Hey thanks! That was fun to watch. I haven't touched the Norin-Thopter deck since the 5-0, as it was mostly just a fun mash-up that happened to do well, but I might run it through another league now.
Since then, I played 5 leagues with variations of my normal Sultai build, going 3-2 three times, 2-3 once, and 5-0 once. High on lili right now, with a 2-2 split between main and SB. I've trimmed my number of spellbombs down, as GY decks aren't as omnipresent. Unmoored Ego is still pulling its weight in the SB for me, as it single-handedly won me two games against scapeshift.
On another note, spoilers are upon us, and there is a new 3 CMC walker that makes thopters, the new Dovin Baan. He looks decent, but I think I would only play him in a Jeskai build to synergize with faithless looting.
I played 4 Looting, 2 Peek, and 2 Metallic Rebuke as the sort of flex non-artifact spells in my Wednesday Modern. Peek won the game against Tron allowing me to preemptively cut off Karn using a Pithing Needle until I could whir for Damping sphere, and a Rebuke hit their TKS in G2. Both can be looted away later when they aren't great in the moment. I keep running into Jund or G/B or Sultai and I'm considering going to 2+2 on Welding Jar. They lean so heavily on Trophy and it's utterly crushing to save your artifact + get a basic for 0 mana. Ego is for sure a 3+ as I also have KCI and Valakut in my meta. I beat spirits with Aether Grid for the 5th time in a row. As long as you can get under the double Drogskol lock you are good and Tezzeret is a way to get around Worship + Geist.
@Tugatog: That looks sweet. Obviously I want to tinker around with it! I've always wondered what it looks like if you commit as hard to comboing this archetype as possible.
@FullMetalTezzeret: I think I agree with you about Codex Shredder. It's slightly better at G1, but makes you very GY dependent for collecting on the value, so you suffer more vs. Surgical, Leyline, or RIP. This place was quiet, but I think that's just how the holidays are!
@Everyone: If you've played the deck with an off-color like green or red, how many non-Opal sources do you feel like you need? I've noticed my moxen are off a lot, and don't love relying on them for colored mana. (Usually my issue is that I want to looting on T1.)
@The_Nobodys: Hmmmmm. That *is* an interesting walker. Kind of like a Sai that can't be Pathed, and doesn't cost mana to operate, but a little slower, but doesn't cost you material to keep advancing your material. Huh.
@The_Nobodys: What was your list like Tug's "One Sword To Rule Them All" list? You mentioned Scrap Trawlers?
@TolariaWest: You will find that Mox Opal will not be consistently turned on compared to decks like Affinity/KCI or even Whir and that's Ok! It's still a mana source of course, but not one we need to lean quite as heavily on to gain our advantages like the aforementioned decks do. One thing I've found to be important is assessing when you primarily want the off color spells (in my case green against enchantments) and if/when they come in, how often do the Mox Opals come out (I look at fair, grindy matchups like UWx and BGx). Of course there are plenty of matchups where I'll bring in the Green spells AND keep in Mox, but the times when you have to cut them is more of a "worst-case-scenario" that you'll want to be a bit more mindful of when assessing the mana sources.
That being said, I traditionally have liked having 10x sources that produce the 3rd color with a 21-land manabase (I've been on 7x Fetches, 1x Shock, 2x Gold Lands), but for the past couple months I've cut the 7th Fetch in favor of a Search for Azcanta. I've played with/without Search(s) at the expense of a land(s) on and off during my testing in 2018. Not sure if this is a long term swap, but the sweet spot feels somewhere in this range. It still feels ok right now though and fits well within the "75-card map" for matchup ins/outs.
I've found this deck is a little bit strange when looking at numbers because while the optimal percentages may typically require a slightly higher land count, we ALSO have to be mindful that one of our primary goals is to get/remain hellbent for bridge, so being too land dense can be an issue.
However, if red is your 3rd color and you want access to turn 1 Red for looting, I think spread should be a bit more dedicated than mine is for green (I only need Gx for 2-3x Decay/Trophy from the board, and I can afford to wait to see Green on Turn 2+). I'd suggest having anywhere from 11-14x Red sources within your lands alone, depending on whether you prioritize a 91.4% consistency with the 14x red sources (lands only) or are ok with closer to an 83.1% rate. Again, sometimes you'll have metalcraft + Mox on turn 1 depending on your early artifact spread so the numbers are probably slightly higher than this overall. That's just how I'd approach thinking about/adjusting this issue.
There's a lot to take into consideration based on this seemingly tiny pain point (as well as the countless other micro-deckbuilding decisions here), but I hope this helped!
@TheNobodys, I've also continued my testing LOTV from the board and I've been generally pleased with it. It fits the niche role I've been trying to fill (wanted to maintain a +3x postboard threat density that puts pressure on combo, threatens grindy strategies, ignores common hate that green spells would need to hit, and also costs less than 4 mana as an alternative to playing more Tezzerets), but I still want to test to make sure this is the absolute best option and approach for the postboard battles she comes in against. I'm not sure I want the full 4x, but going from 1x to 2x in the board has been nice.
Whatcha think about this as an alt wincon? Could swing for lethal turn 4 with active opal and probably 5 or 6 artifacts on the field. Even with 4 which is very plausible that's 12 power turn 4 swinging with 4 bodies.
So this reminded me of some things I had tested a while back (and some through more recent revisiting).
1) Cut the cantrips: Is the card selection more necessary than not.
2) Uptick in hand disruption: Is the ability to stay ahead crucial to consistent winning lines?
3) Test the extremes of Search for Azcanta (2x): Does this mitigate the absence of cantrips to help maintain card quality well enough?
4) Land count of 19x, play 4th Mox: Is this split better or worse than a 20/3 Land/Mox split?
5) Swapped all Serum Visions for Faithless Looting: Is the tempo positive play towards getting hellbent for Bridge lines worth the mana implications?
These tests lead me to the following conclusions:
1) I personally didn't want to be at a land count lower than 20x and didn't want to play more than 3x Mox.
2) 1-mana cantrips of some kind are necessary when the land count is low. It's close, but I prefer Serum over Looting despite the latter having slightly better bridge synergy.
3) Negative tempo with hand disruption can hurt despite hitting solid spells with IOK/TS, as the opponent can continue to curve out with other early spells in hand. Plus the topdecks these spells provide mid-late can be back breaking.
Again, not advocating that I (nor anyone else) is right/wrong, here are details to how/why I came to my conclusions/preferences:
I mentioned this before, but running the numbers on Land count vs number of lands needed to hit color requirements on time is a bit different than say a normal midrange deck I'd be developing for standard. This is largely in part due to leaning heavily on the Ensnaring Bridge plan (getting/maintaining Hellbent status) without the luxury of card control that Lantern's gameplan had access to. While 19x was relatively fine, I felt that the difference between 19x vs 20x hurt my openers more than I would have liked and forced close mulligan decisions. It's also helped me realize that nearly every 1-land hand without a cantrip is a mulligan, but a Serum/Looting as one of the 6x other cards is a keep. Skewing towards a shell that can consistently attain metalcraft on turn 1-2 can help, but looking at postboard configs when you don't want Mox in forces you to look at your mana base without 3-4x of the mana sources you depended on, which made me want to play a 20/3 split of Lands/Mox instead of a 19/4 split. This split decision also trickles down to they way you want to sideboard against certain archetypes. Being content with your land density in relation to your mulligan decisions means you can comfortably slot out most/all of your Mox for high-impact standalone cards that are good topdecks when that sort of thing matters. If your land count is too low and you have to keep in Mox, chances are your sideboarding out things that are individually worse than the Mox you reluctantly have to keep in (for example, while Nihil Spellbomb isn't necessarily fantastic vs Jund, having a cantrip that has minor upsides in shrinking Goyf, hurting K command/Lili Last Hope modes is typically better than sometimes dead mana source). Alternatively it could also mean that you may not be able to bring in things that are serviceable/didn't fill a slot for said matchups because you knew you had to keep the Mox in for games 2-3.
Also, even though you can always increase the odds of being able to turn on Mox turn 1, there is some percentage of time when you won't have Metalcraft and are too light on lands and that Mox being a land would have been serviceable keep. It also hurts when you draw multiple Mox but no way to turn them on, when a Mox/Land split would have been a snap keep. the Land/Mox split mentioned above just felt like an effortless way to mitigate the percentages of running into these bad corner case scenarios enough to justify the numbers.
As far as gold lands go, the more you play, the more you run the risk of having hands where you don't have a 0-drop to turn on a spire/keep a Glimmervoid around if you want to cast a cantrip on Turn 1. You can obviously mitigate these percentages by playing something like a 4/4/4 split of Mox/Bauble/Jar, but that still implies that with hands with only gold Land(s), you need to meet an additional requirement just to allow you to cast the cantrip on turn 1.
While this topic is certainly still up for debate, I found that the difference between 10-11x sources for Red (Looting) vs the 17-18x sources for Blue (Serum) made Serum Visions the cantrip of choice for me personally (taking non-Mox Mana sources into consideration). Since I wanted my secondary source able to cast Foundry and also overlap with one of the main alt-wincons (Tez), I felt Red was more of a 3rd color that I was going out of my way to incorporate. Because of all of this, Serum Visions feels more effortless to incorporate, since you don't have any pressure in postboard (artifact light) configs to be able to turn on any of the gold lands, especially when you plan to cut Mox against the grindy matchups. A lot of deckbuilding decisions hinge on looking at your configuration without Mox and the other indirect effects that result on if you lean too heavily on relying on Mox and have to keep it in all the time.
Bottom line was that while I personally prefer Looting's textbox over Serum in a vaccuum by a slight margin, the difference between having 2 out of 20x Lands that don't reliably allow me to cast a turn 1 Serum vs say 8 out of 19x lands that can't cast Looting was the bigger issue at hand (amongst all the other details/deckbuilding decisions that follow), especially considering this is a land light deck that often relies on the cantrips to fix your land-light openers a decent amount of time. That's also taking into account that you're assuming you have both a cantrip AND a 0-mana artifact if you're forced into playing a gold land on Turn 1. Mulligan implications are crucial to take into account.
1-for-1 trades in this deck are largely the least important things that we're doing. While I think that some number of interaction is necessary to bridge the gap between the beginning/end of either prison setup (Bridge lock, ThopterSword), the hand disruption spells are more of a meta call to me more than anything. However, I don't think they're crucial to the overall success in most metas currently, and the reason Collective Brutality gets the nod over IOK/TS in my shell is due to its synergies with Bridge with the added bonus of setting up a turn 3 ThopterSword on Board (discard sword turn 2, Duress to peek at some form of countermagic/interaction you're afraid of ahead of Foundry). While IOK/TS can certainly hit things you want to hit (and inversely, spot removal like push can certainly be dead in plenty of spots), they also have two downsides that can potentially clash with the development of the deck's endgame - being a dead draw when behind, and forcing you to pay mana to snag a spell that the opponent spent 0 mana casting. The latter is a fundamental topic I'll let others explore elsewhere if you are unfamiliar with it, but the former to me is something that recent re-testing of the 6x maindeck hand disruptions spells again had reminded me why I moved away from it in the first place. It's a classic case of good when it works (while ahead), but can be back breaking when it doesn't (playing from behind which we often tend to do). Too many decks can have high percentages of hands where even if you take 1 thing, the opponent either has another on-curve backup play that's almost equally as bad for you/a redundant copy of the thing you want to take so the impact of the decision is mitigated.
Again, to each their own with these flex slots, as IOK/TS certainly has their merits (I'm still trying to reincorporate the latter back into my sideboard/75), but this isn't typically how I like to pick the battles against a lot of opposing strategies with this deck outside of the super early turns. It is ultimately both a meta call and a personal preference though.
Whether or not you agree with my findings, I hope this helps sway anyone on the fence with any of these decisions one way or the other! These topics pop up every now and then over time and I wanted to weigh in on what I liked and why, as well as the process that helped me come to my conclusions.
Hopefully each person can apply similar testing approaches towards their own deck development/decisions. The most important thing I want taken away from this is not that I'm claiming I'm correct or not, but rather promoting the advancement/forward progression for each individual's core list to their liking through proper thought/application.
Whatcha think about this as an alt wincon? Could swing for lethal turn 4 with active opal and probably 5 or 6 artifacts on the field. Even with 4 which is very plausible that's 12 power turn 4 swinging with 4 bodies.
I think rampage of the clans is a cool win con, but maybe not for thopter/sword? If we have the combo, we aren't casting it, and we don't run as many artifacts that cantrip when destroyed as something like KCI.
That said, I really want to brew with it. I'm thinking an ensoul artifact shell would be perfect for it to shine, and at the risk of getting off topic:
Something like that would be fun. Ideal magic Christmas land scrnario: Turn 1 citadel and star, turn 2 ensoul it, play mox and play rancor swing 7 trample. Turn 3 swing again and cast rampage on their end step for 4 3/3s and draw a card and have rancor return to hand.
I tried the whole tezz touch ensoul deck for awhile. It never really panned out the way I wanted. What I did find is you probably wanna run a playset of jar mb if u go that route. True rampage would be better sb in like a kci build.
I'm gonna try out 2 sb when they drop to see how it goes. True if u have combo out and running you wouldn't wanna cast it but if they have rip/Stony out and your just sitting there I'd rather draw this than say sai or maybe even tezz. Even with 5 artifacts that's 15 power potentially swinging turn 4 and later game it would be even more powerful + it'd blow up your own bridge so u could swing.
5 fetches + steam vents + 3 spire + 3 glimmervoid + 3 opal cast looting rather consistently for me. I'm also considering switching some of the Darkslick shores for spirebluff because black just isn't that important much of the time. It's obviously subjective on how much better looting is over serum but I've repeatedly found it to be practically essential.
Just got done watching the SCG semifinals where a KCI player executed a loop with thopter foundry, sword, 2 opals, and scrap trawler. Makes me wonder if it's worth trying to mash the stars and maybe bomat couriers in the deck for the recursion synergies.
@JaceToTheFace Fair enough! I also think the Looting vs Serum power level arguement is subjective and tbh I think Looting is slightly better. One of the most important takeaways I got from some of my previous testing was that I felt a Cantrip of any kind that can help shape land-light keeps were crucial to success rate of that given game (due to mulligan implications). The difference between Serum vs Looting was marginal, but the difference between Cantrips vs No Cantrips was detrimental.
My point regarding T1 cantrip mana consistency was this (tying into the color source spread you mentioned you're utilizing):
You have 15x sources that CAN produce red, but 6x of them (Gold Lands) require 1x 0-mana artifact to either be turned on or not be destroyed EOT, while an additional 3x need 2x 0-mana artifacts to acquire metalcraft. Further, in the postboard matchups where Mox Opal is lackluster, you're incentivized to cut the Mox and probably lower your overall artifact density, making it harder to turn on the Gold lands. This increases the number of combinations of hands you'll have to mulligan/might have to reluctantly keep (though not strictly because you can't cast T1 Looting). This ties directly into why I prefer a mana base with less gold lands and more Fetch/Shocks.
This now puts you in a tight spot where you either have to consider keeping in the Mox to prevent this (which isn't ideal because you'll be cutting slightly more serviceable cards when sideboarding), or overhaul the complexity of your deck to accommodate these weaknesses which could dilute the overall effectiveness of your configurations against certain archetypes. Maybe you've found a 75 that fixes all of this comfortably enough to your liking, however I myself could not.
Again, as TugaTog said - Looting is great, but the mana implications/adjustments that'd have to be made in order to mitigate these pain points outweighs the effectiveness of Looting over Serum. Sure, Lantern and even Whir (now splashing green) have a higher gold land count with 4x Mox, but you have to take into account their overall artifact density compared to us, as well as the density of 0's (not to mention that Lantern was more incentivized to play a T1 artifact and whose gameplan could mold topdeck decisions to curve out better). Because of this density, their gameplans can afford to keep in some/all Mox postboard (especially Lantern since it has a more explosive turn 1 gameplan to potentially set up compared to us). Also, neither gameplan is pressured to cast a T1 cantrip as much as us (not that it's crucial that we cast T1 Serum/Looting, but it's even less so a priority for the other two decks by comparison).
I can't speak for every list of course, but I just think the work/adjustments needed to accommodate Looting (at least well enough for my liking) is a bit too much when Serum is still good and doesn't run into these pre/postboard issues.
That is exactly the conclusions I came to about Faithless Looting, dustycrumz, well put. You need SO many consistent sources of red to enable its turn-1 application, and the gold lands just don't do the job all the time. You need a certain number of reps with the deck to recognize this, gamed where you're siding out opals like you said, but its true. That's why serum visions is so powerful and consistent for us as a turn 1 play, which is ideally what you want your 1 drops to be doing.
Now you can dedicate your manabase to have consistent red, which I've done. Play 4 Spirebluff Canals, plenty of fetches, etc. When I would put these lists together, however, I found that my main deck had 4 red symbols in them, and my sideboard a few more between wear//tear and aether grid. The 4 red symbols in the main were, of course, faithless looting, and that was it. Does that seem worth it? And the fact is that unless you have sword in hand, looting isn't performing up to its potential as we just don't want to bin anything else. I've played lists with 4 swords and 3 Steelshaper's Gift in an attempt to maximize looting, but the mana constraints were too great when you're trying to get W on turn one and R on turn 2, and have UUU by turn 3.
So yeah, I have to agree that looting is a powerful spell that plays well with sword, but as an overall cantrip for our deck, doesn't have enough support to warrant the changed mana base.
In a deck with 4 Thopter Foundry/Sword that are largely irrelevant in multiples, 3-4 Opals that are largely irrelevant in multiples, 3-4 bridges that are especially irrelevant in multiples, calling the difference between Serum and Looting as marginal is extremely suspect to me. I've played Serum quite a bit and just grew to dislike it greatly. Whether I was dying to a Tribal deck for failure to get a Bridge active, or dying to Burn because even with combo in hand if you are on the draw it's just a half turn too slow. Looting helps in both of these extremely common scenarios, while also being an incredibly powerful way to dig through your deck in hands where things aren't lined up as nicely.
My point was that I felt the cantrips held their weight most on Turn 1 for us specifically, which is what I wanted to focus on. It's especially important to consider when you're forced into tight scenarios such as keeping/mulling into land-light hands, and that the mana adjustments necessary to accommodate T1 Looting are worth taking into account when T1 Serum takes much less effort since you're optimally aiming to play a blue mana source on Turns 1-3 anyway. As I mentioned before, decks like Lantern are a slightly different beast (I've piloted the deck myself as well) and it's great if you or anyone else has found a mana base configuration and/or artifact density that can mitigate the pain points I previously mentioned. I just have yet to find a configuration I'm confident in personally, as Turn 1 U source that also is turned on/produces R isn't nearly as 'Free' as needing just any Turn 1 U Source.
When taking into account the half-turn slower speed of Serum (which I agree on @JaceToTheFace), you have to also look at the other side of things. Let's look at burn for instance - Sure Serum can be slightly tempo negative when on the bridge line, however say you have to Fetch/Shock for a red source during the same game, or had to activate Spire more than once (which is more common if you're playing a higher density of them). In the games where you have to take a bit more pain from your lands, does tacking on essentially Phyrexian Mana to your cantrip make it worth running over Serum? Does it put you in a better/worse end result over the course of the game? Furthermore, is the risk of having a higher percentage of not even being able to cast Looting/having to mulligan away a hand that would have been a keep if it were a castable card worth it's weight? The answer can of course be yes, it's truly up to the pilot! These are just things worth considering (and I myself have mulled over countless times) but have ultimately found myself on the other end of the argument.
Also with regards to just transferring the mana base from Lantern to this deck, you have to ask whether your shell has largely the same density of 0- and 1-cmc artifacts as the former, as that is part of how the deck was able to accommodate the gold lands optimally. I know there are a handful of different cores out there and some people play way more low-end artifacts to justify this mana adjustment. However for me personally, the core I've liked/been developing can't reliably make best use of the gold lands.
These are just my personal findings in relation to the core that I've been tuning and I can't justify the overhaul of my low end + mana base to properly accommodate an off-color cantrip. Again, not saying you can't/shouldn't play Looting (I stand by it still being only slightly better, but not worlds better), I just wanted to state why I have been off it for a while for anyone on the fence/haven't given it much thought. More importantly, I also wanted to evoke critical thinking with deckbuilding decisions and point out that a lot of these things are far from simple "4-in/4-out swaps" for long term results. Rather, if/when someone decides to make a decision like playing Looting over Serum, my hope is that they go through the thought process for themselves and weigh all the pros/cons rather than just blindly pick a side. Shoutout to @JaceToTheFace/@Al_Z_Heimer for evoking some really good conversation on this particular debate!
@Al_Z_Heimer Yeah if you have around 10+ non-blue spells you're consistently trying to cast Turn 1, you almost have to be playiing all 8x Gold lands - at which point you then probably have to reluctantly play a much higher density of 0-1 cmc artifacts and while Welding Jar isn't always an all-star in game 1's, if feels almost necessary in order for the rest of the early turns to function both optimally and consistently given these circumstances.
Even with a 0-mana artifact to cast on Turn 1 to activate Gold Land/Opal, your mana base still leaves you with 8x non-red sources (Looting) and 7x non-black sources (IOK/TS), whereas you only have 1x non-blue source that locks you out of T1 Serum. Again, if we're looking at this from the perspective that a cantrip's inclusion is vital to being able to sculpt a suboptimal keep by deploying it as early as possible (T1), it all comes down to whether the percentages here (plus the percentage of openers you'll see with only Gold Lands/Opal but no 0-cmc spell) warrant favoring the difference of Looting over Serum. I've just valued the ability to be able to cast a cantrip off of a higher number of mana sources (that lead towards Turn 3 UUU development) in the event I see 1x land and said cantrip, which has been directly correlated to the number of hands I'm willing to keep vs mulligan.
Certainly not a cut-and-dry decision from either side of the spectrum though!
Yes please. That looks like it can do some serious work out of the board. Her plus Sai = value town.
EDIT: Well, I spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out how the original was posted in the spoilers thread so you could click on it for a larger image. SO here is the card:
Priest of the Forgotten Gods 1B
Creature - Human Cleric (R)
T, Sacrifice two other creatures: Any number of target players each lose two life and sacrifice a creature. You add BB and draw card.
The Orzhov are not the only religious tradition on Ravnica, nor the oldest.
1/2
Since then, I played 5 leagues with variations of my normal Sultai build, going 3-2 three times, 2-3 once, and 5-0 once. High on lili right now, with a 2-2 split between main and SB. I've trimmed my number of spellbombs down, as GY decks aren't as omnipresent. Unmoored Ego is still pulling its weight in the SB for me, as it single-handedly won me two games against scapeshift.
On another note, spoilers are upon us, and there is a new 3 CMC walker that makes thopters, the new Dovin Baan. He looks decent, but I think I would only play him in a Jeskai build to synergize with faithless looting.
https://i.imgur.com/YuFq5YQ.jpg
@FullMetalTezzeret: I think I agree with you about Codex Shredder. It's slightly better at G1, but makes you very GY dependent for collecting on the value, so you suffer more vs. Surgical, Leyline, or RIP. This place was quiet, but I think that's just how the holidays are!
@Everyone: If you've played the deck with an off-color like green or red, how many non-Opal sources do you feel like you need? I've noticed my moxen are off a lot, and don't love relying on them for colored mana. (Usually my issue is that I want to looting on T1.)
@The_Nobodys: Hmmmmm. That *is* an interesting walker. Kind of like a Sai that can't be Pathed, and doesn't cost mana to operate, but a little slower, but doesn't cost you material to keep advancing your material. Huh.
@The_Nobodys: What was your list like Tug's "One Sword To Rule Them All" list? You mentioned Scrap Trawlers?
That being said, I traditionally have liked having 10x sources that produce the 3rd color with a 21-land manabase (I've been on 7x Fetches, 1x Shock, 2x Gold Lands), but for the past couple months I've cut the 7th Fetch in favor of a Search for Azcanta. I've played with/without Search(s) at the expense of a land(s) on and off during my testing in 2018. Not sure if this is a long term swap, but the sweet spot feels somewhere in this range. It still feels ok right now though and fits well within the "75-card map" for matchup ins/outs.
I've found this deck is a little bit strange when looking at numbers because while the optimal percentages may typically require a slightly higher land count, we ALSO have to be mindful that one of our primary goals is to get/remain hellbent for bridge, so being too land dense can be an issue.
However, if red is your 3rd color and you want access to turn 1 Red for looting, I think spread should be a bit more dedicated than mine is for green (I only need Gx for 2-3x Decay/Trophy from the board, and I can afford to wait to see Green on Turn 2+). I'd suggest having anywhere from 11-14x Red sources within your lands alone, depending on whether you prioritize a 91.4% consistency with the 14x red sources (lands only) or are ok with closer to an 83.1% rate. Again, sometimes you'll have metalcraft + Mox on turn 1 depending on your early artifact spread so the numbers are probably slightly higher than this overall. That's just how I'd approach thinking about/adjusting this issue.
There's a lot to take into consideration based on this seemingly tiny pain point (as well as the countless other micro-deckbuilding decisions here), but I hope this helped!
I went the opposite direction and went with Stirrings and have been happy with where I've ended up so far.
This is the list I came up with and have been testing heavily on MtGO as of late:
1x Bottled Cloister
4x Codex Shredder
4x Ensnaring Bridge
1x Grafdigger's Cage
1x Krark-Clan Ironworks
1x Lantern of Insight
4x Mox Opal
2x Pithing Needle
4x Sword of the Meek
4x Thopter Foundry
2x Welding Jar
1x Witchbane Orb
1x Academy Ruins
3x Botanical Sanctum
3x Darkslick Shores
4x Glimmervoid
1x Inventors' Fair
3x Island
4x Spire of Industry
//Instant
4x Whir of Invention
//Sorcery
4x Ancient Stirrings
//Enchantment
2x Artificer's Intuition
//Creature
2x Spellskite
1x Abrupt Decay
2x Assassin's Trophy
1x Collective Brutality
1x Damping Sphere
1x Engineered Explosives
1x Nature's Claim
1x Sorcerous Spyglass
1x Surgical Extraction
2x Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas
1x Tormod's Crypt
1x Torpor Orb
2x Unmoored Ego
1) Cut the cantrips: Is the card selection more necessary than not.
2) Uptick in hand disruption: Is the ability to stay ahead crucial to consistent winning lines?
3) Test the extremes of Search for Azcanta (2x): Does this mitigate the absence of cantrips to help maintain card quality well enough?
4) Land count of 19x, play 4th Mox: Is this split better or worse than a 20/3 Land/Mox split?
5) Swapped all Serum Visions for Faithless Looting: Is the tempo positive play towards getting hellbent for Bridge lines worth the mana implications?
These tests lead me to the following conclusions:
1) I personally didn't want to be at a land count lower than 20x and didn't want to play more than 3x Mox.
2) 1-mana cantrips of some kind are necessary when the land count is low. It's close, but I prefer Serum over Looting despite the latter having slightly better bridge synergy.
3) Negative tempo with hand disruption can hurt despite hitting solid spells with IOK/TS, as the opponent can continue to curve out with other early spells in hand. Plus the topdecks these spells provide mid-late can be back breaking.
Again, not advocating that I (nor anyone else) is right/wrong, here are details to how/why I came to my conclusions/preferences:
Also, even though you can always increase the odds of being able to turn on Mox turn 1, there is some percentage of time when you won't have Metalcraft and are too light on lands and that Mox being a land would have been serviceable keep. It also hurts when you draw multiple Mox but no way to turn them on, when a Mox/Land split would have been a snap keep. the Land/Mox split mentioned above just felt like an effortless way to mitigate the percentages of running into these bad corner case scenarios enough to justify the numbers.
As far as gold lands go, the more you play, the more you run the risk of having hands where you don't have a 0-drop to turn on a spire/keep a Glimmervoid around if you want to cast a cantrip on Turn 1. You can obviously mitigate these percentages by playing something like a 4/4/4 split of Mox/Bauble/Jar, but that still implies that with hands with only gold Land(s), you need to meet an additional requirement just to allow you to cast the cantrip on turn 1.
Bottom line was that while I personally prefer Looting's textbox over Serum in a vaccuum by a slight margin, the difference between having 2 out of 20x Lands that don't reliably allow me to cast a turn 1 Serum vs say 8 out of 19x lands that can't cast Looting was the bigger issue at hand (amongst all the other details/deckbuilding decisions that follow), especially considering this is a land light deck that often relies on the cantrips to fix your land-light openers a decent amount of time. That's also taking into account that you're assuming you have both a cantrip AND a 0-mana artifact if you're forced into playing a gold land on Turn 1. Mulligan implications are crucial to take into account.
Again, to each their own with these flex slots, as IOK/TS certainly has their merits (I'm still trying to reincorporate the latter back into my sideboard/75), but this isn't typically how I like to pick the battles against a lot of opposing strategies with this deck outside of the super early turns. It is ultimately both a meta call and a personal preference though.
Whether or not you agree with my findings, I hope this helps sway anyone on the fence with any of these decisions one way or the other! These topics pop up every now and then over time and I wanted to weigh in on what I liked and why, as well as the process that helped me come to my conclusions.
Hopefully each person can apply similar testing approaches towards their own deck development/decisions. The most important thing I want taken away from this is not that I'm claiming I'm correct or not, but rather promoting the advancement/forward progression for each individual's core list to their liking through proper thought/application.
I think rampage of the clans is a cool win con, but maybe not for thopter/sword? If we have the combo, we aren't casting it, and we don't run as many artifacts that cantrip when destroyed as something like KCI.
That said, I really want to brew with it. I'm thinking an ensoul artifact shell would be perfect for it to shine, and at the risk of getting off topic:
Something like that would be fun. Ideal magic Christmas land scrnario: Turn 1 citadel and star, turn 2 ensoul it, play mox and play rancor swing 7 trample. Turn 3 swing again and cast rampage on their end step for 4 3/3s and draw a card and have rancor return to hand.
I'm gonna try out 2 sb when they drop to see how it goes. True if u have combo out and running you wouldn't wanna cast it but if they have rip/Stony out and your just sitting there I'd rather draw this than say sai or maybe even tezz. Even with 5 artifacts that's 15 power potentially swinging turn 4 and later game it would be even more powerful + it'd blow up your own bridge so u could swing.
Just got done watching the SCG semifinals where a KCI player executed a loop with thopter foundry, sword, 2 opals, and scrap trawler. Makes me wonder if it's worth trying to mash the stars and maybe bomat couriers in the deck for the recursion synergies.
Here was the list:
4 Scrap Trawler
Lands (19)
4 Darksteel Citadel
1 Island
1 Plains
2 Botanical Sanctum
2 Buried Ruin
3 Razorverge Thicket
4 Spire of Industry
2 Inventors' Fair
Spells (37)
4 Chromatic Star
1 Engineered Explosives
4 Ichor Wellspring
4 Krark-Clan Ironworks
3 Mind Stone
1 Mishra's Bauble
1 Pyrite Spellbomb
3 Sword of the Meek
4 Terrarion
4 Thopter Foundry
4 Mox Opal
4 Ancient Stirrings
1 Damping Sphere
3 Metallic Rebuke
4 Nature's Claim
4 Path to Exile
3 Sai, Master Thopterist
My point regarding T1 cantrip mana consistency was this (tying into the color source spread you mentioned you're utilizing):
You have 15x sources that CAN produce red, but 6x of them (Gold Lands) require 1x 0-mana artifact to either be turned on or not be destroyed EOT, while an additional 3x need 2x 0-mana artifacts to acquire metalcraft. Further, in the postboard matchups where Mox Opal is lackluster, you're incentivized to cut the Mox and probably lower your overall artifact density, making it harder to turn on the Gold lands. This increases the number of combinations of hands you'll have to mulligan/might have to reluctantly keep (though not strictly because you can't cast T1 Looting). This ties directly into why I prefer a mana base with less gold lands and more Fetch/Shocks.
This now puts you in a tight spot where you either have to consider keeping in the Mox to prevent this (which isn't ideal because you'll be cutting slightly more serviceable cards when sideboarding), or overhaul the complexity of your deck to accommodate these weaknesses which could dilute the overall effectiveness of your configurations against certain archetypes. Maybe you've found a 75 that fixes all of this comfortably enough to your liking, however I myself could not.
Again, as TugaTog said - Looting is great, but the mana implications/adjustments that'd have to be made in order to mitigate these pain points outweighs the effectiveness of Looting over Serum. Sure, Lantern and even Whir (now splashing green) have a higher gold land count with 4x Mox, but you have to take into account their overall artifact density compared to us, as well as the density of 0's (not to mention that Lantern was more incentivized to play a T1 artifact and whose gameplan could mold topdeck decisions to curve out better). Because of this density, their gameplans can afford to keep in some/all Mox postboard (especially Lantern since it has a more explosive turn 1 gameplan to potentially set up compared to us). Also, neither gameplan is pressured to cast a T1 cantrip as much as us (not that it's crucial that we cast T1 Serum/Looting, but it's even less so a priority for the other two decks by comparison).
I can't speak for every list of course, but I just think the work/adjustments needed to accommodate Looting (at least well enough for my liking) is a bit too much when Serum is still good and doesn't run into these pre/postboard issues.
Now you can dedicate your manabase to have consistent red, which I've done. Play 4 Spirebluff Canals, plenty of fetches, etc. When I would put these lists together, however, I found that my main deck had 4 red symbols in them, and my sideboard a few more between wear//tear and aether grid. The 4 red symbols in the main were, of course, faithless looting, and that was it. Does that seem worth it? And the fact is that unless you have sword in hand, looting isn't performing up to its potential as we just don't want to bin anything else. I've played lists with 4 swords and 3 Steelshaper's Gift in an attempt to maximize looting, but the mana constraints were too great when you're trying to get W on turn one and R on turn 2, and have UUU by turn 3.
So yeah, I have to agree that looting is a powerful spell that plays well with sword, but as an overall cantrip for our deck, doesn't have enough support to warrant the changed mana base.
When taking into account the half-turn slower speed of Serum (which I agree on @JaceToTheFace), you have to also look at the other side of things. Let's look at burn for instance - Sure Serum can be slightly tempo negative when on the bridge line, however say you have to Fetch/Shock for a red source during the same game, or had to activate Spire more than once (which is more common if you're playing a higher density of them). In the games where you have to take a bit more pain from your lands, does tacking on essentially Phyrexian Mana to your cantrip make it worth running over Serum? Does it put you in a better/worse end result over the course of the game? Furthermore, is the risk of having a higher percentage of not even being able to cast Looting/having to mulligan away a hand that would have been a keep if it were a castable card worth it's weight? The answer can of course be yes, it's truly up to the pilot! These are just things worth considering (and I myself have mulled over countless times) but have ultimately found myself on the other end of the argument.
Also with regards to just transferring the mana base from Lantern to this deck, you have to ask whether your shell has largely the same density of 0- and 1-cmc artifacts as the former, as that is part of how the deck was able to accommodate the gold lands optimally. I know there are a handful of different cores out there and some people play way more low-end artifacts to justify this mana adjustment. However for me personally, the core I've liked/been developing can't reliably make best use of the gold lands.
These are just my personal findings in relation to the core that I've been tuning and I can't justify the overhaul of my low end + mana base to properly accommodate an off-color cantrip. Again, not saying you can't/shouldn't play Looting (I stand by it still being only slightly better, but not worlds better), I just wanted to state why I have been off it for a while for anyone on the fence/haven't given it much thought. More importantly, I also wanted to evoke critical thinking with deckbuilding decisions and point out that a lot of these things are far from simple "4-in/4-out swaps" for long term results. Rather, if/when someone decides to make a decision like playing Looting over Serum, my hope is that they go through the thought process for themselves and weigh all the pros/cons rather than just blindly pick a side. Shoutout to @JaceToTheFace/@Al_Z_Heimer for evoking some really good conversation on this particular debate!
Even with a 0-mana artifact to cast on Turn 1 to activate Gold Land/Opal, your mana base still leaves you with 8x non-red sources (Looting) and 7x non-black sources (IOK/TS), whereas you only have 1x non-blue source that locks you out of T1 Serum. Again, if we're looking at this from the perspective that a cantrip's inclusion is vital to being able to sculpt a suboptimal keep by deploying it as early as possible (T1), it all comes down to whether the percentages here (plus the percentage of openers you'll see with only Gold Lands/Opal but no 0-cmc spell) warrant favoring the difference of Looting over Serum. I've just valued the ability to be able to cast a cantrip off of a higher number of mana sources (that lead towards Turn 3 UUU development) in the event I see 1x land and said cantrip, which has been directly correlated to the number of hands I'm willing to keep vs mulligan.
Certainly not a cut-and-dry decision from either side of the spectrum though!
Yes please. That looks like it can do some serious work out of the board. Her plus Sai = value town.
EDIT: Well, I spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out how the original was posted in the spoilers thread so you could click on it for a larger image. SO here is the card:
Priest of the Forgotten Gods 1B
Creature - Human Cleric (R)
T, Sacrifice two other creatures: Any number of target players each lose two life and sacrifice a creature. You add BB and draw card.
The Orzhov are not the only religious tradition on Ravnica, nor the oldest.
1/2