misterwit

In standard, right now, I know of a lot of people who build RW aggro decks, which will probably swing for game by turn 5, and of all the sample hands I drew, there was no situation where the extra ramp cards got you an unexpected results earlier than turn 4 (and when I did get one turn 4 I got a land first).

My roomate's deck can do the following in that time:
turn 1 - champion of the parish
turn 2 - faithless looting (discards unburial rites and either malignus or gisela)
turn 3 - silverblade paladin.
turn 4 - flashback unburial rites, getting gisela or malignus, soulbonded for doublestrike to silverblade paladin
turn 5 - boros charm and a swing for a LOT of damage.

That excludes the possibility that he gets multiple low-cost guys, soulbonds a reckoner with nearheath pilgrim and uses boros charm for infinite health, plays a bunch of rancors on a champion with etherial armor, or just hard casts his big stuff and uses flings to get over your guys when he gets them. I'm not saying you can't make an awesome deck with what you have here, but you need to do one of two things:
1: put in something that will allow you to stall out the game to 5+ turns without taking significant damage.
2: Put in a creature that makes it impossible for you to take any more damage than you already have by turn 5 so that your combo can survive long enough to work more than once.

Cyclonic Rift, anyone?

Beep boop

http://www.mtgvault.com/ViewDeck.aspx?DeckID=348336

Why not replace delver with Blighted Agent?

Two cards I highly recommend for venser decks:
Wall of Omens: as a 2-cost early wall that lets you draw a card it's awesome and it's only better when you can bounce it every turn for draw power.
Halimar Depths: whenever this land comes into play you can look at the top 3 cards of your library and rearrange them, very important and easily combinable with wall of omens.
Below is my venser/jace mill/exile deck. He doesn't play quite as essential a role as seen in your deck but the concept is still there that his bounce is easily applicable to any purpose with the right cards.

http://www.mtgvault.com/ViewDeck.aspx?DeckID=324301

Looks good.

You might as well just make the celestial purges doomblades or go for the throats since you've got black already.

Replacing the Gut shots with revoke existence means it will stay relevant late game (most standard decks run captains which buff creatures to toughness more than 1), and it's your color so it won't be a "must pay life" scenario.

If you have the dough, phyrexian metamorphs are always good, too. With all the legendary creatures in the new set, metamorphs make great legendary-killers.

Could use a sideboard if this is to be a tournament play deck.
mana leaks
surgical extractions
revoke existences
etc.
There's plenty of FOTM sideboard cards.

Pretty clever creature combinations, but I think it's light on spot removal, there's not much stopping an opponent from out-building you.

But you do have undying, so you can poke your enemies during combat with a small creature, allow it to die and revive, then toss out the Gravetiller Wurm.

Consider that carnage wurm, if you fail to do damage, you also fail to ramp your creatures. if you fail to deal damage and you roll Gravetillers, you ramp successfully, but if they take the damage, then you dealt damage and either way you gain from the event.

It's worth considering.

When you say that Isochron Scepter is used strictly for Boomerang, I wonder why echoing truth isn't viable. I would think that if given the opportunity to echoTruth someone's collection of eldrazi spawns for 2 mana, thus forcing them to discard virtually their entire hand, well... I just don't see how that isn't better.

I suppose boomerang affords you the power to return their lands to their hand, which is powerful enough early game to be the better card, but I would do one of each if I could manage to drop both.

The other thing that concerns me is that Isoscepter is insufficiently protected from counterspells, you have a whopping 3 counterspells, which imo isn't enough. if you lose your scepters you stand to be significantly disadvantaged mid and late game since your spellpower doesn't ramp any other way except by spamming caress and devotion. Even if you could get that many of them, you would either lack the mana to play followup spells or lack the mana to cast them in the first place. I would either lean harder to control spells or wallet-tank some more scepters into this deck.

I ran a similar deck before, however it used proliferation and splashed blue. Inexorable tides will allow you to proliferate your chandra by enough to use her every turn. Combine this with chimeric masses for creatures which will scale per turn, and you will have a pretty decent deck on your hands.

why assault strobe? I'd sooner concentrate the purpose of the deck down to: get blightsteel asap, win.

Yeah I just don't see it working without throwing in more lightweight creatures or some form of defensive spell.

straaaaaange... but I don't see it NOT working. Cool.

Imo this needs more defense, maybe a set of "Wall of Frost" or "Wall of Tanglecord", because I don't see much ramp outside of raw draw mechanic. Also, glissa's scorn isn't very good as a mainboard card when you're dealing infect. Fog, vapor snag, mana leak, and tumble magnet are all good stall cards for decks that run proliferate and need some time to put the right cards in play to win.

You're gimping your own phyrexian revokers with your torpor orbs.

Any particular reason you chose not to include norn's annex? Seems like a great control card for white/artifact control.

looking back at this, it would be even funnier if you could acquire some lightning greaves, so that you could scoot a big creature out turn 3-ish and wtfzorz shroud-'n-haste them with a stupid-big creature.

I believe there is a leviathan that makes all lands islands... can't remember the name though, but it's worth looking into if you want to capitalize on islandwalk.