One thing the article mentions that I agree with is that some decks have higher variance than others. One thing I think it is important to remember is that if you're mediocre or bad relative to your competition, you want to play the highest variance deck you can. If there was no variance, it would be impossible to win if your opponents were better than you. If you know you're weaker than your competition, take steps to up your deck's variance and hope for luck. If you know you're better than your opponents, variance is your enemy, and you should try and reduce it as much as possible.
I kind of want to try brewing a U/R delver variant in modern with this and grafted wargear, but its probably not good enough there due to antisynergy with the delver/pyromancer spells theme...
Generally, decks in legacy can do so much that uncounterably mindslavering them is going to be devastating. The most fun would probably be trying to combo out various combo decks when you mindslaver them; trying to go off and commit suicide with combo elves, high tide, storm, reanimator....that sounds like too much fun. I may have to try this...
The last time I remember this effect seeing consistent play was Morbid Plunder in Mirrodin Besieged, where it was quite strong. Macabre Waltz has too many conditions to get your 2 for 1 to be really good, since you need both a madness card and two creatures in your graveyard. Madness, Delirium and self mill made it playable sometimes, but rarely amazing.
One thing that is really important is to note that major tournaments have many rounds for exactly this reason. While any individual match can go against a player just due to being unlucky, your odds of winning a 15 round GP with a 33% expected match win rate are approximately the following:
Probability of going 13-2: 0.00259%
Probability of going 14-1: 0.00018%
Probability of going 15-0: 0.0000059%
Probability of top 8: 0.0027759%
Then you need to go 3-0 in the top 8: 3.5937% chance
Now, in reality, your odds would be better than this because you don't have to play against nothing but pros for the entire time. You can play some of your rounds with a 50, 60, or 70% expected win rate because your opponents are even worse than you. But realistically, if you're at 33% vs the best, you are incredibly unlikely to take down a major tournament.
1) You can include silver bullet cards that are bad against most decks, and you are very unlikely to draw them. Since your deck is huge, you can pack singleton grave hate, mass enchantment destruction, mass artifact destruction, etc and you barely dilute your plan at all.
2) You can play Invincible Hymn. It is hilarious against a lot of decks, especially if you recur it or cast a second one. Crumbling Sanctuary is similarly fun, but much easier to deal with.
3) You can play 5 color green off entirely basics just fine, because your mana is something like 180 forests/40 islands/7 swamp/mountain/plains. You hit almost all forests then search up whatever you need.
4) You are naturally resistant to non-infinite mill, which comes up sometimes in casual.
None of these are strong enough advantages to make up for the lack of consistency and general weakness of the ramp+card draw plan in a competitive environment, but it actually made a decently strong casual deck. It occasionally would even be able to beat some real competitive decks by either lucking into the correct silver bullet pieces or somehow getting Invincible Hymn off, but for the most part it was strictly casual. It was, however, super fun because you were both always doing stuff (you almost never ran out of cards because of all the draw effects) and had potential answers to almost everything somewhere in your deck. You also got to play random stuff noone ever sees, and games both generally turned out very similarly (you always ramped+drew then did crazy splashy stuff) and very different (what pieces fit that formula, exactly, changed every game). It was actually very much like a game of commander in that regard.
None of this is to say that this is a good strategy for winning, but it can be quite fun and is easily strong enough in a lot of casual environments.
I've done this deck 3 times now, and it has ended up being competitive every time. I've started just taking this immediately on seeing it and testing if the deck is open, because it is quite strong if it is. Also, the deck is super fun; I got to hit this with a geistblast on turn 9 for 18 zombies in the finals of my last draft, which is just a really fun way to win a game.
It is good, actually, because this is the sort of card you can get 13th pick a lot of the time, which really helps fill out the instant/sorcery count for the deck.
I agree, that's not a best case scenario. The best case scenario I can think of would have been if I had been able to play it in a game where I did turn 2 Erdwal Illuminator into turn 3 Trail of Evidence in a R/U deck with 16 instants/sorceries. For the rest of the game, I got to double investigate every time I played a spell, and many of my spells had investigate riders. I had like 16 clues in play at one point. Normally, that much card advantage would be a nearly insurmountable advantage, but the deck was running a fair amount of card draw as part of the 16 instants/sorceries, so there were tempo/board presence issues that prevented it from being an unbeatably strong position. A Tamiyo's journal there just lets me demonic tutor every turn for the rest of the game, directly pulling answers out of the library for whatever the opponent does and casting the card draw spells with any leftover mana until I get enough in the yard for a lethal Rise from the Tides.
The amount of card advantage available in the set and relative weakness of the common 2 drops also helps push the games a little longer and adds a lot of decision points to the game, which I feel leads to more depth. Overall, I am deeply impressed with the draft experience with this set, and I am very much looking forward to playing much more of it.
This. It takes people a while to understand the threat of cards and mana vs. more obvious threats. If you have two opponents, one of which has a Baneslayer Angel+Serra's Ascendant with two cards in hand, and another who has 7 islands and a Caged Sun with 6 cards in hand, don't oblivion ring Baneslayer Angel. There is a very reasonable chance you're all about to lose if that blue player untaps with Caged Sun still around. I've been the blue player in that scenario, it didn't end well for anyone else.
On the other hand, I love dedicated control strategies. I will be very excited to see if it is possible to pull off 5 color control leveraging that blue converge card draw spell everyone else probably won't want, removal from all 5 colors and eldrazi finishers.