The idea behind this deck comes after losing quite a few games to tezzeret decks resolving dark confidant and eventually killing through the attack phase while controlling the game with all the extra cards.
I'm not looking to build a combo deck so leave your "add time vault combo" comments to appropriate threads. This just isn't the way I like to win a game of magic.
Please take a moment to read what I have to say on this issue with an open mind.
What is your goal with this deck? Are you designing to have fun at FNM/Kitchen Table, or are you designing it to win? This is an important question to think about and answer when building and tuning a deck.
If oyur answer is "I am building this deck with the goal of having fun being more important than winning", then stop reading my post. (or skip to the big bold "or" for some points that don;t involve key/vault) Right now. Nothing else I have to say will be relevant for you.
However, if your answer is"I am building this deck with the goal of winning being more important than having fun", then I question your statement. The fact is, you've built a deck full of tutors, draw, and recursive elements that would help you get destroyed/coutnered cards back. You have quite of bit of permission and plenty of ways to win in extra turns. What you don't have is anything broken, or anything to stop things from being broken.
Unfortunately, Vintage as a formet is about being broken. As a Vintage player who has the goal of winning, we need to accept that.
If our goal is to have fun and play moxen, then go ahead, go nuts. I know if I had time to play casual magic I'd be brewing up something with Black Lotuts and the janky Goblin Bombardment/Reins of Power combo in the same deck becuase that's the sort of thing I like to play. However, I'm here to win. In order to that, I need to accept the following:
Sometimes, no matter how much you don't like a choice, you have to accept that it's the right choice for your deck. I love Progenitus. My inner Timmy squeals with excitement every time I see him in my binder. Unfortunately, playing him in Oath in not right for the current metagame. So he sits in my binder, waiting for a home, or waiting for me to pick up some Natural Orders and play him in legacy. When I switched form Progenitus in Oath to double dragon (this was pre-Zendikar), my win percentage DOUBLED. Was it as fun? No, but I let go of my inner Timmy and embraced my inner Spike, and I won more. I accheived what I was trying to accomplish.
The next step was to move on from Oath entirely and embrace Storm Combo, but that's another story and it's very meta-specific.
My point is, if you want to win. Key/Vault will win you games. It will win you alot of games that you won't win otherwise. It will win you the occaisional game on turn One, and plenty on turns two, three, and four, which is something that your current deck simply cannot do, and soemthing that you may need to do against certain archetypes. Dredge seems like an Aweful match-up for you, near unwinnable. Oath runs almost as much permission and their wincon very much trumps yours. You say BU Tezz has been fine- was the person running it at a skill level sufficient to make this claim? I don't see how their instant win vs your 3-5 attack phase win backed by the same permission and more broken spells doesn't trump your strategy.
How was the Storm pilot you tested against? I only ask because your decklist looks like somethign I would walk right over, and I'm certainly not the best Storm pilot out there by a long long shot. I just don't see how you can deal with that level of bomb density for long enough to kill us.
If however, you could deal with it for 2 or three turns and then take all the rest of the turn, then maybe I could see it. Your deck needs key-vault.
ORRemember how I said Vintage was about broken things? Well, it can also be about stopping broken things. You have an extremely low curve, why not cut the Top's and some off-color moxen and add Null Rod? It slows down broken starts immensely, stops Key-Vault, and is just awesome. Your last line says Fish - I'm not sure why in a meta topped by an artifact based strategy you would play a "Fish" deck without it's best weapon to combat Broken.dec in all its various incarnations.
As an aside, has 7 duress effects really been that good for you? Don't you just run out of stuff to target, given that they are likely just casting threats after a few turns rather than holding them?
The core of the issue here is that your deck doesn't do what I think are the fundamental rquirements of a Vintage Tournament deck:
Do broken things, or be really really good at stopping them.
Nothing you do is all that broken. And you don't have really powerful hosers for the format's most broken strategies. In my experience, just permission and discard don't cut it becuase they are one-for-one answers and don't address inevitability.
If none of this rings true for you, I'd honestly suggest Legacy might just be a better format for you. You can do some very broken thigns there, but you don't have to play an "unfair" strategy in order to win. This is no shame- some people just like it better, and maybe that's true for you.
