip your opponent of resources without affecting the board. However, extraction has a few things going for it:

1) Resolving it is an autowin against certain decks. Yes, not many decks, granted, but even if you only win one matchup in a tourney outright because of it I'd say that's worth it.
2) It isn't randomly dead where twist can be, for instance when your opponent plays graveyard recursion or some kind of deck that empties its hand very quickly. It'll always nail the problem cards in your opponents deck.
3) It's psychologically more powerful than the twist. I expect that removing some key spell in an opponents deck will lead to them making mistakes as they struggle to play around not having said card or simply miscalculate because they're too used to having it)

Twist has always been a card I wan't too happy with in 4CC and every time somebody says how Hymn to Tourach is bad I can't help thinking that the Hymn is a Mind Twist for 2 cards that cost one less than an actual Twist.

Actually, as far as my (limited) testing goes the matchup is at best 55/45 in favour of 4CC at least with the builds I was looking at. FCG can draw nice things like lackey, null rod and blood moon (after boarding) and if either sticks, 4CC is going to struggle (or probably scoop after blood moon). Anyways, nice to see FCG do well, the deck was maligned a lot recently when it is, in fact, very good at what it does. I'm much more surprised at the win against Stax.

I'd love to see the decklist though.

Actually, Null Rod is more problematic for this deck than you might think since it shuts down all your artifact mana and your clamps (and your jar for that matter) meaning that you're stuck with 10 mana sources to cast both the glimpse and the tendrils. And you have no maindeck disruption or artifact removal. Duress?

Sorry, but scooping to any deck that plays trinisphere, chalice AND null rod doesn't sound very promising. I'm not a fan of Deathlong but it seems to me to be a far better tendrils deck.