dknight27

Ah, true. I forgot to look there. I know next to nothing about Pioneer.

Since you've got a super high volume of 2-drops, you could run some of the great land/non-land combo cards from Zendikar Rising such as Kabira Takedown or Sejiri Shelter (since you don't need an untapped land turn 1). You could also run Mutavault which just helps everything in here.

What format, level of competition, and budget are we going for here?

I always try to work in mutavault when playing around with gravecrawler. Might not fit in here due to your high need for double black, but worth mentioning.

I'm pretty out of the loop these days, so I never really checked out Regent, or many of the other cards you mentioned. I even missed out on consider, which is a delightful card.

No lightning bolt?

Baral's place seems a bit odd to me too. You don't need it's reduction abil to hit your combo, cause you're gunna gearhulk it, and you don't really need it's reduction abil for the rest of the deck as you've got a low curve in general. I also don't see much use for its draw/discard effect beyond the normal sifting through your deck. You don't need it for the combo, as you can discard opus to itself. It is a nice blocker, but I'm not sure if it warrants the spot in here.

Just my thoughts, maybe I'm missing something.

What's our budged with this one? And are we going for competitive modern?

The first thing that leapt out at me was the mana curve problem. You're way too topheavy on the 3-drops. I asked about the budget because there are no snaps in here, which are pretty typical staples in flicker builds that can manage them.

Are you going for budget modern here?

Hermaphroditism would make sense, as he/she (I guess) can self-impregnate to generate little Arastas.

I can't be the only person that loves Arasta and wants him to succeed.

Are we going for Legacy budget here?

Sounds good to me. My magical power is no longer over 9,000, but I still work on ideas when they hit.

What format and budget are we working with here?

No anti land cards?

I haven't played commander in a while, but the standard used to be playing stuff like winter orb to really take advantage of the tax effects.

I'm surprised not to see Urza's Saga in here. In legacy you can even use it to fetch the artifact color lands.

You know, I've been wanting to build an updated version of this. Perhaps that will go on my to-do list.

Also, I haven't forgotten about your project.

The curve here looks mighty high. I would consider cutting the 4+ drops considerably and putting some fast 2 drops in to give you some tempo

Even with the low curve and low operational curve, 19 lands seems too low. Do you see a lot of mulligans?

For casual, the tapped lands basically fix themselves because you can just drop them turn 1 on the play and have no problem. Same thing for the 5 drops really, much less important in casual than other formats, and the rest of the deck is drop dead cheap.

From what I'm seeing, you're falling into the normal pitfalls of newer players. Happens to all of us. Here's how I would build the deck you're trying to do.

https://www.mtgvault.com/dknight27/decks/mono-u-control-budget-casual/