I would second Raff, but also in your meta it sounds like Ephara might work well. If you keep off devotion then you have a draw engine in the command zone that can't be edicted out, and then when you're ready you can devotion her up and swing if you want. Honestly she probably belongs in Raff rather than the other way around as she can be flashed out, but when I ran my Ephara deck I had a lot of fun.
Unhelpful answer, it depends, right? On colors and strategy and mana curve? Do you put Rhystic Study in every blue deck? Oddly enough I didn't put it in my enchantress deck because the enchantresses already draw a crap ton of cards and I wanted a slot for something else more interesting.
It's color specific but one of my favorite flat out draw spells is Sphinx's Revelation because it's flexible, instant speed, and includes life gain as a bonus.
The most card drawing fun I've ever had is when I get Scroll Rack and Land Tax active.
I have a game to help think about this - I call it "Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon Synergy". Lets use as an example my first Toshiro Umezawa deck, which I didn't like how it turned out.
The primary synergy with Toshi is instants - without those, Toshiro does nothing, and he needs nothing else to have synergy.
Then you have stuff that supports that synergy but doesn't have synergy on its own, such as self-mill to get instants into your grave without casting them, or non-instant removal, which can trigger toshiro. So that's the second degree of synergy.
Once I had the self-mill, suddenly self-recurring creatures like reassembling skeleton were better. Now we're up to three degrees of synergy.
And once I had a bunch of self-recurring creatures, I needed something to do with them to get decent value besides just chump blocking. So then I threw in grave pact and dictate of erebos and the like. Holy crap, we're up to four degrees.
And finally, now that I've got a grave pact engine going, I need sac outlets to reliably trigger them instead of relying on blocks. Five degrees of synergy at this point. Yikes.
You can see where this went off the rails. By the end, there were a lot of cards that had no direct synergy with my commander, and I was spreading myself way too thin across many different functionalities of cards. The odds of drawing cards that didn't work well together was way too high, and a lot of my cards were very low-impact without synergies.
So I think it's worth analyzing card choices in this way. Think to yourself - "why is this card in my deck, what makes it good here?" And if you find that it takes quite a few degrees of synergy - by which I usually mean more than about 3 at absolute maximum - then you should probably reevaluate and try to refocus your deck.
This is the best explanation of this phenomenon that I've seen. Also pretty much sums up what happened to the deck in my op... It was a Sigarda humans and small useful dorks matter deck, so Skullclamp was super important as it's the best draw engine in the deck. So I put in Stoneforge Mystic to get clamp and to activate Bygone Bishop and Champion of Lambholt and others. But then I would draw Stoneforge Mystic when I already had clamp out and be like, wouldn't it be cool to have other equipment to go fetch, especially with beaters like Sigarda, Gisela, and Avacyn... And so how I end up split between a humans/dorks matter deck and an angels with swords deck.
Does the drifted deck play badly? No, but I consistently find myself wondering mid game what it is I'm trying to accomplish. I have good cards in my hand and on the battlefield, and I can do some decent damage, but part of the fun of playing a deck for me is piloting a well-tuned engine (is that a mixed metaphor? it might be).
If your deck drifts to good stuff and it's still fun to play, hey, cool. But that's not my jam.
The lesson for me here, and Dirk puts it so well, is not to mistake my support engines for the goal of my deck. If you're really digging that 4th level of synergy, then that's a sign you should build a deck that makes it a higher level of synergy, especially if you're frustrated at where the original intent of the deck has gone. Which is why my current project is to develop lists for both ends of the spectrum of my deck and decide which one is actually more fun to play.
If people put some kind of "looking for feedback" tag on their deck then you could use the tag to generate a pool of decks to select from. On the header of the random deck of the day thread you can then note that if someone wants their deck in the pool they need to put that tag in the title.
Finally got some games in with my build. What a fun deck. Deathbringer Thoctar is the real deal. Much better than Blood Artist in its versatility. Had an awesome Balthor the Defiled turn where I unearthed Corpse Connoisseur to put Thoctar in the grave first, got all of my creatures back and then went off. A card I put in that's not on your list but did serious work was Rummaging Goblin. It got Anger in the graveyard early game and helped me filter through my deck to find the pieces I needed.
Thanks for the inspiration!
I imagine you'll wait until the full set is out to look at what might make it into the deck, but Mayhem Devil looks promising.
With all the return to hand stuff, maybe prioritize creature etb ramp more. I know spell-based ramp takes counters off your general, so it's a balance, but as good as Azusa is, she might be better off as Wood Elves or Yavimaya Dryad here as either one can get your forest-named duals and when you Whelming Wave you get to reuse them.
I've found that putting my decks on tappedout has helped with this as well as I can get a snapshot of the deck without having to physically sort all the cards to see what it's doing.
I do this as a reference but for some reason have never used it as a tool to compare an A and a B version of a deck. I'll have to do that. (though sorting out my decks on the kitchen table is always satisfying for some reason, tactile interaction with my creation?) And deck drift is a pretty good term for the phenomenon.
Does this happen to you? I started a Sigarda, Heron's Grace deck that was supposed to be Eldritch Moon themed with a bunch of humans and other dorks providing utility and blockers until I could get out Brisela, Voice of Nightmares. I favored Tamiyo's Journal over Staff of Nin for card advantage and made other such flavor choices.
Then I started subbing in more useful angels for the dorks as my Brisela plan routinely got shafted. Shalai, Voice of Plenty, Linvala, Keeper of Silence, original Sigarda took over at the helm of the deck, and suddenly my Bygone Bishop wasn't ever being activated.
The deck is still plenty playable, but would be much more efficient as a full blown angel/equipment deck or back to the humans matter deck it was originally intended to be.
I suppose the best plan would be to have a list for both decks and alternate, letting each thrive in its best version. When I get the oomph I'll do exactly that. But in the meantime, how many of you have found your original deck ideas corrupted as you edit your deck and suddenly have a split personality creation on your hands?
What the others said. Also unless a thread has "want feedback" or some such in it I only tend to click on the decklists I'm interested in. A lot of people put up lists more for documentation and record keeping than for active feedback so I don't tend to go through lists looking to actively give feedback unless it's requested. Also, if your lists are pretty tuned than aside from expressing some personal preferences I'm not sure there'd be a lot to critique? I'm sorry the response has been lukewarm... it really is quieter here than it used to be, edhrec has something to do with that too.
Plenty of people don't like them because they're too enabling, but I like how they accelerate the table but break parity for you if you build your deck right. They're basically grease in my favorite colors and there are so many options for building with them.
Drawing cards off Glacial Chasm... so good...
Also, Dread Cacodemon isn't cheap, but it is Plague Wind stapled to a creature.
We've done top 5 in various colors before, and top 10, and various such lists. Google brought up this from 2014: https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/commander-edh/567131-top-10-draw-spells-for-edh
Unhelpful answer, it depends, right? On colors and strategy and mana curve? Do you put Rhystic Study in every blue deck? Oddly enough I didn't put it in my enchantress deck because the enchantresses already draw a crap ton of cards and I wanted a slot for something else more interesting.
It's color specific but one of my favorite flat out draw spells is Sphinx's Revelation because it's flexible, instant speed, and includes life gain as a bonus.
The most card drawing fun I've ever had is when I get Scroll Rack and Land Tax active.
This is the best explanation of this phenomenon that I've seen. Also pretty much sums up what happened to the deck in my op... It was a Sigarda humans and small useful dorks matter deck, so Skullclamp was super important as it's the best draw engine in the deck. So I put in Stoneforge Mystic to get clamp and to activate Bygone Bishop and Champion of Lambholt and others. But then I would draw Stoneforge Mystic when I already had clamp out and be like, wouldn't it be cool to have other equipment to go fetch, especially with beaters like Sigarda, Gisela, and Avacyn... And so how I end up split between a humans/dorks matter deck and an angels with swords deck.
Does the drifted deck play badly? No, but I consistently find myself wondering mid game what it is I'm trying to accomplish. I have good cards in my hand and on the battlefield, and I can do some decent damage, but part of the fun of playing a deck for me is piloting a well-tuned engine (is that a mixed metaphor? it might be).
If your deck drifts to good stuff and it's still fun to play, hey, cool. But that's not my jam.
The lesson for me here, and Dirk puts it so well, is not to mistake my support engines for the goal of my deck. If you're really digging that 4th level of synergy, then that's a sign you should build a deck that makes it a higher level of synergy, especially if you're frustrated at where the original intent of the deck has gone. Which is why my current project is to develop lists for both ends of the spectrum of my deck and decide which one is actually more fun to play.
Thanks for the inspiration!
I imagine you'll wait until the full set is out to look at what might make it into the deck, but Mayhem Devil looks promising.
I do this as a reference but for some reason have never used it as a tool to compare an A and a B version of a deck. I'll have to do that. (though sorting out my decks on the kitchen table is always satisfying for some reason, tactile interaction with my creation?) And deck drift is a pretty good term for the phenomenon.
Then I started subbing in more useful angels for the dorks as my Brisela plan routinely got shafted. Shalai, Voice of Plenty, Linvala, Keeper of Silence, original Sigarda took over at the helm of the deck, and suddenly my Bygone Bishop wasn't ever being activated.
The deck is still plenty playable, but would be much more efficient as a full blown angel/equipment deck or back to the humans matter deck it was originally intended to be.
I suppose the best plan would be to have a list for both decks and alternate, letting each thrive in its best version. When I get the oomph I'll do exactly that. But in the meantime, how many of you have found your original deck ideas corrupted as you edit your deck and suddenly have a split personality creation on your hands?
Plenty of people don't like them because they're too enabling, but I like how they accelerate the table but break parity for you if you build your deck right. They're basically grease in my favorite colors and there are so many options for building with them.
Grenzo, Dungeon Warden is one of the coolest designs I've seen.