future sight and counters isnt the hottest thing. The problem with future sight often is that you play like mad until you get stuck on your 2nd land or on a counter. I know that brainstorm and reshuffles helps a lot to keep the engine going, but you can't easily play your entire deck that way.
Personally I would cut the trinket mage. They cost a 'lot' of mana for a deck that tries to run through the entire deck. You really ought to try artificer's intuition instead, providing you with free reshuffles.
A problem that I can foresee is that the deck cannot realistically hope to go off before turn 3, because the first 2 turns seems to be dedidacted towards getting a future sight into play. The big issue that I see is that the 3rd turn (assuming a future sight hit play on the 2nd turn) only provides you with a 'gamble' to try and play the entire deck (go off). I have personally tried playing with future sight in my 'New Long' decklist I have posted a good while ago
http://www.themanadrain.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=17683&highlight=long . You really ought to take a look at my thread, as it does point out a similar deck that already can abuse future sight.
BTW, you can't use lions eye diamond to pay for future sight, unless youre playing a 2nd future sight and that the 2nd is the one being shown by the first one.
Conserning some card changes:
-The next suggestion will probably seem very very dumb, but in my view would probably we better. Try replacing the 4x future sight with 4x recycle. Recycles have the advantage that they 'stack up' together. If you have 2 into play, you draw 2 cards for each played cards. Their effect is similar. I will note that they won't work well with counterspells, due to the 2 cards restriction. You might want to play with more cantrips, like chromatic sphere. I will add that they work great with recycle (draw-2 cards + mana fix
. If you can manage to turn this into a 'real' combo deck, you ought to cut the mana drains, and perhaps consider replacing the force with duress or xantid swarm.
-Obviously, you forgot to put tolarian academy in there.
-Where are the draw-7 ??? Seriously, read that many many times over. Future sight is not a draw-7 because it tends to stall-out unless you can get an almost perfect draw (like well timed retract to add mana, and a lot of free artifacts, plus some shuffles for the futuresight stalls out on counters/2nd land). You really, really ought to change the tutors for demonic tutor (where are you?) AND put at least 2 or 3 draw-7s. The idea is that your draw-7 can act as a 'mini-tutor' AND they will give you mana in the case of your deck.
-Where is mind's desire? and yawgmoth's bargain? (and possibly necropotence)... yawgmoth's will? dark ritual? I can understand you don't want dark rituals because they don't retract, but they're still really good accelerants that like don't need a retract to provide more than 1 mana. They also allow you to easily replace the brain freeze with tendrils of agony.
-The balance looks very random, but I can understand that your deck isn't a pure combo deck in the sense that it goess off faster than aggro kills you. I know I made the same mistake as you in my original new long thread. You soon realize that balance is 'bad' in a combo deck because the card is usually good against the decks that you're supposed to kill way before they can kill you. Therefore, it is cuttable (assuming you can combo off quickly).
I can understand some of your decisions, but theres some ideas that look fragile. I can see that you want to play out the deck a bit like Tog, where you just blindly mana drain anything your opponent plays in order to fuel your next turn/kill. Unfortunately I don't think this can work in your current deck as it is. Perhaps that strategy could prove to work. Honestly, I have NEVER seen a combo deck that play mana drain that way. /me sets a mental note
I will assume here that nobody tried it because no combo deck could reliably get UU into play fast enough (due to the way mana bases are usually done in combo decks). Also, usually combo decks try to kill before control decks can have their UU into play. I will just make a short note here that perhaps someone could make a combo deck with 4x xantid swarm (for the control matchup) and 4x mana drains (for everything else), thus allowing for perhaps new ways of playing combo.
On a sidenote, you might also want to have a check at the list of good type-1 cards I posted there:
http://www.themanadrain.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=18568. They're all sorted by categories which makes the search for new ideas quite easy.
-marton
