I like the direction the list headed, especially with Orb Of Dreams, which I've often advocated for in the past.

One card that I think has potential in a list like this is Sword of Fire and Ice. I've never been the biggest fan of the card in the past since it was neither a lock piece or a threat on its own, but the protection it offeres seems like it could be very important right now. With the rise of Jace, Lightning Bolt, and Ancient Grudge in almost every blue it seems as though it might be difficult to keep a threat on the table at times. Sword helps solve that problem and provides a good way to kill Jaces that isn't Slash Panther. Of course, the extra damage and card draw is just gravy. The issue of what to remove is probably the harder question to answer, and I would currently suggest removing perhaps a single Tangle Wire and going down to 2 Orb Of Dreams since it seems fairly bad in the Workshop mirror.

As far as I know this approach was tested in earlier versions of the deck. Some versions did not feature null rod in favor of the power of key vault and used tutors including vamp, demonic and entomb IIRC. The problem with this strategy, in my opinion is the number of cards needed to cut besides null rods to make keyvault really useful, since Vamp and demonic become must-haves at the least. This dilutes your core strategy and gives you cards that are dead on their own, which is terrible for a deck with as light a draw engine as BRStax that relies on every card to be at least decent on its own.

Finally, I really like the new list and agree with basically every change. I've been playing more gorilla shamans and fewer crucibles in every stax list I've been playing lately and have been consistently quite pleased.

I'd like to echo Norm in saying that Dragoon was incredible. The battle system was unique and innovative, the plot and characters were solid, and the game was difficult but never made me want to chuck a controller, which is good. Another personal favorite was The Legend Of Legaia, which had an innovative combat system and an interesting story, but was a little on the easy side.
All that said, I did vote for FF III/VI for all of the reasons listed by others.

Although I've done very limited testing with Bomberman recently, I do feel compelled to offer a suggestion based on observations from playing other drain-based decks.

Sensei's Divining Top and Voltaic Key together create a sustainable, decent draw engine, allowing you to essentially draw an extra card a turn for 2 mana. Since this deck has Top in play quite often due to trinket mages, would it be worth it to include a second voltaic key in the deck? It makes up half of your good combo, and makes good cards like top and sol ring better, and is tutorable with trinket mage.
On the positive side, assembling key-top can give you a big edge in slower matches like drain mirrors. On the negative side though, a second key can lead to more dead draws without top or time vault. The interaction may be a little too cute and not good enough, but I think I'll be testing with a second key and see how often it's a dead draw compared to how often it gets me a few extra cards with top.

I agree with this last point, and I will argue for the inclusion of both Titan and Bazaar keeping this in mind.
Though I understand and can appreciate your points regarding Sundering Titan and Bazaar, I also feel that not including them seems like a bit of a contradiction in the context of your list. The list you presented has a great deal of colored bombs and tutors, because they provide the deck with a good deal more raw power than would be available going for a less tutor-intensive approach.

First of all, it's odd in my mind that you include multiple crop rotations and Imperial Seal for power purposes, but in many games tinkering for Titan or using bazaar to fuel welder or crucible are two of THE most powerful things you can do.
Secondly, the fact that you have so many tutors seems to actually add to the argument for the inclusion of Titan and/or Bazaar. Neither are particularily great in the opening hand, granted, but with the critical mass of tutors you have, they are both terrific to have somewhere in your deck. Having 3 tutors for tinker makes it much more likely to find tinker before you draw the Titan and then makes your tinkers much better. The same applies to bazaar, you have several tutors that can get it, and generally you should have 1 of the 8 cards in your list that interact well with Bazaar online before you have the actual Bazaar.

Though I generally agree that splashing green isn't worth it for this deck, I must contest the statement about Goyf. After playing quite a bit with a 5-color shop aggro build featuring Goyf, I can think of exactly 1 turn where I had a 0/1 Tarmogoyf. If they aren't putting cards into their graveyard that means they aren't casting anything, which seems fine for you. Though the splash probably isn't worth it here, tarmogoyf isn't bad in some shop aggro builds and could merit testing if you were to splash. He is basically a 2/3 at worst, which isn't great admittedly. What makes him playable though is the fact that he does only cost 2, for those hands where you may be hurting from your own spheres or just fail to draw a shop, or a non-shop source in the case of comparing him to Gathan raiders.

So you are proposing to make decks less inconsistent by making them bigger? Adding more cards means that your deck, by the nature of probability, becomes less consistent. This arguement just doesn't make sense.

Also, as someone who plays fully-powered 5-color quite a bit, I must say that making the games less consistent makes them even less fun. If you think it's bad now being blown out by a hand full of moxen, just imagine how fun it is when you don't draw any of your own insane acceleration or bombs. Does it happen less often? Yes, yes it does. But also makes it infinitely less fun when it does happen.

Lastly, who exactly do you honestly think would support this? The DCI and WOTC surely aren't going to make a move like this, and the vintage community has been adamant in the fact that they will stick with the DCI's decisions. This isn't the first call to separate the community from most of the rest of the Magic world, and I'm sure that this will end up no different.

My worst play ever was probably the final game of the finals at an event we had already split. We agreed to split the prize, and play for the title and the extra $5 since the split wasn't perfectly even.

It's game 3, I'm playing stax against slaver on the draw, he mulls to six, and I draw Lotus, Shop, Rack and Ruin, Trinisphere, Triskelion, a CoB, and some other card. He plays a seat of the synod, then a sol ring, and says go. Since this is on the worst plays thread, I bet you can guess where there is going... I draw, play my shop and lotus, and tap out for... Triskelion. Yeah. Next turn he gets drain mana, starts countering anything I try to play, and resolve a huge yawg will on like turn 4 after time walking. Man do I suck.

I went as Alex from A Clockwork Orange and had a good time, but nothing beats the costume of a friend of mine at the same party.

He wore a brown suit and carried around a briefcase, with a fake noose around his neck. Suicidal Stock Broker. Everyone had a huge laugh at it all through the party.

The list looks pretty solid as far as Cerebral Assassin goes, though there are a few slots I wonder about. The first, and most pondersome, is Merchant Scroll. Scrolling for Intuition is very expensive, scrolling for Ancestral is meh in this deck. The only real reason I can see for its inclusion is to find your lone bounce spell. I think this would be served better by simply a second bounce spell, or possibly another thoughtseize, since only having 5 disruption spells seems risky.

Also, why no Deep Analysis? This card is very solid in Dragon, and this runs a similar engine, meaning there may very well be a spot for Deep here.

I feel like I should chip into the flash discussion from the perspective DeMars has been bringing up lately. Anyone form the area who knows me knows I will almost always play some sort of shop deck at any given event, for a variety of reasons. It's my pet deck. It also happens to have awful match-ups against oath and flash.

I went 5-3 in games against flash at the event, with a deck that shouldn't win even half of those games. Was my maindeck warped around beating flash and oath a little? Sure was. But why wouldn't it be? I was confident in all of my other matches, so why shouldn't I try to hate out my worst matches if I have space. I went into the day 2-0, including beating flash, and my record against flash was solid all day.

I guess what that rambling was getting at is that if a pet deck can be tweaked a little with OK, although probably not optimal, meta slots and compete pretty well, why the hell is everyone complaining?

Agree with everyone above. Everything went very smoothly, and the event was a lot of fun. I was the Red-shop guy, except I was playing Stax, not shop aggro. I always play shops, and the only way I had of competing was with 4 Caps and 4 Moon Men. No juggernauts or aggro pieces at all.

The meta was great, I ended at a disappointing 3-3, but playing against a total of 4 different archetypes in 6 rounds was pretty sweet. And although I still hate flash as a deck, power-wise it's fine, and it's only slightly more annoying than other decks.

MUD as an archetype has always intrigued me, although I have yet to abandon 5c Stax for MUD in actual tournament play. There is one reason for the hesitation, the Mirror Match. MUD has a really rough time against any other sort of stax decks because of a certain little goblin.

I do believe that the archetype is very strong, and think that metalworker allows really stupid things to happen very quickly. The only weakness is how vulnerable the deck is in the mirror, but I believe that can be remedied by one little card... Powder Keg.

Keg not only kills opposing welders dead, but it also makes up for one of the biggest weaknesses of Stax in general, losing the dice roll. Dealing with early threats is the biggest problem with MUD has, and Keg can do that surprisingly quickly. It deals with fast goyfs and dryads as soon as turn 3, and can come down and wreck EtW tokens on the spot.

I would suggest going
-1 Cloister
-1 Thorn
+2 Keg

To your latest list.

 

Write a book on how to get rich quick and market the hell out of it until it becomes a best seller and you become filthy rich. I can see it now...

Get Rich Quick by: Bram
Step 1: Establish yourself in an online community.
Step 2: Ask that community to help make you rich.
Step 3: Actually listen to their terrible ideas.
Step 4:
Step 5: Profit.

I think Kobefan is heading in the right direction for this deck right now. Mainboarding a control magic effect with sower is incredible right now, and I think 3 is a good number, even if it does seem a little high. Thoughtseize is a must in this deck, the damage is well worth the ability to take creatures. Crucible is also a beating against almost everything right now, allowing you to make full use of your numerous strip effects, and 2 is probably the right number, since you draw a lot of cards and never want to see more than 1.

I would make a few changes to the list posted though. I think REB is losing effect right now, even with gush still being popular. I think Spell Snare becomes a viable alternative right now, especially since a lot of your REBs are hitting merchant scroll anyway, and snare is actually quite good against stax and fish as well, where REB would be pretty bad. The other thing I would change is tweaking the mana base a little. With crucible in the main, Factory is very solid against GAT and shops, providing a wall of chump blockers, and is very good against other fish, where it takes down most creatures, and can be recurred. I think I would take the mana base and go:
+2 Factory
-1 Mox Pearl
-1 Wasteland
Wasteland is a good card, no doubt, but it loses some of it's power against shops when they have 3 or more crucibles in the main, and there is also always the possibility of GAT having the the gush to make it useless. I think 4 strip effects is enough right now.

A friend of mine played URBana Fish at GenCon, going 3-3 drop.

He played a list he worked on seperately from the list in this thread, and I think he made some sup-optimal maindeck choices, such as only 2 ninja, and the addition of 3 Cutpurse, and no maindeck control magic/threads.

One thing that he commented on after playing the rounds he did and some more games at our hotel, is that sideboarding something else against Flash might be needed. He lost a suprisingly high number of games against flash, even when he had leyline and 1 or 2 counters. Trickbind came up as a potential answer, and we are testing it in both the main and the board now.

Normal foil 'Tog. The promo foiling on gold golds looks like someone foiled the cards with urine...

WB Japanese Flash OR BB English ones?

Wow, it looks like my music tastes are completely different from most other people's here. Here's my current few tracks...

The Furios - Seventy Seven
Before that was:
Choking Victim - 500 Channels
Against All Authority - Sweet Televised Destruction
Cranked Up - Another Vietnam
Citizen Fish - Back To Square One

Are there any other people here that listen to ska, or is it really a dead genre?

And Pandora really does rock, I encourage anyone who hasn't to check it out.

I never liked the matrix system, there are way too many cards in a deck to be constantly checking, especially in vintage, a format of singletons.

Personally, my friends and I just pool all of our commons after every draft we do and just sharpie decks on the backs on those.
We never proxy on basic lands though, we need those for draft decks and when we add cards to our 1000+ card highlanders. 

I;m not usually on Ebay, but I want a second opinion on this auction, and all of the others the seller has listed, they look very supect...
http://cgi.ebay.com/MtG-Gathering-Mox-Ruby-Limited-beta-rare-no-reserv_W0QQitemZ230148407149QQihZ013QQcategoryZ49194QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
The picture is pretty fuzzy, there is a large glare over a lot of the card, and the borders seem very very dark and unaffected by the glare.
All of his items are like this, with very heavy borders, and a glare. Also, he has all positive feedback, but it is all from people who are no longer registered and the feedback is quite old. Anyone else think that these auctions are fake?

I think a big part of the reason Null Rod has fallen out of favor in prison lately is because against most of the top decks, it really isn't all that good. Take a look at some of the decks that are doing the best right now and how bad Null Rod is against a lot of them...
Flash - Plays only on color moxen and lotus
GAT - Plays petal, Lotus, And probably 4/5 moxen/crypt.
Ichorid - LED? Maybe?
Fish - Most lists play only on color moxen and lotus, the exception being URBana
Bomberman & Stax -  These are really the only matches where Null Rod is exceptionally good, and you have a lot of hate already for these two decks.
Shutting off more cards in your deck than in the opponents is pretty bad, and coutner-productive to your gameplan.

As for playing Karn in the main, he is somewhat of a win-more card, but he is also a win-now card, which can be a somewhat big problem playing Uba Stax. An opponent can be locked pretty tight, and still manage to get the resources to rebuild or Hurkyls eventually because we cannot kill them in a reasonable amount of turns. Karn solves that problem, forcing them to find their answer now, instead of letting them capitalize on our very slow clock.

It's true, his writing looks like crap, and it wasn't updated very often, and still isn't...

Another of my favorites is Cyanide And Happiness: http://www.explosm.net/comics/945/

The art and writing are both horrible, it is really just a collection of one-liners, in very poorly drawn comic form. Funny if you can turn off your brain for a while.

I can't imagine a lot of people getting these, as they are very musical genre-driven, but these are two of my favorites not mentioned yet:
www.21deadmonkeys.com - for anyone who listens to ska
http://www.mitchclem.com/nothingnice/ - touted as the world's first online punk comic.
Mitch Clem (Nothing nice) also does some funny other one I can't remember with the same characters from Nothing Nice.

I like the list, it is definitely interesting. I have tested other control decks in the past using comandeer as a 1 or 2 of, but a 4-of is impressive.

A few comments on the list:

I am not sold at all on Nix, because it is rarely better than annul, which sees little to no play, for good reason. Also, it hurts your chalice at 1, which is a beating against most decks now.

Daze also seems weak, because the tempo hit can be bad for a control deck like this, and it is just too dead to draw late.

I agree that angel is hard on the mana base, but it seems like it fits well into the deck, although there might be something better. Have you tested decree as a finisher, especially now with standstill in the deck?

Also, in relation to the draw engine, why no FoF? That card is insane in pure control, getting you basically the most cards ever from 1 spell. It is especially good in a deck as redundant as this.

Adding a few more off color moxen to the mana base seems like a good idea to me. Yes, it conflicts with chalice, but it also enables turn 1 scrolls and standstills more often, which is a good thing. Also, adding more moxen opens up the option of mana leak as a turn-1 hard counter.

That's the things I can think of off the top of my head, take them with a grain of salt, or consider and test, your call.

Yea, sorry about that. I didn't realize it was mother's day either.

ANyways, event tomorrow, anyone else here going to make it for sure?

Thanks for reminding me about the issue.

I am going to say that Future Sight will NOT be legal for this event, because of supply issues and the fact that Wizards isn't allowing it in constructed for anohter week after the event.

Good to know I have at least a little support.
*update* If attendence is good enough, I just obtained an italian drain to give out for second if enough people show.
Also, I made the event 15 proxies specifically to draw new players to the format in a somewhat centralized location, so be sure to tell anyone you know about the event.

What - Ancestral Tournament
Where - Hobbytown New Berlin
3830 S Moorland Rd
New Berlin, WI 53151
When - Registration begins at 12 noon
Event begins at 1 pm.
Entrance - $20
Proxies - 15

Unlimited Ancestral Recall will be guarenteed first place, additional prizes based on attendence.

I can't think of any really weird habits from many players, but I did play one very peculiar looking game against Endress in a T8 in Milwaukee.

He was carrying around bobble heads that day for luck, cold for some reason, and playing combo in the usual compulsive Endress way. Just picture the match of Endress, hunched over wrapped in a pink blanket, trying to decide whether or not to mull for literaly 10 minutes, while i practically am falling asleep, all the while surrounded by bobble heads of various sorts.

Top, brainstorm, and standstill. I have never been a huge fan of brainstorm in fish, but here are my views anyways.

Top I like as a singleton to smooth out draws, but brainstorm does so much better. Brainstorm is also just a single mana to use and pitches to force, which probably makes brainstorm better than top.

That leaves the question of brainstorm vs. standstill. Standstill has great synergy with the deck, and is amazing if your deck is ALREADY working. Brainstorm makes it so your deck GETS working. Both pitch to force, so that is a non-issue. Overall though with the style you are going for I think standstill is actually better. You should have just enough tempo and fixing early to make standstill good, and probably better than brainstorm.