I think you miss the point of this deck. The goal is to maximize your advantage in mana, reducing their available mana as much as possible, while ramping yours into your win con. Ghost quarters does the reverse of this. You remove land that you have available, while not changing the amount of mana available to the opponent. It's great if you're running non LD, and need an answer to something like, say, Inkmoth Nexus, but it doesn't fit this deck type nearly as well.
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That's really what I'm not sure of. I'll have to give it a few tries before I decide what kind of priority they deserve. The extreme utility of the card is what would incline me towards including it, but I'm not certain how the beast would end up working, and whether that should remove it from the running. I guess that's something where you'll just have to play and see... =)
That's exactly what I've been thinking about with extraction. It really seems like an effective counter to a wide number of the more potent decks that have been dominating standard recently: Valakut: Obviously. It's land destruction. Pop one, then pull the rest of this main combo piece from the deck. If you can hit the Titan, the deck is essentially done. Inkmoth/Blightsteel: As you said, if you can pop one Inkmoth, you can keep this from ever going off. Tempered Steel: Getting rid of the enchant wouldn't necessarily shut this deck down completely, but it removes almost all of its tempo. Caw Blade: Without the mana to both cast and equip swords on the same turn, this deck loses a great deal of tempo. This is besides the fact that many of them only run limited copies of the swords, allowing the destruction to handle that threat rather effectively. Extracting a squadron hawk turns the card into an expensive 1/1, in a deck that doesn't run many cheap creatures in the first place. Granted, the hardest deck to deal with is going to be control, but even that can be challenging if you force them to tap out every turn. As far as that goes, I think that's one thing that would make Beast Within worth considering, at least for a sideboard. Especially running Llanowar and BoP, you can easily drop it on turn 2, and since it's at instant speed, you can mess with control decks by forcing them to counter something on their turn, rather than yours, hopefully allowing you to cast something bigger without threat of counter on yours.
Interesting. It seems like Extraction and Nihil would be even more potent against Skaab, due to the high additional cost of 3 creatures being in the graveyard. The only way to do that efficiently is likely discard or self mill, and Extraction provides a way of getting rid of any of those once and for all, while Nihil just gets rid of anything that they have to pay the cost with.
Thanks for commenting on my LD as well! (http://www.mtgvault.com/ViewDeck.aspx?DeckID=237244) Definitely a bit of a different take on the style. If any of y'all have further input on it, that'd be much appreciated.
Interesting deck. Only thing is how combo dependent it is. Seems like you're drawing dead for half the deck if you can't get Liquimetal coating on the field. Seems like some form of search would be appropriate, with how critical that card is to this running well.
I like it, especially the Surgical Extractions to help with eliminating the rest of whatever threat they managed to cast onto the field with the little mana they have available. I almost think that I'd rather swap Into the Maw with Extraction, just because of the amout of land destruction you have, it should hopefully keep anything that large off the field fairly effectively. The recursion for spells Charmbreakers seems like a nice finisher, especially with the Lavamancer letting you select what you want to pull back.
Very interesting deck. I guess the reason I ended up deciding against Charmbreakers was that it seems to fit exactly the same slot as the Titan for the most part, and by the time I'd be playing it, Titan seems the stronger answer to the likely board that I'd be facing, whether that be a variety of 2 and 3 drops, or the Beast Token I've given them, and helps to keep the field clear/win the game in the following turns. As far as Argentum armor, I'll have to see how it goes, but I'd like to have the option to have a broad answer to whatever permanent is causing the greatest threat, while still giving the option of using it to simply lock down what little land they might have remaining once it drops. Karn serves the same purpose, but at a slightly lower cost, and faster activation. The two cards I'd be quite tempted to include would be the Surgical Extraction and Ratchet Bomb, especially since if their mana pool is restricted, they're likely to have a similar low mana cost for most of their permanents. I'll have to update my sideboard to include them. Surgical extraction would be a very strong response to tempered steel, Valakut, and Blinkmoth, as well as any other combo that appears. I may also sideboard Nihil Spellbomb, depending on how much issue I have with graveyard reccursion. I'll have to think about Grimoire, as if this runs how I would like, the opponent will hopefully not be able to play many creatures for me to destroy, letting me focus that destruction on their land. Also, given the low creature count in the deck, the discard would seem crippling, in many cases. Depending on how it goes in playtesting, I'll have to give it a shot though.