A few immediate concerns upon reading the thread:

This deck doing something seems HEAVILY reliant on getting "cute tricks" online, which is historically a bad bet in Vintage, especially when the components are fairly awful by themselves.  After the first two turns, which you ought to be using to effect the game state, your hand is small and your "draw engine" is an overcosted cantrip without some sort of graveyard interaction.  Your "control package" is prohibitively narrow without a Painter's Servant, and your Grindstones are useless without him.  Your Scarecrones seem terrible in general, but especially so when you're not fueling him with goblin lores.  Painter's Servant himself is irrelevant in isolation (except when he lets your opponent pitch a land to FOW).  Welder almost looks consistently strong enough to consider independent by comparison, which is not a good sign.

The collateral damage you take in the metagame is outright massive.  Null Rod, grave hate, artifact hate, weenie hate, and Chalice are all a beating.  That's so many cards that are good against you, and with the possible exception of weenie hate they're all everywhere.

The disruption suite shows no focus.  REB is for obvious reasons, tcrypt appears necessary to defeat blessing, and moon man is often strong, but they don't compliment each other well.  The lack of Wasteland seems especially bizarre and as I think I saw mentioned above, Chalice.  Waste, Chalice, and Magus together drastically increase the chances of your disruption being relevant by attacking the same resource.

Painter/Grinder looks awfully lonely as a win condition.  Swinging with one power dorks is a horrible plan B, and giving your opponent such a crucial weakness to exploit is always disastrous.  If I were playing against this list, my strategy would be simply keep Painter off the table while I set up my win, which appears to cripple you so thoroughly that I could expect to go largely unmolested for the time it'd take me to end the game.  Seems like you're guaranteed to fight an uphill battle to line up synergies while defending a keystone permanent, and any lapse in that effort results in you trying to race with a couple 1/x's.  Not a pleasant prospect.



Please feel free to explain what I missed anywhere I made an incorrect assumption.

Ok, I guess I got a bit confused.  I thought by asking what non-white creatures you'd want to massacre, you were implying that sideboarding in creature kill against decks without white creatures was always an inappropriate boarding strategy, and so creature kill board slots were best reserved for massacre.  I was trying to point out holes in that arguement.

I do use slaughter pact, and I've recommended the card in this and other threads.  I don't use massacre, though, because I think it's too narrow and too painful to Nausiate.

I often care about Goyfs.  Your life total is precious with Naus.

I've had Voidmage Prodigy pop up and cause a headache.

Brown aggro men and metalworkers can also prove irritating.  I like Oxidize in that situation but not everyone has that in the sideboard.

It isn't as easily recycled with bounce cards when you want to cast it more than once this turn, but that's an extremely minor consideration even with the high frequency of bounce plays you make with the deck. 

The land base is just too light for mox diamond to be a good idea, straight out.  Mox diamond generates no mana, only gives you a land drop.  With one land in hand it does nothing.  With two lands in hand the 1 turn of Exploration frequently does nothing.  And it opens you up further to manabase disruption by stripping mana out of your hand and potentially costing you the chance to put a basic land into play.

I think the implied answer is a justified, largely proven-out fear that the restrictions would not cause the rebalancing of strategies they seemed to intend, and simply lead to the replacement of the restricted staples with the next-best unrestricted card.  With ponder, at least, this seems obvious to me (you'd run ponders as brainstorm replacements if you could, right?).  While it does seem that with the above exception the restrictions were largely considered in isolation, when you take into account the DCI's unfamiliarity with vintage deck design it strikes me more as playing it safe.  I remember their article about the restrictions that killed original Long.dec discussing sleeving the thing up and demonstrating it.  If they knew what was up in our format this wouldn't have been neccecary.

They wanted Gush and Flash gone, not to see new support under either card.  Then, realizing that it went both ways and axing the top of the chain left the support intact, they killed that too in order to not see the same shell powered by the next best thing.  My gut says the word diversity was thrown around and they wanted to open up design space for a new breed of tier 1 decks.  I honestly don't think they noticed the gaping holes in this line of thinking.

The rise of flash, especially, sets off serious colour pie sirens under type 2 design theory, and with only a slightly closer inspection Gush is almost as bad.  The restrictions say "enough is enough" and try to cut the legs out from under Blue's ability to enable non-Blue strategy.  It takes a much better feel for Vintage to recognize the futility of that crusade, and probably one better still to realize it's just not a problem.

I've tested singleton impulse.  It's not too bad.  I have it out for now but I wouldn't rule against ever putting it back in.

I'm feeling reminiscient and wordy, so you folks are stuck with my magical autobiography.  If this concept bores you, press back.  Otherwise, feel free to add your own.  Warning: I am... verbose, and my memory is often described as remarkable.  Smmenen and I should have a windbag contest.

Perhaps because I've never really considered myself a serious member of the MTG community, it strikes me that I have carried on this hobby for a tremendously long time.  I bought my first cards during Homelands, I believe.  I was in grade school and had seen people playing before, it looked interesting and fun.  I found out a friend of mine had cards so I took the plunge.  My first purchase was the 4th edition starter set equivilent, with two piles of 60 random cards, a felt bag and some blue glass beads in a box printed to look like the back of an oversized card.  I still have the box, bag, and beads.

My grade school friend played by some nonstandard rules, which myself and the couple other kids who also decided to start out did not know.  The only major difference I remember, aside from a kids' oversimplification of the batch rules, was that you had infinite land drops per turn and could draw a card when you played a land.  X spells dominated, and massive, 5c, 200+ card decks were standard.  Nevertheless, it was the social experience I liked; we hardly thought it worth sitting down with less than 4 players.  Sometimes we formed official teams, at other times the freeforalls divided by hastily drawn alliance and divided again at the first opportunity to backstab.  All with a grin and a laugh, but you couldn't trust any of those fuckers once you shuffled up.

Sometime during Tempest I discovered the actual rules, convinced others to use them, and began trying to build a 40 card 2-colour deck in response to the brand new issue of manabase instability.  I didn't have enough cards.

Things got more serious and our tiny playgroup joined a hobby shop's weekly night.  By now I was playing a green fatty deck that used elvish piper and other cost cheating effects.  I was starting to outperform most folks due to my superior understanding of deck design (lol!).  I even built a sliver/burn deck from commons and uncommons that impressed others with such technology as focus and a mana curve enough that someone bought it from me.  Eventually I traded my green rares to build new decks around new themes, with very limited access to the card pool this diversifying knocked my win percentage down a few pegs.  Partly due to this and partly due to my blossoming exploration of the newfangled Internet, I discovered Beyond Dominaria sometime during early Masques, which I joined as Liam.

Looking back the online type 1 community was hilarious.  Practically half the regulars used to playtest in person (well, maybe not quite), and many were very young... if you browse the TMD archives you can find JP reminiscing about getting permission from his mom to sleep over at Azhrei's house.  Neutral Ground was the Type 1 mecca.  The Canadian metagame consisted of suicide black.  Developing Enchantress was serious business.  Sylvan Library vs Soothesaying in Keeper was the hot topic of the day, with the green enchantment championed by the Librarian himself, Matt D'avanzo.  Invincible Counter Troll was everyone's favorite thing to hate.  Smmenen argued against Force in Keeper.  Obviously, anything that could post a winning record against The Deck was auto-restrict.  And I'm pretty sure most of us hadn't even heard of Europe, let alone the metagame there.

While I followed the boards for some time, I was playing less and not against anyone good, so I didn't really pick up much aside from a desire to play with blue cards from BD.  I remember OSC being the innovation of the day, having a blast goldfishing TurboNevyn in apprentice, and the Doomsday prank, which confused me thoroughly (my gut told me the list made no sense, but I'd learned to believe those names...).  I remember K-Run taking down the first T1ToC with Parfait (those things used to be played on apprentice!), catapulting his pet deck to the stone-age equivilent of teir 1.  I mailed him a Pegasus Stampede for his birthday.  Through all this, I focused most of my attention on trying to make a U/B budget deck and 3-colour zoo.  I never once, and still have not, played a single game with a Keeper deck. 

Then FoF was printed and the metagame was officially crapped on.  BBS decimated Neutral Ground and the current ToC.  Rumbles of discontent began to build, but they were quickly eclipsed by massive drama over net-decking.  As I recall, Legend had assembled the obvious fof/b2b/4xMorphling/999counter deck to prey on Keeper and Suicide, dubbed it Legend Blue, and subsequently thrown a massive fit when someone ran his list card for card in the ToC.  He also raised loud, incessant objections to use of the name BBS, insisting the deck was called Legend Blue and must go by no other monkier.  To be honest, I don't remember Legend keeping it up for long, I think he left the site.  His crony Negator, however, stuck around flaming and trolling untill everyone was thoroughly sick of him.  Insults flew like monkey feces and the whole thing got very immature.  Fun was had by all.  I think eventually Negator, too, gave up... I'm not sure BD's archaic forum software was capable of bans.

Since it powered a deck that won against Keeper, FoF got the axe pretty quickly, an event which pretty much coincided with my fading interest in magic.  The last thing I remember playing with was the brand new Standstill, trying to make it work in one of my endless and terrible Zoo permutations, before I said my goodbyes on BD and took up playing Descent 3 aggressively.  I do remember that a new deck called Grow was just starting to get the first trickles of serious attention, I think because someone with a name played it at a tournament, but I didn't look into it myself.

It was a long while before I felt a strange but familiar urge.  I'd totally forgotten about BD and my cards had been shoved somewhere out of the way long since.  But for some reason, I had to find out what was up: discover the latest 60th card in Keeper (let me guess, Lobotomy again?), say hi to Rakso, that sort of thing.  Instead, I found myself confronted with a 404.

The site used to go down once in a while so I didn't think much of it.  I checked back a couple times a day for a few days... but no "site down" temporary page appeared, as was the custom, nor did any Apache-related page telling me to log in if I was the owner of the domain.  So, I made one of my extremely uncommon forays into #bdchat to get the scoop.  The room seemed mostly extinct, but I was informed that BD had died, that Zherbus had tried and failed to save it, and that he had migrated the community to a new home called themanadrain.com.  I registered here as Liam and began the process of unfurling the new and foreign metagame.

Tog was king shit, and there were several kinds of Slaver deck all in very raw states.  I experimented a bit with 'tog, but decided I didn't like it... intuition/ak was obviously a great effect, but it always seemed like more work to do than I could leverage it for in some unquantifiable way.  Obviously, I was doing it wrong, but I know now this observation was the beginning of my understanding of a concept that would later be called tempo.  Next I copied some shop slaver list that had mana drains.  I raised an eyebrow for some time at Guilded Lotus... surely this is exactly the sort of card that used to catch derision on BD.  The deck tested terribly and guilded lotus seemed like an inadequate and misguided attempt to mesh shops and drains.  I looked around a bit, but when I saw Guilded Lotus was actually fairly standard I left the site in disgust.

It was another fair while before I appeared here again.  I started reading about the decks on the front page again (I'd say the top decks, but I was too far removed from the meta to make the distinction, so I looked at everything) and it seemed like 4cc was popular.  I think I remember a debate over the ratio of Exalted Angel to Decree Of Justice.  Then, I saw a deck that captured my imagination, despite the fact I quickly gathered it was an underdog that was championed by a single, dedicated proponent.  I had stumbled into a thread by JDizzle and a list for DeathLong.

DeathLong appealed to me and my asthetic of the game.  Moreso than anything else I'd ever put my hands on, the list and playstyle were extremely removed from the metagame.  Either a card enabled the nonsense better than the other options, or it was wrong.  Either you blew your load in their face before they could do anything about it, or you lost.  In my mind, this made the decklist objective and the strategy inherently strong.  I tinkered with JD's list heavily and positively butchered it.  However, I learned to play Storm, discovered the potential depth of the logic puzzle side of the game, and became interested in Vintage again.  When Grim Tutor was legalized, I tested both lists and missed the toolbox sideboard and secretly disappointed the much-debated card didn't push my pet deck over the top.  I switched away from Death Wish after most others.

The other deck I picked up, perhaps not coincidentally, was also a list that recieved chiefly disdain.  Probably more coincidentally, it also contained the seeds to a metagame powerhouse.  That deck was Meandeck Gifts.  I learned the deck and posted about it for my Full Member exam, another very lengthy post that I probably should have spent a lot less words on.  I think the only really relevant thing in there was some theorizing that gifts-oath was inferior to the main list... gifts-oath was a brand new toy at the time but I think my lack of excitement proved wise.  With the aid and urging of Clown of Tresserhorn, I put a fair bit of effort into hybridizing Gifts and Slaver, winding up with a reasonably competative list that ran a lot of multiples of 3.  In the end it proved to be the incorrect meta choice and the project was abandoned.  I remember getting the find 2 robots, nothing else trick from Clown before it became common knowledge and thinking that was pretty slick.  Somewhere in here I tested Uba Stax extensively and grew frustrated.  I built a lot of weird shop variants that went nowhere to try to give it the punch I couldn't find.

Next Becker unveiled Pitch Long and my world was filled with glee.  My pet deck was now AWESOME.  Since I already knew the archetype inside out, I had a big head start on most of the people trying to get used to the thing... my test partner at the time was in love with Slaver and, due to playing people without a clue, didn't believe me that Becker's deck cut it to pieces.  I proved him wrong, over and over and over.

Quickly, people figured out Pitch Long.  It wasn't too long after that that people figured out Meandeck Gifts.  I rarely championed scroll gifts on the boards, what with most people so convinced by SSB, but there was definitely a serious gap between Steve releasing the list and the metagame learning how to play it.  I used to get irritated with people who still insisted on running Tendrils in the sideboard and relied heavily on tinx.  The gifts/long meta pushed out Slaver and Stax, a void which was flooded with u/w fish.  I found that matchup aggrevating and lost a lot of interest in the format.

The metabomb trifecta of ichorid cards, gush, and flash hit and distanced me further, after my initial attempts to make Gush Tendrils good failed.  I messed around with GAT and learned the Gro concept, many years after the first time I saw the deck in its infant stages.  Interest waxed and waned until I turned to my favorite way to make the game interesting: tendrils of agony.  I returned to the Gush Tendrils idea, this time starting from scratch with the gro concept in mind.  The result can still be found in the Open forum... unfortunately, I didn't have the courage to post my deck for critiscism until ICBM kicked up a stink with Empty Gush and proved the premise valid.  I released my list with a detailed analysis, but the proven work of a proven team (fairly) got more attention.  When TTS came out, it was almost card for card with my deck except with Ponder over Scroll... Becker considered this the key innovation but I argued my list was just as valid, and which you should play should depend on the meta.  I was pleased to notice almost as many gush-storm lists with Scroll as without make top 8.  Soon Tyrant Oath was on the rise and I was too busy to test.

Then, of course, the DCI uprooted us all again.  I couldn't be bothered to learn the new meta and pretty much didn't surface again until Ad Nauseam was spoiled.  Once again, the chance to work on an explosive Tendrils deck presented itself, and I've been active again for the past little while.

(phew.  We're done.  Go have a smoke.)

Is anyone else still running 11 land?  I have found it fine so far, though I should note I feel free to side in my Bayou to increase the land count even if I don't want any green cards.

Like I said earlier in the thread, and Spooky alluded to, Twister is often a key card from a less than ideal position.  Say you're trying to mount a second attempt after blowing your Rituals, or you've lost a bunch of life, or Null Rod hit the table or something like that.  Twister very often comes online long before anything else could in these situations, even from inside your deck.  Remember you can tutor for it.

Secondly, say you *do* have a hand where you resolve Twister first turn with mana floating and duress backup.  Do you really think you improve your odds of taking down the game by throwing it back and drawing 6?  Or 5?  It's not always an optimal first attempt but in my experience it's lightyears better than mulling for something else, which you would do if that Twister was a utility card.

Bear in mind this deck plays more accelerants than anything else in the field.  Even on the draw, your opponent is likely gaining 1-2 cards off the twist, where you're likely gaining 4ish.  Sometimes, dropping a handful of moxes, resolving Twister, firing off a duress and threatening a 5 mana untap next turn with a full grip is vicious enough to be worth giving your opponent 2 cards, especially when they haven't developed their manabase enough to exploit the refill the way you're about to.

Fetchlands and basics make you not lose to wasteland.  You're trying to get to 5 mana here, and you run at most 12 land.  Wasteland is a serious threat.  The mana base is a potential high point of AdN.  If you see my list in the other thread, it has 2 seas and an Academy, the rest is waste-proof.  The bayou is in the sideboard.

Not to mention gemstome mine running out has cost me more than a few games with grim long.

Extract has been terrible every time it has ever surfaced in any deck, as far as I can tell.  It's a card and a mana for an insurance policy against one eventuality, played in a deck that revolves around effects mattering now, against decks that have ten billion branched descision trees of splendid victory.  It was consistently reported by pretty much everyone who ran a 1 tendrils long list that they had never lost a match to extract, and people running 2 tendrils or Gifts just thought it was funny.  Decks have only become less vulnerable in the meantime.

For the most part enchantments can be solved with bounce, which you should already have bucketloads of.  I can't imagine what I'd side out against a Drain deck for enchantment removal..

If you're running transmute artifact is a single scroll rack a bad plan?  Probably, but I really wished it was a trinket mage target when brainstorm bit it and it occurs to me again now.

in my example you can mind twist for 5 then cast nauseam.  I would still rather spend 1 mana and get their force than this.  In every other instance casting Mind Twist for 5 means you spent all your rituals and now you can't cast nauseam even if you draw it.

Mind Twist does not help you win and competes for resources you need to win.

Having both hands empty is bad for you because you need a more complicated hand configuration to start doing something than your opponent does to either start doing something or to disrupt you.  Your opponent is going to draw what he needs to take control of the game before you, because it's just easier to get.  You have no way to capitolize on the tempo generated (though your opponent very well might) and are backing yourself into a hand sculpting race with a deck that doesn't have a draw engine.

I chose that example because it shows the absurd unlikelyhood of a hand where casting mind twist for more than two doesn't disrupt your gameplan.  Typically mind twist will either be hymn to tourach for more mana, or reduce both hands to nothing.  Neither is good.

my hand could be nauseam, mind twist, lotus, ritual, ritual, ritual, ritual and I would still rather mind twist were duress or pact

I am not so sure about repeal anymore.  Most of the time when I use bounce to storm I want to bounce more than 1 mox, and the chances the card I rip off the top is castable for storm don't make up for the guaranteed free storm and mana I get for sacrificing a land, particularly when I'm going to do that twice or sacrificie another land to bounce something of my opponent's.  I'm up to 3 chain + hurkyl now and have found the extra bounce invaluable on both the offense and the defense.  I used repeal to draw from a topdeck tutor once ever and I think I've noticed one, maybe two more instances where it would have been important, compared to the every other time when I'm happy it's chain.

I posted this somewhere else but I solidly support necro 100% now.  I think there was a bit of an adjustment curve there where I had to unlearn my pitchlong pattern recognition and stop acting like I had force of wills.  A key thing is to actually draw a few less cards so you have life left to draw more if something goes wrong on your opponent's turn.  Having 3 tendrils in the deck makes a noticeable difference when necro'ing too and I find your smaller draws are much more reliable than you would expect with a grim tutor deck.

I've been testing without time walk and haven't missed it so far.  Since I seem to be the card's last proponent I guess we can officially call it out.

If you resolve AdN with more than 15 life, you don't have any higher chance of fizzle than you did with any fast storm deck of yor.  You assume it will happen and if it doesn't it's part of the cost of playing a deck that makes about a quarter of everyone else's deck do absolutely nothing.

Having pact in the deck doesn't mean you lose to the trigger every time adn doesn't work out, either.  It's not hard to play a chrome mox for blue mana and keep a ritual in your hand to pay the trigger next turn.  And you obv don't have a pact or need to use it every attempt.

In my experience against current fish lists, every time I pass them the turn they are going to put something into play that makes it more work for me to win.  They are tempo decks and they do their job well.  The more turns they buy with permanents the more fow's they draw and the more life you can no longer spend on Naus.  I feel like your strategy should be to try to win at the earliest opportunity, because they're trying to force you to do exactly the opposite and waiting plays into their hands.  Case in point: the other day I was testing against fish and had first turn Nauseam with B floating; my hand contained Consult, another Naus, and enough mana to cast the second Naus next turn.  My first Naus got forced and, after considering my options, I decided to let it get countered and try again next turn, conserving gas, rather than Consult for Pact and go all in.  I passed and got strip mined, after which I always needed just 1 more turn to assemble my hand until I died.

Dude there's very finite number of tier 1 decks you've never head of before to write about.

I've had trouble resolving cabal ritual for threshold when it counts (ie to resolve my first attempt).  If I were to add a third I'd probably replace sol ring.

The sideboard bayou has so far been fine to support the green board.  Siding in a 12th land against certain decks is good too.

Walk is probably the 60th card.  It's been decent.  I think I'm going to take it out and put an impulse back in for a bit and see how I feel.

Hurkyl's is key against chalice=1, among other things.

I found the third tendrils increases my nauseam draw usefulness more than it decreases it, plus it makes consult a lot less dangerous and necro a lot better.  I've started to get out of the pitchlong mindset with necro and found playing it appropriately in this deck often involves drawing less cards in order to play around discard by having life left to draw again if you get hit.  You appreciate tendrils being easier to find when you're not drawing 14 cards and having 2 tendrils still in the deck when you're going to pick up 5 cards after the first one got sent to RFG is nice.

my list is far from set in stone, but here's what I'm currently working with

land (11):
4 polluted delta
2 bloodstained mire
2 underground sea
2 swamp
1 tolarian academy

accelertion (18):
1 mox jet
1 mox sapphire
1 mox emerald
1 mox ruby
1 black lotus
1 mana crypt
1 lotus petal
1 mana vault
1 sol ring
3 chrome mox
4 dark ritual
2 cabal ritual

assembly (9):
1 demonic tutor
1 vampiric tutor
1 imperial seal
1 demonic consultation
1 mystical tutor
1 ancestral recall
1 brainstorm
1 ponder
1 time walk

disruption (12):
4 duress
4 pact of negation
3 chain of vapor
1 hurkyl's recall

win (10):
4 ad nauseam
1 timetwister
1 necropotence
1 yawgmoth's will
3 tendrils of agony


sideboard (I'm not the best with these)
1 bayou
4 xantid swarm
3 oxidize
3 tormod's crypt
2 pithing needle
2 slaughter pact

Is massacre the best sideboard card right now?  BUG doesn't have plains and the etherium guys deck is also (more?) vulnerable to Hurkyl's.  Tried Slaughter Pact at all?  It isn't dependant on your opponent fetching out a tundra and kills any size of dude.  And you can definitely afford to pay 2B if you need to use it before you're ready to win.

I wouldn't run mox diamond.  You have 12 land and miss tons of land drops already.

I'm still not convinced 4 chrome mox is the right number.  I ran 4 for a while time and felt like they put too much stress on my opening 7 especially in multiples.  Drawing 2x chrome mox is effectively a mull to 5.  I ran 2 and 5 regular mox for quite a while and was totally happy.  Everyone except for me insisting chrome mox was a mandatory 4-of convinced me to try 3 chrome and 4 regular mox, at which point I do notice both the good and bad points more strongly...  I am still very reluctant to add a 4th when I already am having as much trouble with choosing between imprinting and casting a card as I want to deal with.

You look a bit mana heavy, you could probably just scrap 2ish sources for cards. 

I highly recommend testing with the 3rd tendrils.

Sensei's Top looks kind of terrible.  I tested an Impulse for a while and found it pretty decent, though I ended up needing the slot for bounce.  You might like this card if you want more filtering power.

Academy has been great for me in the testing I probably haven't done, actually.  The deck runs 12+ artifact accelerants, making academy really good.  If 4 of those are chrome mox, 7 potentially tap for B, plus the deck also runs 6-8 ritual effects so the chances you need two B-generating lands to get BB are very low.  Your chances of getting colourscrewed on land don't change at all if you go from 2 to 1 island, except where the extra U from academy opens up additional lines of play improving things.  And there is always use for the extra mana.

edit: inflammatory statement removed but... c'mon, man, that was pretty insulting

wait, there's no academy in steve's list?  That's a DEFINITE error.

How much actual testing did you do with necro?  If it sticks and you don't get duressed, you are going to win.  You won't get anywhere with nauseam after necro, sure, so you get yawgwill or bounce artifacts for storm.

So you blow 2 disposable accelerants and your only gas card on the second turn, counter their drain, and lose to the force.  You went second so you have 2, maybe 3 cards left in hand.  If you'd used FoW or Misdirection instead of Pact, that'd be 1 or 2.  Your only hope at this point is to topdeck and pray for timetwister.  Your opponent has 5 drain mana next turn.  Do you really need the Pact trigger to lose this game?

Yes, duress would have clued you in to wait and topdeck for a second disruption spell.  Playing draw-go against drain with a deck that doesn't have a draw engine sounds like a plan, yo.  I'll take the Pact advantages of free to nauseam, 10x better on the first turn and not costing the third B out of a ritual over this dubious arguement.

Besides we side in xantid in this match.

out of which list?  scroll, from spooky's

Am I the only person who likes Time Walk?

First of all, it lets you duress for free.  Second of all, it gives you a land drop... which, even with 1 land in hand, is quite helpful if you're planning to cast Nauseam on your walk turn.  Third, it's good with topdeck tutors.  Fourth, it's good with the skull.  Fifth, it's very convenient to untap after a Twister.  And, while this should be a minor consideration, it's salvaged at least a couple otherwise-whiffed Nauseam draws for me.  I decided to keep it before I started considering a sideboard at all, let alone xantid swarms.  If it's just cantripping for you your hand is already going nowhere, and it's not like the deck is particularly tight for slots.

In my testing I have been running 4 pact 4 duress.  There are certainly situations where one or the other is preferable but in actual use I've found they weigh in rather equally.  However the 0cc during Nauseam is a very real factor outside of that comparison that weighs in on behalf of the pact.  Pact also has the pitchlong effect of protecting land, ritual.  It's also not irrelevant that 2 rituals off 1 permanent source can afford Nauseam but not back it up with Duress.

It's true that they push you away from end step plays, but generally if I can afford to cast nauseam and figure it'll resolve, I just do it.  I'm very confident I'll find the mana I want and even with nothing floating, usually more confident my chances of losing to no free B source are lower than my chances of winning shrink by giving my opponent another turn.  If I'm baiting a counter, I can do it on the end step without blowing a Pact then just have my Pact to counter their next force.  Plus that play costs too many rituals to come up more than once in a while.