Why the Gargadon? A deck really needs to have a sac outlet, one that can eat more than just creatures, to justify it. It does nothing else for you when suspended, takes forever to come in without lots of fodder, and isn't that hard to deal with once it actually enters the battlefield. It's literally a dead card without expertise. Heck, it might still not do anything worthwhile for you anyways.
Simian spirit guide should never, ever end up outside decks that need the extra mana badly. I'm talking about decks that can resolve a key card and win on the spot, like Living End, Ad Nauseam, and Goryo's Vengeance. A cute expertise-AV combo is not sufficient.
Manamorphose is another baffling inclusion. Storm needs to make every spell count, but Delver and Pyromancer work best with spells that actually do something. At least Serum Visions has that nifty scry attached to flip Delver.
Blood Moon is a fine sideboard card, but an utterly inappropriate card in the main of a tempo strategy. The fact that you admitted that it's there for two matchups supports that. Magus of the Moon shouldn't even be here at all. Tron decks run Pyroclasm, y'know.
Lastly on the list of cards that shouldn't be here is Cavern of Souls. For 2/3 of your deck it might as well be a Wastes, for heaven's sake. It's actually worse than running a land that ETB tapped. Swap it for Spirebluff Canal.
Cards are cards and tokens are tokens. They're mutually exclusive, and their status can't be changed. You can feel free to replace creatures with tokens, but actually turning nontoken permanents into tokens is a decidedly unpleasant trip down the rules rabbit hole.
Null Rod's reserve list status has already been "cheated" by Stony Silence, but w/e.
"Search your library for a card with a Transform ability, reveal it and put it into your hand. Then shuffle your library."
All double-faced cards have some ability on the front face that causes them to be turned to the back face, and the term for that process is Transform. You can search for cards that have a Transform ability, and define a Transform ability as any ability that causes a permanent to be transformed.
The only wrinkle is the few cards like Moonmist that transform something else, but that shouldn't be too much of an issue.
I disagree with your usage of the term "transform ability." Unlike, say, mana abilities, which are specifically confined to very specific activated and triggered abilities, transformation is much broader in scope. Your definition doesn't mention cards that enter the battlefield transformed, and, more damningly, transform and DFCs are not the same thing. In this article MaRo explicitly mentions that, despite the fact that all DFCs released so far transform, the transform mechanic only comprises a subset of DFCs. It's quite possible that Wizards could release a DFC that uses a mechanic other than transform.
A better solution would be to identify a double-faced card as, well, a double faced card. All DFCs have telltale signs that identify them, such as the circle next to their names, the arrow pointing to the other side, and having their names on a checklist card. It's certainly much easier than hunting down the word "transform" in a text box.
Some of the text here needs cleaning up. One of the problems with your replacement effect is that it tries to replace casting with a discard, but they have different zone restrictions. Casting can be from any zone (with help), but cards can only ever be discarded from the hand. Plus, the very first step of casting (i.e. the point at which this card would stop being hidden information) is to move the card out of the hand and onto the stack. This makes the fact that you're trying to mash the discard clause into the additional casting cost extremely confusing. Generally speaking, Wizards doesn't try to replace the act of casting because a card in hand is hidden information, and casting is a very complicated process. For the sake of your card functioning in a sane manner, the discard effect should be extricated from the additional casting cost.
As such, the first line should be "As an additional cost to cast CARDNAME, pay ."
You can then add an activated ability: " , discard CARDNAME: Add to your mana pool and you get ." Adding mana to a mana pool and gaining energy have their own separate syntax, so they can't be crammed together.
Unless you want the creature's tap ability to be able to give you mana and energy even when you don't remove a counter from anything, the act of removing a counter should be part of the ability's cost, before the colon as such: " , remove a counter from a permanent you control: add to your mana pool and you get ."
Costs can't target, since that would be antithetical to how costs and targeting are supposed to function. You'd just have to have it remove a -1/-1 counter from a chosen creature instead.
It's an interesting reverse-Pentavus, but being able to grow/heal opposing creatures is pretty wacky.
The official term, as it appears on the product pages for Commander decks, is "oversized." WoTC has a number of full oversized decks that they occasionally break out for certain conventions.
As fun as it was to cast expensive spells with the likes of Expertises, Brain in a Jar, and Isochron Scepter, this change makes a lot of sense, or, at least, more than one card having two CMCs. This does disrupt a handful of decks in Modern and Legacy, but it's not going to topple entire metagames.
It's an Invocation, which fall into the same category as Inventions and Expeditions. It has a very small chance to appear in Amonkhet packs, is playable in limited if pulled, and is not legal in Standard. Masterpieces are only legal in Standard when they are also printed in ordinary expansions. Masterpiece series are considered separate sets, and format legality-wise they should be treated like Commander or Conspiracy.
I was in fact trying to make them vulnerable to countermagic, are you suggesting that that is in some way unwise? It's much simpler of course to just make the skipped turn part of the resolution, but I was deliberately tying to make it function like a cost; something that you commit to even if the spell doesn't work, in order to make it a greater downside and a harsher decision whether to play the card. I don't want players weaseling their way out of that missed turn.
You're sacrificing any sort of design elegance if you choose this route. Slapping uncounterable casting triggers onto these cards is flat-out ugly looking because non-delayed triggers are generally unnecessary when designing instants and sorceries.
It's going to happen eventually, either due to a mistake that hemorrhages players, getting outsold by competition, Wizards getting sold by Hasbro, a major scandal, economic downturn, etc. At the end of the day, we are paying massive amounts of money for scraps of cardboard, so it's not like we can close out ears to the idea of a bust some time in the future.
I don't know. This deck doesn't really seem to have a unified strategy. Your creature choices scream aggressive (what with Kari Zev and all), but Vault is just tempo suicide no matter how you slice it. You need to invest 6 mana into it before it does anything at all, and it needs 10 mana if you can't get your proliferate-lite cards online. At least Marvel decks had a bunch of energy production on the side. What's more is that your mana base is going to be all over the place. You left room for only 20 colored mana-producing lands, which makes it hard to drop your Revolutionaries, Glorybringers, and Chandra on curve and nearly impossible to play Decimator without a 3-brick Vault. Again, Temur Marvel decks at least ran fixing. Vault isn't strong enough to support an entire deck on its own, and the deck you've built around it actually has a better chance of winning without it.
Mairsil's reappearance in card form absolutely can be a coincidence because Commander products are a dumping ground for neglected legendary figures, the vast majority of whom are irrelevant to contemporary sets.
While its value probably won't spike, I disagree with your assessment of Bygone Bishop. It has applications outside of clue-based decks; for example, it makes every creature that Collected Company decks hardcast replace themselves. If any sort of white weenie crops up (human or spirit tribal?), Bishop would give the deck crucial staying power in the mid and late games.
Simian spirit guide should never, ever end up outside decks that need the extra mana badly. I'm talking about decks that can resolve a key card and win on the spot, like Living End, Ad Nauseam, and Goryo's Vengeance. A cute expertise-AV combo is not sufficient.
Manamorphose is another baffling inclusion. Storm needs to make every spell count, but Delver and Pyromancer work best with spells that actually do something. At least Serum Visions has that nifty scry attached to flip Delver.
Blood Moon is a fine sideboard card, but an utterly inappropriate card in the main of a tempo strategy. The fact that you admitted that it's there for two matchups supports that. Magus of the Moon shouldn't even be here at all. Tron decks run Pyroclasm, y'know.
Lastly on the list of cards that shouldn't be here is Cavern of Souls. For 2/3 of your deck it might as well be a Wastes, for heaven's sake. It's actually worse than running a land that ETB tapped. Swap it for Spirebluff Canal.
Green draw has been a thing for a long time. It's the tertiary draw color behind blue and black.
Cards are cards and tokens are tokens. They're mutually exclusive, and their status can't be changed. You can feel free to replace creatures with tokens, but actually turning nontoken permanents into tokens is a decidedly unpleasant trip down the rules rabbit hole.
Null Rod's reserve list status has already been "cheated" by Stony Silence, but w/e.
I disagree with your usage of the term "transform ability." Unlike, say, mana abilities, which are specifically confined to very specific activated and triggered abilities, transformation is much broader in scope. Your definition doesn't mention cards that enter the battlefield transformed, and, more damningly, transform and DFCs are not the same thing. In this article MaRo explicitly mentions that, despite the fact that all DFCs released so far transform, the transform mechanic only comprises a subset of DFCs. It's quite possible that Wizards could release a DFC that uses a mechanic other than transform.
A better solution would be to identify a double-faced card as, well, a double faced card. All DFCs have telltale signs that identify them, such as the circle next to their names, the arrow pointing to the other side, and having their names on a checklist card. It's certainly much easier than hunting down the word "transform" in a text box.
As such, the first line should be "As an additional cost to cast CARDNAME, pay
You can then add an activated ability: "
Unless you want the creature's tap ability to be able to give you mana and energy even when you don't remove a counter from anything, the act of removing a counter should be part of the ability's cost, before the colon as such: "
It's an interesting reverse-Pentavus, but being able to grow/heal opposing creatures is pretty wacky.
It's been 6 boosters since they stopped releasing tournament packs. Same as any ordinary sealed event.
You're sacrificing any sort of design elegance if you choose this route. Slapping uncounterable casting triggers onto these cards is flat-out ugly looking because non-delayed triggers are generally unnecessary when designing instants and sorceries.
Also, Lotus is really easy to work around with the likes of Reshape and Whir of Invention.