I'm curious if, in a deck which is already Wishing up Tendrils, the solution is to include ETW as fizzle protection in the board; play out the hand as though you were going to go to Tendrils, if you can't hit 9 storm, audible over to ETW and hope to finish things that way. It's got to be better than just crapping out with no hand and an opponent at 2 life. Plus, it's a sneaky way around a resolved Mage.

It seems like the Hellbent mechanic would be paired well with Uba Mask shenanigans, in addition to the LED tricks already proposed. Not that (vintage) Stax has any use for a worse Tutor than what it's (rarely) running. Maybe Flame Vault Stax in Legacy would run it, but since Bazaar is not legal in that format, Uba is < amazing. (I think...I'm no Stax expert...or Staxpert, if you will...)

If someone out there is sitting on some amazing Uba-based prison/combo list, speak right up.

I must admit, I forgot about Will...which was sort of like forgetting a 400 lb. gorilla in your bathtub. Upon reflection, however, I'm not so sure that it matters. The decks most notable for "winning with Will" (storm combo) are more than likely just doing your job (being a non-interactive, balls-to-the-wall damage dealer) better than you. So while they may scoop the subgame, it probably won't save you, especially given that you now have a large number of non-threats (Shahrazad, and Tormod's) in what really will need to be a threat-dense deck. Essentially, my message is that by diluting a sub-Tier 1 deck with somewhat flaky tech, you're not solving its problems.

I was keeping in mind the clarification about card removal in the subgame, however. To me, it seems that down this path lies the best means of abusing Shahrazad, and not the variable (if possibly large) amount of damage it does on the back end. What this does is put less emphasis on playing a color that Shaharazad is not in (red), lowers the number of threats needed, allowing you to put more focus on other disruption, and enables greater possible synergy with the Crypt/other graveyard removal. You're using Shaharazad to make "remove from game" ablilities nasty...the problem is, this basically dictates that your kill condition be deck removal, which seems damn dicey without a combo in mind.

I wonder if Shaharazad could be used as a reset button in a deck-removal combo deck? Like, "Oops, I didn't go off...well, time to try again!" Sensei and Dragon can't really spare the slots, though...anyone got anything here?

I love the heck out of Shaharazad and burn, taken separately, but for many of the reasons stated above, I think Shaharazad is a bad move in a burn deck. It's really just a manabase/redundancy thing.

In a heavily red deck, you will probably not want to run a large number of white sources, if you want to maintain the density of threats required of a burn deck. So when you find WW, you will have reduced the number of white sources available to you in the subgame by 2; this reduction in sources becomes more dire if you used fetchlands or other means to find that WW.

"But,", you may say, "I don't care about finding WW in the subgame, I just want to burn him out there." Well, you just made that job harder, too. Why? Because now you have three deader-than-fried-chicken Shaharazads cluttering up your deck.

The response to this may be, "Well, my opponent will just concede anyway." Why should he? If he thinks that will decrease his chances of winning the main game, there's no reason to--and if I was staring down a burn deck with a full hand, I would almost certainly take my chances. 

As to the point of Shaharazad for disruption, I agree that there is probably some deck out there which would like one, even if only in the board to be wished in for some odd, not-currently-envisioned-by-me circumstance.

As to the notion of a Boros+Shah Vintage port, I'm not feeling it--seems like it would be RW Fish with a shoddy disruption package. I would love nothing more , though, than to be completely proven wrong.

This may be the deck out there that could benefit the most from running Shattered Dreams in the board for Duress 5-?. (So you don't have to look it up, Shattered Dreams is Duress that can only hit artifacts.)

It grabs Chalice from whoever, some of Stax's more evil tricks, Belcher, Slaver, Uba, and steals a small but measureable amount of thunder from storm combo. It seems like in certain metas, it could be a better answer out of the board than the Chalice.

No way to know without testing it, however, how much you want an extra Duress-like effect.

True enough, but this card may allow the possibility of some kind of Counter Storm deck. This would seem to be a more likely archetype in Legacy, where the card pool does not abound in 0cc mana artifacts.  Sorry to back-to-back post, like this...I thought of this on the walk home last night.

It lets you Duress/Cabal Therapy immediately after a card draw during your opponent's turn.

Or (and I know that this is dead jank), if you resolve a Slaver, you can cast an instant Trade Secrets during their turn to win immediately, if your match is short on time.

So you don't have to look it up:

Trade Secrets - 1UU - Sorcery - Target opponent draws two cards, then you draw up to four cards. That opponent may repeat this process as many times as he or she chooses.

I was not aware of this. My apologies for polluting the board with faulty history. If it's not too off topic, who was this prankster?

You make a good point, but in the metagame you describe, where Fish is "the only decent deck [most people] can afford", there will exist other decent affordable decks. Why? Because in a Fish-heavy meta, a deck that beats Fish is 'the proverbial l33t haX'. Enter Better Than Fish. If BTF becomes popular, Fish will go down, and Better Than Better Than Fish will crop up. (It could well be argued that there will be powered decks which are both BTF and BTBTF, I know) The point here is that in that metagame, there has been no loss in richness, only a loss in brokenness and degeneracy, imposed by a low proxy limit.

Regarding the comment that the same Powered people will win every tourney. Yeah, probably true. The 5 proxy doesn't really allow you to build the best thing out there, but it may let you play without getting wasted.

I've seen a couple variations on this, but none that really expanded on it.

First, is it possible that too many proxies hurts ingenuity? If I'm a dedicated, competitive T2 player (I'm not...hypothetically) and I want to try Vintage, and you allow me unlimited proxies, what am I probably going to try, if I want to do well? Probably the biggest pile of broken that I can netdeck. But had I been forced to really woodshed and make something I could get my hands on, and showed up with some semi-jank, home-brew Mono-Black Discard Carpet Bomb (or something), even if I lose every game, if I make one or two interesting, and more importantly unique, plays vs. LongStaxxyMcBrokenPile, the Vintage community has an opportunity to gain something.

To quote an obvious example, Fish started out as a pure budget deck, and gains some things from being lightly powered. I don't think anyone here would say that the creation of Fish was a bad day for Vintage--the question is, would it have come into existance in a 60 proxy environment? (Arguments are fun, and I'm admittedly trying to start one. I'll say bad things about your mother, if that's what it takes.)

Second, does increasing the number of proxies "hurt" (ie narrow) the metagame? If noone's playing budget aggro, then none of the big decks will try to tune themselves to beat it. Then you have decks like Keeper falling by the wayside because their whole raison d'etre was that they could hang with the big boys, and not randomly lose to Erniegeddon. Admittedly, GRUba probably won't lose to Elf.dec whatever way it's tuned, but it's sure not making its life easier if it was running Null Rod and Wasteland maindeck, and now has a bunch of dead draws littering it.

So how many would I like to see? (Sigh...it's all about the number...I'll tell you if you promise to respect me in the morning...)

Five.

Justification: It lets you play a budget deck with a little bit of power and near power (Workshop, Drain...), but nothing really power-intensive. This way, you can "sweeten" a fundamentally decent idea, but you can't just Sharpie up Uba.

Let the record show that I own no power, nor any pretender to the throne (Drain, Bazaar, etc.)