The last two responses I received alternately said that there's no permanent based hate, and no instant based hate for me to worry about. Someone should tell that to my opponents.
But seriously, there's a lot of instant based hate to worry about:
bounce, stp, stifle, trickbind, wipe away, extirpate. Not to mention the lethal damage that red mages are sometimes able to muster.
In short, there's lots of instant based hate to worry about. The WGD combo is very easy to disrupt with instants if you know your timing rules.
This build is pulling away from the synergies and advantages that are present in WGDX. You still run RtR, but this card is weakened by the diminished number of instant speed win conditions (WGD has an additional 4 instant speed win cards: +1 Intuition, +2 Cunning Wish, and +1 Entomb). If you're going to do this, go with Compulsion instead, because your RtR plays will probably be quite underwhelming.
I don't understand how running less instant-speed win cards makes RtR weaker. Are you saying I should be afraid to cast RtR because I need to hold onto it as a win condition? I've still got the big artifact mana and plenty of cards to dump in the graveyard. To me, those are the factors that make RtR strong in dragon.
I would entirely support the use of Lim Dul's Vaults if you plan on using Xantid Swarms, but I would not cut card drawing from WGD - the DAs or Squees are very important in this archetype. WGD is a very redundant archetype in terms of its combo pieces, and is well served by card drawing.
I don't want to include Squee. It's a dead card w/o bazaar. To me the big success of WGDX is making the deck less reliant on bazaar to win. Yes the deck has lots of redundancies because it needs specific cards to win.
DA is good, but are the odds really that good for drawing what you need off a flashed back DA? Maybe the sting of defeat is clouding my judgment, but DA seems to disappoint a lot. Scenarios where I NEED to draw something specific (say, an animate spell) and flashing back the DA misses, while at the same time speeding up my opponent's clock against me.
Your "primary kill card" puzzles me - Bogardan Hellkite is not a good win condition, because it requires other cards (aside from WGD and Animate) for the card to actually kill your opponent. Your actual primary kill card is Witness; Hellkite is just an alternate means by which Witness can kill (aside from the traditional Ancestral Recall kill), but is very much inferior in a deck that aims to exploit Read the Runes, which Hellkite cannot do. Hellkite might be a decent SB card to bring in versus Fish (or as pre-SB if you face a lot of Fish in your meta) for alternate animation or as part of an Oath conversion, but maindeck I'd stick to Cunning Wishes.
Maybe I test against stax too much, but wishing for answers was always too slow for me. Hence it's "just" a win card, sitting in my hand the whole game until I can safely animate a worldgorger. I'm interested in filling this deck with lots of versatile cards and less situational cards like squee and entomb.
But you're absolutely right, using bogardan hellkite to win requires more than just an animated worldgorger. You need to an extra animate spell in hand, or a ruby/lotus in play, or a bazaar in play, or a rtr/intuition in hand. Maybe I've been lucky so far, but I haven't run into the situation where I'm ready to go off but I don't have a way to get the hellkite into play from my graveyard. Since I do require an extra animate spell it might be a good idea to fit the fourth necromancy into the deck.
Worst case scenario you could start the dragon loop, generate enough mana to cast all the spells in your hand, and then end the loop by animating the hellkite. It doesn't win right away but it definitely improves your board position while simultaneously whittling away at your opponent's life total and/or creatures in play.
The Regrowth is weak. What are you Regrowing that's so important in such a redundant archetype? You might as well consider running Yawgmoth's Will instead.
Like I said previously, it allows me to do much more interesting things with intuition. It's also useful to get a spent ancestral back, or to duress one last time before going off, or to get a win condition back after a painful bazaar session. I don't like the idea of Yawgmoth's Will because it acts like Leyline of the Void against you for a turn. This precludes you from going off on the same turn that you cast yawgwill.
The Pernicious Deeds are weak - you are worried phantom threats. Deed is a fantastic SB card, but most main decks will have 0-1 permanent based hate cards to worry about, and even then WGDX addresses this potential possibility via the 2 Cunning Wish. If you feel that your meta features a number of decks that run main deck Leyline of the Void (the only "serious" permanent-based threat against WGD), play some other archetype in the short run to try to push it out of main decks - Leyline isn't that strong pre-SB against the field, and the Ichorid hype has passed.
Deed is also good against stax's lock components, keeping your opponent from getting too far ahead of you via confidant, keeping grunt from digging up your gorgers, buying yourself another turn or two against aggro, etc. Again, I feel like I play/test against a different set of decks than you or something. But I do value your advice. Perhaps I'll try running 2x Chain of Vapor maindeck and relegate all four deeds to the SB.
Running only 3 of your strongest card - Intuition? Are you really afraid of Extirpate?
I'm not so sure about intuition being the backbone of this deck. It's good, no doubt, but Lim-Dul's vault might be stealing intuition's place in my heart. That card has done nothing but good things for me since I started playing with it.
Maybe I haven't been playing with intuition correctly, but when I played it in WGDX it always did one of two thing for me:
*allowed me to tutor for a 3-of (animate, RtR, bazaar)
or more frequently:
*acted as a more expensive entomb: (show a pile consisting of WGD, WGD, DA)
There's other cards that mess with your graveyard besides extirpate. It doesn't make sense to cast intuition early in the game for WGD, WGD, DA if you know your opponent has four jotun grunts maindeck.
Keep in mind that I designed this build for myriad game's tournament this past weekend. This was the first vintage event that I know of where planar chaos would be legal. If there was ever going to be a time when lots of people would be running extirpate, I figured it would be this tournament. This mostly happened as a side-effect, but I discovered tat my deck is fairly resilient to extirpate. Take my gorgers, I beat you to death with the hellkite. Take my hellkite I recur ancestral with the witness. Take my witness I animate the kite, then animate the gorger for the win. A single extirpate vs WGDX could put you in "beat down with witness" mode
I disagree with Meadbert about 21 mana sources being too high - it is actually on the low side in a RtR based WGD. In the older Compulsion/Squee based builds it seemed that 19 was the bare minimum.
I don't think I could afford to cut any mana sources, especially considering how often I blow up my own artifacts with deed or RtR. The five color mana base is a possibility. That would make it much more likely that I could hardcast bogardan hellkite at instant speed ftw during a dragon loop. I would miss the deck-thinning effect of fetches however.
My suggestion, if you haven't already done so, is to start by playing WGDX first, and see how synergistic the build actually is and what resources are available to you when combatting "hate". It is likewise important not to succumb to "the fear" and have it dictate how you construct the deck. WGDX can be pulled in many different directions, and you touch upon some of these - using Xantids and Lim Duls Vaults, for example, is a relatively unexplored avenue for this iteration. Just make sure you're not sacrificing those things that made WGDX successful in the first place, unless what you are bringing to the table can very strongly offset the losses.
I've played WGDX quite a bit, and it was a desire to make the deck more resilient to "incidental hate" that led me to make changes. The fact that hardly anyone plays this archetype, and the few people who do seem to scrub out consistently, leads me to believe that something new has to be attempted.
I agree about not succumbing to "the fear", but it's also very important to establish a board position where you can safely combo off. Going "all in", so to speak, often times results in you staring at an empty board. Be careful, but don't be paranoid.
Never would I play this deck with anything less than 4 Force of Will. Xantid Swarm is a rather weak choice right now, considering that there is very little instant speed removal in the format. Sure it shuts off permission, but Dragon can often fight through control match-ups via overwhelming card advantage (of which this deck has very litte) or winning in response to an opponent's spell.
FoW is good, but often times it's very painful to select a card to pitch.
I agree that xantid swarm is weak. It's slow (summoning sickness), it only stops spells (not abilities), and you can only take advantage of it once if your opponent has ANY blocker in play. Hence why I will start experimenting with City of Solitude in its place.
I don't think a dragon deck should have more than eight disruption pieces maindeck. More than that and you're going down the road of control, which is not a role that this deck can successfully play IMO.
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