Hi All. I thought I'd post the current deckles I've been trying out, which I think utilises Abrade quite well in the current meta.
The simple reason why I went with <Red> as opposed with the more traditional <White> is:

1. Dack who aside from being great against shops and of course colossus, allows me to filter through specific inconsequential cards in any given match up (i.e. REB's, Mindbreak Traps, Null Rods etc.). I tend to find that since the meta is so polarised between Brown and Blue that main deck answers are required for both but obviously in different instances,

2. Abrade, which one would assume falls into the above mentioned category of situational, similarly to what Stephen Menedian suggested in his podcast, is actually almost always a great draw. It has replaced By Force in the main, which perennially felt quite clunky. The mentor sequence usually involves waiting til your turn to Abrade, ideally with one or no mana open on the other side. Since mentor lists play few instants that interact with a creature-less decks (swords) they are left with Ancestral, Brainstorm and Dig as their main pumps for Mentor as response (assuming FOW is the other card). Usually that feels like an ok play since one of the above cards must be played prior to FOW.

3. A lack of a 'pure' removal that white offers is somewhat neutralised by Dismember, however fatties aren't the easiest to deal with.

4. The main drawback of course is the much less versatile

The Decklist is as follows:

Maindeck: 60

1 Black Lotus
1 Crucible of Worlds
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
2 Null Rod

1 Consecrated Sphinx

4 Standstill

3 Abrade
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Brainstorm
1 Dig Through Time
4 Force of Will
3 Mana Drain
3 Mental Misstep
1 Mindbreak Trap
2 Pyroblast

2 Flooded Strand
2 Island
1 Library of Alexandria
4 Mishra's Factory
1 Mountain
4 Scalding Tarn
1 Strip Mine
3 Volcanic Island
4 Wasteland

2 Dack Fayden
3 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

1 Ponder
1 Time Walk
1 Treasure Cruise

SB:

2 Engineered Explosives
3 Grafdigger's Cage
2 Tormod's Crypt
3 Ingot Chewer
3 Sulfur Elemental
2 Dismember

Any comments or suggestions are MORE than welcome, as this deck is very much a moving feast at this point in time.
All the best, NBA84

@nba84 This looks great to me.

I wonder... hmm sure, let's just respond to your post by talking about myself. That will be great. I play a lot of poker, so I've gotten way into calcing the odds and playing the percentages over the years. I've gotten into playing against a range of unknown hands, and trying to play in such a way as to make the most (or lose the lease sometimes) in the face of that range.

So I wonder... why 2 pyroblast instead of 1... or instead of 3? Is that just the number you ended up picking? Did you test? Did you do some calculation given your metagame?

If you're like me. You just dream up random numbers and write up a list. So no criticism there. But there is more to it than that. I see all these decks posted on TMD, and they go up. And some guy (like me) comes along and says.... no no no. You should only have 1 Pyro. Then some other guy says. No way 2 is great. Then another guy says the cards sucks and should be Flusterstorm.

The crazy thing here is that they are probably all right given their own experience. The one guys plays against a ton of Misstep, so he runs Fluster instead. One guy lives out in Shopsistan and only plays against brown... You get the point.

What I would suggest is to use this site - http://mtgtop8.com/topcards in order to get some sense of the macroscopic picture of the field, as well as to stay very current of the best versions of each deck... and this site - http://stattrek.com/online-calculator/hypergeometric.aspx to calculate how often each deck draws and plays a given card... if you ever want to go that deep.

The main takeaway is this, you aren't building a deck so much as you are building a range of Landstill decks that you can configure to a particular metagame. I'm assuming that your particular build is configured to fight a lot of blue decks? Given the double Pyroblast?

I encourage you to think about what your setup would be if you knew for sure that you were playing against Shops in the first round. What if you knew it was 50/50 between Shops or Mentor? You get the idea. If you think about these questions you will likely be able to SB well in real tourneys and calibrate you Landstill very closely to a given field, since Vintage players are very predictable, and tend to play the same sort of thing over and over.

@topical_island, correct. The second REB is definitely a meta choice. In previous iterations it has been any number of soft counters. Most recently a singleton spell snare or spell pierce.

What I find is that a resolved planeswalker is hard to deal with if your primary removal shifts from bolt or shock to abrade. Fundamentally this deck has no way to remove planeswalkers other than attacking with lands. Therein lies the particular problem with abrade.

Why two? Well I felt quite comfortable to reduce the number of missteps to three due to the ineffectiveness of swords (aside from lands). Mana drain is either a two or three off due to the versatility against both blue and brown. Islands are easily supported in two colours.

Ultimately I felt that flusterstorm has lost a lot of power with the shift towards permanent based storm with PO.

To be perfectly honest, the toughest choices for me are main deck null rods or main deck EE 's.

Thank you, nba84

@nba84 Yeah... what can I say to that? Just yeah. I totally agree.

As for your other question. I like EE a ton. I love how it's basically the only card in the format that bypasses Taxing effects right now. (Like you can cast for zero and pay the taxed mana with colors to make it 2 and blow up all their Spheres, Thalias, Thorns in one go?) It feels slightly worse against Moxen, but not a ton worse... what else? It's bad at dealing with Revoker and Ballista, ok, you have me there.

Interesting question. Might be time to playtest against Shops... Energy Flux anyone?

I always run a singleton Psionic Blast in all my landstill lists. Ninja of Deep hours is pretty amazing also. These 2 cards could help out the planeswalkers situation.

http://morphling.de/search.php?type=1&app=10&sorting=DESC&search=john+knight&sent=1

the 8.01 and the one below tho are my 2 lists I ran and t8 with, mind you, highly outdated, but the premist remains the same. Hope they give insight sir. Any questions feel free to PM me, I prolly got over 1000 hours in testing these lists on cockatrice.