Having never played a madness style deck, I would have liked to see an example or two of a hand.
What to look for, how to play the first land - mana producing or bazaar first? This article still left me pretty isolated from how the deck actually plays out.
That's a fair point. in the future I'd love more advice like this, to try and make my articles as accessible as possible.
To answer your specific issue it's pretty hand dependent. If you have a Spell Pierce or Spell Snare you almost always lead with the mana. If you don't, but you have Squees or Rootwallas you'll almost always lead with the Bazaar. If you don't have either you lead with whatever you want to get Wastelanded the least, or the colored mana if you're expecting to want a 2 or 3 drop soon.
Have you considered cutting the robot from TPS for the second Tendrils? I have never been a fan of a robot in TPS or storm combo in general since I always felt like I lost when I put him in play. This was espcially true against Shops, which is probably the biggest reason to include a robot. With Myr Battlesphere this has changed things since it can tap down for Tangle Wire and still be usefull but its just a suggestion. I would think playing a Robot would be more of a "training wheel" scenerio then playing a second Tendrils.
I can't claim to be a TPS guru, but I feel like a Tinker robot is just such a powerful play in any deck that can run it. It attacks the other player on a completely different level than the rest of your deck, making it extremely unprofitable for your opponent to play around/sideboard against it. I was also excited to try Battlesphere in the list, because 7 is extremely cheap for a Tinker target, and I wanted to see how realistic a play "Ritual, Ritual, Battlesphere" was.
Cutting the robot is interesting though, as in that case I would likely drop Tinker and Jar as well, freeing up a lot of room to play with. It's worth noting that over the course of a very short tournament, Tinker-Lotus, Tinker-Battlesphere, and Hardcast Jar all won me games, but it's hard to say if they are essential or not.
I also was never a fan of 12 land TPS as I felt the manabase was always rough. I cut Imperial Seal for the 3rd Underground a long time ago and never regretted it. This could be because I am not the biggest fan of top deck tutors and Imp is certainly the worse of the bunch being played. I don't think the dream scenerio of having to Imp for Recall or Necro is really worth it. I was always happy with another land.
That makes perfect sense - and Imp Seal is even worse now with the likelyhood of an opponent dropping Jace and fatesealing you.
Also is there a reason why you didn't play 4 Delta?
Not a good one - I only have three foil Deltas.
My last question is what do you think about Preordain in combo or general?
I haven't gotten a chance to test it in TPS but have played with 3 copies in more of a Pitch Long style deck and was surprised about how much it helped smooth things out.
I think Preordain is as good, if not better, than Ponder, but those cantrips aren't super-exciting for me compared to "bombs". I really did want to try out a 3/4 preordain list, but I couldn't figure out what to drop. If I were exploring TPS more that would be a direction I'd try... but there's a lot of other decks I'd like to figure out first.
