Established Blue Engines:
Gush
Dark Confidant
Oath
Standstill
For the most part, these are all defining cards of a deck. Almost every blue deck will run four copies of something on that list. There usually isn't much overlap between them either, other than Oath lists using Gush and the fleeting appearance of Bob/Gush last summer. Mystic Remora deserves an honorable mention here, but it will always show up with one of the other engines and not just by itself.
Snapcaster can sort of be seen as an engine unto itself. For example:
Creatures [5]
1 Blightsteel Colossus
4 Snapcaster Mage
Instants [22]
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Brainstorm
1 Echoing Truth
1 Gifts Ungiven
1 Nature's Claim
1 Vampiric Tutor
2 Spell Snare
3 Flusterstorm
3 Mana Drain
4 Force of Will
4 Mental Misstep
Sorceries [6]
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Merchant Scroll
1 Ponder
1 Time Walk
1 Tinker
1 Yawgmoth's Will
Planeswalkers [2]
2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
Artifacts [10]
1 Black Lotus
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Sol Ring
1 Time Vault
1 Voltaic Key
Lands [15]
1 Island
2 City of Brass
2 Riptide Laboratory
2 Scalding Tarn
2 Tropical Island
2 Underground Sea
4 Misty Rainforest
Sideboard:
4 Surgical Extraction
4 Leyline of the Void
2 Doom Blade
2 Nature's Claim
1 Forest
2 Trygon Predator
This uses none of the established blue engines, and relies on Snapcaster to provide overwhelming redundancy. At the same time, Snapcaster also gives you extreme versatility with a minimal investment in "wildcards." Running 1-2 copies of Flusterstorm, REB, Nature's Claim, and other techy cards in the maindeck is very efficient. You have repeated access to blowout effects in appropriate matchups, but you also aren't clogging up your hand with potentially dead cards in other matchups. When you see Snapcaster being a splash like this, it is usually assimilating into deck's strategy instead of supporting it entirely by himself. That's what I'm much more interested in lately - Snapcaster as an addition to the existing engines. Most of these questions are already answered:
Oath: Can't play Snapcaster
Dark Confidant: Snapcaster/Bob decks have been the best deck in Europe for a while now
Standstill: Snapcaster has made T8 in some Landstill lists
Gush: . . .
So of the existing engines, it's safe to say that Snapcaster plays nicest with Bob. It's a very powerful deck, and I think it returns Suicide Jace Vault type builds to prominence. Anyway, Gush has had very little exploration with Snapcaster (at least in terms of mindshare). Intuitively, it seems like they have a bit of conflict between them. Snapcaster is mana hungry, Gush decks can often be mana thrifty. My first test was to take the most "pure" Gush deck I could think of, and just shove 3 Snapcaster in without modifying the deck around him. Rich Shay's Champs list was a good starting point, since it is entirely focused around Gush. It evolved into this:
3 Snapcaster Mage
1 Blightsteel Colossus
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Brainstorm
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Flusterstorm
1 Hurky's Recall
3 Mana Drain
4 Force of Will
4 Gush
3 Mental Misstep
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Merchant Scroll
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Time Walk
1 Timetwister
1 Tinker
1 Yawgmoth's Will
3 Preordain
1 Fastbond
2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
1 Black Lotus
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Sol Ring
1 Library of Alexandria
2 Tropical Island
3 Island
3 Underground Sea
4 Misty Rainforest
1 Scalding Tarn
1 Polluted Delta
So, this was an exercise to see how the tension between Gush and Snapcaster worked with no real attention paid to maximizing Snapcaster's usefulness. This already has a fair amount of cards that Snapcaster likes to see though, such as Mana Crypt and some hard counters. The result was very good even with minimal tweaking. Basically, Snapcaster is completely ridiculous even if it does nothing other than flash Misstep or wait for an attempt to flash Ancestral. He also makes your sideboard stuff get a lot more bang for its buck. Against any deck where you want to bring something like Dismember in, it is a complete blowout to be able to flash it back. Not to mention he can surprise block, protect Jace, etc. All of this is fairly obvious, it's not a news flash that Snapcaster is good. What was surprising about this is that he was still INSANELY good with no real changes made to an existing Gush deck. I swapped out the Duress that Rich had for a Flusterstorm, dropped Regrowth/the 4th Misstep/a Hurk's for 3 Snapcaster, and that was pretty much it. Somewhat on topic side note: I want Tendrils or ETW in pretty much any Gush deck these days, at least until the new explosion of Cage exploration subsides. It's really nice to ignore Cage and just Storm out, whether through a lethal Tendrils or a nice meaty ETW for 10 tokens.
After accepting that Snapcaster can easily coexist with pure Gush build, I went wild trying other things. After playing Gush/Snapcaster/Drains, I wanted to try something more aggressive with a lighter mana base. Here is one recent configuration, with nods to Meandeck Bob/Gush and Pikula's "4-3-2" deck.
3 Dark Confidant
2 Snapcaster Mage
2 Trygon Predator
2 Vendilion Clique
1 BSC
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Merchant Scroll
1 Ancestral
1 Brainstorm
1 SDT
1 Ponder
4 Preordain
4 Gush
4 Force of Will
2 Mental Misstep
1 Misdirection
1 Echoing Truth
1 Nature's Claim
1 Fastbond
1 Time Walk
1 Tinker
1 Yawgmoth's
1 Jace
1 Lotus
5 Mox
7 Fetch
3 Sea
2 Trop
2 Island
Sideboard: 1 Nihil, 1 Jailer, 4 Leyline, 2 Dismember, 2 Fluster, 2 Hurks, 2 Claim, 1 Forest
The Misdirection slot goes back and forth a lot, competing with the third copy of Misstep. You could also easily cut a Clique for a second Jace. There is other shuffling around you could do to capitalize a bit more on Snapcaster, like a Steel Sabotage. Echoing Truth deserves the slot over Hurk's though. Notice the lack of Crypt/Sol Ring in a deck that only has Tinker as a reasonable victory condition. Also, note how I am going against my own self imposed rule of trying to include a Storm victory condition as backup against Cage. That's mostly OK, because there are a lot of maindeck answers. It's also OK because this deck in general is insane. It has the exact kind of flow I was looking for. While Snapcaster was a worthwhile addition in the more controlling Drain build, he really does some nice things with this kind of deck. Maxing out on Preordain to dig for a bomb gets much, much better when you have Snapcaster to give you a second chance at the bomb (or the ability to better protect your bomb). He also helps you muck up the boad with creatures, which is nice to buy some turns in this creature infested meta. Post board, Snapcaster is also such a superstar.
I also tried a version of this with less creatures and using Vault/Key. And another build that had 2 copies of Thoughtseize. And another with Tendrils. And about 10 other variants that all had their own flavor. Once you start overlapping blue engines, the sky is really the limit. You already had so many choices to make, just within each engine. Oath deck? Well is it Tyrant, or Demon, or Golden Gun? Is your Landstill deck 2 or 3 colors? Null Rods? EEs? What kind of Gush deck are you using? Gush with Remora? Gush with Tarmogoyfs? Gush storm? Gush control? In Gush control, are you using a storm spell? Do you have the full amount of Preordains, or just x2? Maindeck Grudge, or Claim instead? Maindeck Trygons?
There were so many existing blue decks, and now Snapcaster has just given us an even more exciting number of choices. Are you using Snapcaster control with four copies and Riptide Lab, or splashing him into a Bob deck? Splashing him with Gush? Splashing him with Bob AND Gush? And to think, this is just the "top tier" blue stuff. There are still countless viable blue decks, like Bomberman or other rogue/pet lists. Then, the other archetypes...aggro has Noble Fish, a rapidly improving GW deck, and the always threatening RG beatz. Dredge is still a force. Workshops have four completely distinct and all equally viable builds. Rituals could rise again in the face of Cage. All of these other viable decks just give you more choices on how you want to utilize Snapcaster in your blue deck (if at all). The more good decks there are, the more other semi-good decks can sneak through the cracks...which in turns causes more decks to become good. It's just beautiful to be playing Vintage right now!
All that being said, Snapcaster's greatest strength is its versatility. With so many potential decks that you might encounter, Snapcaster will give you extra mileage out of your best cards for that matchup.
