If I may weigh in, it depends on your playgroup. It still kills when Purph out and with Splinter Twin by itself. But if, say, your combat step is being infringed upon by repeated Stonehorn Dignitary triggers or some kind of Ghostly Prison effect then you can't kill that person. Celebrant does untap Krenko though regardless.
I still vote for not playing it. While making everyone else lose handfuls of life a turn seems fine you're not drawing cards off of it which is what you want to be doing. It doesn't replace a dude or a counterspell or removal or a Time Walk effect. If for some reason you can't spring for even all the cheaper Time Walk cards then you could play it to kill people faster, but it's not actually doing anything for you. Yes, it's making people lose life without a doubt, but the only life point that matters is the last one.
This is true, but there were a few reasons I removed it.
A. The deck ended up being too potent with confusion. People were refusing to play with me because of it. Apparently counter heavy blue combo decks are easier to metagame against? This was mostly due to genesis chamber tokens stealing every artifact on the battlefield.
B. My meta also has a lot of token decks. While I did reasonably well with confusion in go tall metas, going wide with tokens isn't as great with it.
C. Aligned hedron network solved many other problems, which was how to aggro win when everyone else's boardstate is superior to mine. Turns out removing big beef until they get rid of the network usually makes it much harder for them to deal with swarms. Of course, it invariably gets recurred, but since it's soft, it usually is ignored until someone mistakenly assumes I can't get it back fast enough to stop them from stomping me.
D. I have a personal aversion to winning with other people's cards. I don't like bribery or treachery affects, so even when I can show the blue player that I can do it better than he can, I prefer winning with my own resources.
If people don't run any sort of enchantment/permanent removal like Vindicate or Krosan Grip or Reclamation Sage or a Counterspell or anything else then they seriously need to adapt and play interaction.
The looting is only when casting CREATURE cards and he only has 27 creatures to trigger it (counting the removal of Deal Broker). That's only 27% of the deck that will trigger the loot effect, and only 25% of the deck will have the cost reduced (Duplicant and Solemn Simulacrum are not red). There are enough unconditional card draw/filtering effects in Magic to choose from.
I'm a huge proponent of Deal Broker because it's a body to block in a pinch, and it's blue loot (draw then discard) instead of red loot (discard then draw). I do also like Smuggler's Copter since it and Norin avoid most board wipes which helps keep the engine running, and it's blue loot.
'Red looting' is usually referred to as rummaging.
The issues are you don't really want it early because it either means you (usually) don't have counterspell mana up and you're not playing dudes that draw you cards, and you don't want it late because you are casting your extra turn cards. After you start chaining them then you're running away with the game and winning already and have been hitting your land drops every turn already so it becomes excessive. By all means feel free to test it though, though I'm guessing you'll find it unneeded.
No Harvest Season. The excessive ramp is unnecessary, imo. Plus I wouldn't want to spend half of an extra turn's mana on something that isn't going to give me another turn.
Open into Wonder (alt link) MIGHT be okay if we've lost Edric a time or two, but if we're there then we're probably not winning anyway.
Shattering Spree is better than By Force both because it costs one less in the end for destroying the same amount of artifacts and if a counterspell hits Spree it's like storm in that not all copies are countered.
it is probably way to late to do this now. But for infinite combos we could classify them as Class S(super) Class A and class B.
Class B can only be done at sorcery speed because it requires recasting or reequiping or something else givinf a timing restriction.
Class A can be done at instant speed. So you can respond to someone else winning or something like that.
Class S can be done at instant speed and cant be interrupted, or if an opponent does something in response, you can in response start the combo all over again.
I would consider implementing something like that only if people would format their suggestions properly first (mana symbols in proper order with all card previews working properly and overall formatted the standardized way).
I see your point about Trinisphere but if I'm locking the board down then I personally don't mind going long and casting a bit extra for my rocks if it means that other decks can't do anything. Portcullis seems nice, though once it's answered decks (take Yisan for example) can just continue. Containment Priest is probably better in that case, as is Aven Mindcensor probably just in general. At this moment I'm going through my long list and trying to widdle it down to something more usable.
I would love to see the original combo version update. I'm currently working on adding stax into the deck (and maybe another color if those stax pieces are needed/good enough) since a lot of the effects don't hurt us and I'm sure doing other dirty things would come easy. For example Trinisphere only really hits some rocks and a couple pieces of removal and everything else is huge, so if that is gotten out turn 1 or two then other people slow way the hell down. I'm going to be pondering this list for a while.
I happened across this take on Edric. It has a neat idea going on for it, but how do we flesh it out? I also really like BigLupu's idea in making the deck work in a more competitive environment. The latter has some added interaction (and interesting additions) to interact with specific things but the former is attempting to add its own stax pieces to hit everyone a little bit.
Would playing snow-covered lands be slightly better in case that comes up in a game?
Also Donald I've been working on foiling your deck out for quite a while now because I love it so much. That land base tho..
The only times I’ve seen snow lands come up is with Wake of Destruction, Extraplanar Lens and if you run Mouth of Ronom or Scrying Sheets (or I suppose Skred). I think it’s more likely someone drops Extraplanar Lens than you get hit by Wake of Destruction so maybe a meta call if the guy running Lens has snow lands? If there's any other reason to swap I'd like to know.
I’m so far from foiling my deck it’s not funny. I have most of the cheap stuff but have been focusing on foiling my cube which is using up all my trade stock. Then you have the stupid stuff (Cradle, Mana Drain, FoW) so it’s going to take me like 10 years to finish…I got a PM from a guy a few years ago that said he had Japanese foiled his whole Edric deck o.O.
Daaaaaaaaaang, and I thought I was cool.But if it isn't a foil of this style of build then I'd have to see it before I get envious.
My 1.5 cents.
If people don't run any sort of enchantment/permanent removal like Vindicate or Krosan Grip or Reclamation Sage or a Counterspell or anything else then they seriously need to adapt and play interaction.
'Red looting' is usually referred to as rummaging.
Open into Wonder (alt link) MIGHT be okay if we've lost Edric a time or two, but if we're there then we're probably not winning anyway.
I would consider implementing something like that only if people would format their suggestions properly first (mana symbols in proper order with all card previews working properly and overall formatted the standardized way).
Daaaaaaaaaang, and I thought I was cool.But if it isn't a foil of this style of build then I'd have to see it before I get envious.