MTG Salvation

Actually, color in blue control becomes a nontrivial property once Counterspell exists as an incentive. If people remember Next Level Blue, it was basically monoblue, but often would be splashing as many as 3 colors to power up Engineered Explosives, and often use those same splashes to play kill cards like tog or goyf, and card advantage engines like bob. Is a blue deck with 4 Goyfs and a bunch of G/U duels and all blue spells and artifacts monoblue, or blue/green? How about a blue deck with Steam Vents, Watery Grave, and Breeding Pool, but no other colors?
Realistically, you'd probably see the emergence of something like a b/g/X shell, where you have blue control with counterspell splashing black and green to power up EE, maybe play a Bob or two, and to have access to the removal, goyf, and even Liliana. That would be my prediction. It would definitely be interesting though, and make building manabases a bit more of a challenge than they are now, which I see as a plus.

I think a miracles build would probably cut some of the Scrolls and maybe even the Hive Mind kill entirely, to get more discard outlets in the deck (read: Thirst for Knowledge). It would also need a new pile, since the one I immediately thought of they can just give you Entreat and Thirst and you can't get it on top of your deck.
The deck actually started out UW, but Increasing Ambition, Far // Away, and black sideboard cards give the deck a lot (as does Slaughter Pact, of course) give so much to the deck it's hard to imagine going back. If you could find room to replace the versatility black gives you with redundant power (room for multiple timely's and Lingering Souls and such), you could go a route more like the straight UW Tron builds. It would certainly be interesting to try it out.

Life from the Loam.

If you're interested, the Time Warp deck was featured on the mothership a while back. You can find it here:
http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/deck/1362

I once built a deck that used Dralnu, Lich Lord and prevent damage effects like Safe Passage to fog-lock the opponent.

Which automatically puts you in G/U and makes it very hard to splash for another color and pretty much impossible to play utility lands (Academy Ruins and Tectonic Edge don't play well with it). That severely restricts the number of decks you can play it in, and keeps it from being usable in a lot of the good shells in the format.

Mana Theft
2UU
Instant
Counter target spell. At the beginning of your next precombat main phase, add X to your mana pool, where X is the converted mana cost of the countered spell.

I don't know if it would be crazy broken or unplayable, but I want to find out.

I'm still not quite clear on the combo engine, but I'll figure it out. My initial thoughts:
1. This seems like a unique and fairly consistent way to kill. It opens up some interesting lines of play, and allows for some pretty crazy lines of play. It passes the quick look test, which is a big plus, so it's absolutely worth considering.
2. It still feels a bit weird in that it needs some very specific sequencing to go off, and needs to draw the right cards. With the more classic Past in Flames engine, topdecking a ritual could still accelerate you into a gifts, and topdecking a Past in Flames late game could easily be game over. Each card on its own was a decent draw. While that may be true here (I'm still not well-versed enough on Spellweaver Volute to say), it doesn't initially seem that way.
3. I also agree that finding a better mana engine for the Volute would be great. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that the copies made by Spellweaver Volute are made in the graveyard, and that therefore when you cast the copy, you cast it from the graveyard? I think that means that, if you enchant Increasing Ambition with Volute and then cast a mana-producing sorcery (say, Channel the Suns), it would be copied twice, giving double the mana. It's possible that could be used to generate a ton of mana without resorting to Heartbeat of Spring, which isn't particularly synergistic with the plan and is vulnerable to cards like Abrupt Decay.

While some of that is true, I actually think the old extended system was even worse. It's certainly true that there's more uncertainty with modern. You don't know for sure that your key cards won't get banned. I myself am one of those people who was playing an innocent bystander deck that got seriously wounded by the banning of a card from another archetype (Ritual Gifts was pretty badly hurt by the one-two punch of DRS and the Seething Song banning, right as it was poised to become a real player in the format). And that may discourage people from buying into the format. It sounds like you could be one of those. But when wizards bans a card from your deck in modern, they ban one card, and you can usually see it coming to some extent. Every time a card is banned, there's a fair amount of chatter before about it, so that if you're really paying attention, you know to at least watch out. And it's only one card. As we can see from Jund and BBE, or storm and Ponder/Preordain, archetypes usually survive the loss of 1 or 2 of their cards, even if they lose some of their power. That means that the monetary value you're likely to lose from a banning is mostly concentrated in the banned card itself. That can be annoying, of course. But it's nothing compared to a whole host of staples rotating. In extended, for instance, not many decks were really neutered by the loss of Onslaught block. Faeries and Elves lost a lot, and never came back to their past records, and Storm was pretty much gone, but much of the format could still survive. But EVERY SINGLE PLAYER who was playing 2 or more colors had to sell off their Onslaught Fetches for some low price and replace them with Zendikar fetches. That's a huge loss, even crippling, especially if you sold off your allied fetches before enemy ones were spoiled and, thinking you wouldn't have the fetch/shock manabase, decided to sell off the staples of, say, your zoo deck, thinking zoo would be gone. If you buy into modern, you know that your fetches and shocks are pretty much always going to be the go-to manabase, and will always retain their value. You know that, unless a key card is banned, you can keep playing your deck for some time. Is it perfect? No. But I rather like what they've done with it so far.
The other thing is that, while the DCI has been fairly ban-happy with the format, they're also a lot more willing to unban, at least in my opinion. If a card is banned in standard, it is NEVER coming off that list. They'll just let it rotate. Similarly, with Legacy, cards coming off the list are fairly rare, leaving chaff like Earthcraft and Worldgorger Dragon banned (I know they enable powerful combos, but let's face it, they combos they enable just aren't that powerful in the grand scheme of Legacy). In Modern, however, at least in the last couple years, they've unbanned as many cards as they've banned, which means that there's more of a chance your cards can make a comeback.

Finally, this is a bit off-topic, but words cannot express how much I appreciate your sig. I respect that quite a bit, and I think a lot of others on this forum should take a leaf from your book on that score. Okay, off-topic aside over.

For the most part. Ironically, I didn't see a massive amount of aggro, with my two big matches coming from control brews. I think there was some issue with availability at the moment: there were only three zoo players present out of I think 32 people.

It's also worth noting that, going back to plan A and B, I did wind up winning one match by recurring Engineered Explosives and letting a guy mill himself out with Life from the Loam. He drew his last card in extra turns.

Edit: It was 5 rounds of swiss and the top 8.

I don't know if I speak for the rest of the Modern community, but my personal take is that the more players there are, the better, and that we as competitive players are also the ambassadors of our format. So, if you were to show up with a tier-1 deck and were still learning the ropes, I'd make sure that you learned as much and had as much fun as possible. If you had a question about lines of play, I would try to help you with actual honesty and not try to sabotage you, and I'd be sure to make myself available after the match to talk about how to use your deck to its full potential.
Then again, not everyone shares my view, so don't expect everyone to act like that.

Except that in Old Extended, you KNEW the cards would go soon, and in large numbers. Wizards is never going to ban cards of equal value to the cards that left when Onslaught rotated and the format lost Mind's Desire, Stifle, Riptide Laboratory, the entire Goblins deck, a bunch of the Elves deck, Astral Slide and company, Decree of Justice, and the Allied Fetches. If you were playing blue, that was a HUGE investment gone. Bigger than any bans in the history of Modern as a major format.

Tournament this weekend. I made semis with this deck, one of my teammates made quarters. Another teammate won the whole thing with Zoo. Report coming soon.

For those who are interested, William Spaniel did an analysis of match win percentages in the Caw-Blade Standard, and pre-batterskull, it consistently won over 60% of matches, with the closest other deck being Valakut with about 52%. RUG was up there, especially near the end, but I don't THINK it ever breached 60%. Take the numbers with a grain of salt, though, I haven't taken the time to look them up.

Personally, even if the banned list were to go down to 10 cards I would prefer it if Hypergenesis were one of them. I've NEVER liked Hypergenesis, as it's a particularly uninteractive deck with a lot of very simple decision-making trees and not much else. But that is just me.

]I don't think anyone here is advocating a Hypergenesis unban. I will say that it's not a great deck choice once you unban everything on the list, but that's when EVERYTHING is unbanned and there are way better things to be doing than Hypergenesis. If there's someone advocating a Hypergenesis unban and not taking an additional 15-20 cards off the list to make sure everything else can keep up with it is deluding themselves.