@john-cox it can be, but it can also be burn. Burn doesnt play many generic mana, so I guess it can be lotus and ruby and blue power. Burn without attacking creatures is too risky. You would need 6 or 5 burn spells to resolve, which takes lots of time.

You need either bazaar or survival active to make good use of pharaoh. As wfain said, that's usually how we lose games. It can help sometimes. But as a matchup-specific card I think energy field does a better job.

The question here is: are you doing anything better than monored prison? I don't mean to be mean, but I don't see it being better in any aspect. This is kinda funny actually, you got like null rod and eidolon that are great against PO (seems like it's the baseline for your deck actually, to beat PO), misstep that is good against... blue? fork also for blue decks, burn for shops. But they aren't backbreaking (except against shops). If you want to hit everything, you want to have backbreaking spells against the decks so you compensate the cards that are bad for the matchups.

Maybe, just maybe you are looking it at the wrong direction. You want a deck that beats PO, shops, blue, etc. Maybe burn is supposed to be just burn, not a deck to beat those. The deck that should be beaten. To try to impose your gameplan, ignoring as much as possible your opponents'. Make the famous lists of 10 creatures, 16-ish lands, some moxen, blue power (recall, cruise, dig, timewalk) and like 26-30 burn spells.

It would be like legacy burn with power. But maybe that's enough? I mean, eldrazi here is like eldrazi stompy with power (and it's adjustments), and espiatrianero was the trophy leader last season with it. Sometimes, legacy with power is enough for vintage

This doesn't seem so much as a burn deck, more like the monored prison splashing a few burn spells. With that few burn spells (I mean, to count to something like 18 you need 6 burn spells) I'm not sure burn is correct there. Wouldn't it be better to have some creatures with potential to do 4-10 damage per game? BTW, this I'm saying is basically what monored prison is. If you are going to the burn plan, I think you should go focusing on the burn.

I thought about fiery confluence (the card is insane), but with that few lands I'm not sure you would be able to rely on that.
I think your deck looks way more like a normal red aggro deck running shocks to clear the way to... 6 weak creatures than a burn deck.

Maybe you should try using more artifact mana (at least ruby and lotus) to be more explosive, and cut null rod for extra eidolons (they are also PO hate after all). Null rod is only great against PO, it's ok against shops (depending on the hand it's insane, but it's more likely ok), and against the rest of the field they probably would feel good that you are playing this spell. Maybe you could go all in in eidolon effects and get scab-clan berserker too. They are awesome in vintage too.

BTW, if you are using burn to the shops matchup, price of progress would be insane.

Dice is lame. Take 10 tokens with you and some d20 in case things get out of control. Some nice tokens btw. If you are already playing paper vintage you should make some effort for things to look cool. That should be an official format rule, even for unofficial games.

But yeah, at least 3 + dices to represent different states in case you have no shame.

Peace.

It has been discarded as an idea already, but pithing needle is awesome AGAINST survival. I really mean it, it's painful to play against it, can name any of the 2 engines and stop any amount of copies with it. In regards to card advantage, wfain is precise there, if you want it you can get more copies of squee. And wonder is awesome. I think I'd rather cut one of the combo creatures (VV, rootwalue and hollow one) than the copy of wonder. It does... wonders.

One thing I'd recommend you to be cautious about. Don't consider good results as necessarily an indicator that it's a good version of the deck. I'm not saying it's not. All I'm saying is that survival is an awesome deck, and it's way above the median of the vintage decks. The deck is so good that tere are bad versions of survival that can do fine in the metagame. I think for you to really be able to understand and brew correctly it'd be good to play the other versions of the deck. See what works in each of them, and what are the metagame each one is better at. For example, for me there are 2 builds of survival that are insane, and each one of them works better in certain enviroments. And each one of them has it's own pros and cons. Besides looking for a better version (say a version that is better than A against any deck) you can look for a version that goes better against X and worse against Y.

I don't know how you feel about that, but we already talked about something between 5 and 10 versions of survival in the main thread. Maybe it would be a nice discussion to have there too, as the versions have lots in common, and maybe when talking about one of them we can have ideas for the other one.

@moorebrother1 I think as long as there are championships, it will be competitive. There may be players who like to go to championships to play casually, and there's nothing wrong with that. But there will always be people playing it competitively. Even commander 1x1 can be competitive. I knew some people that had some pretty expensive and well built x1 decks around here, and there was also the league on MTGO.

I think they are 2 things: the incentives for people to take the format competitively (PT, GPs, even MTGO Leagues, Format Championships, etc) and the people itself. The format doesn't give by itself incentives to become competitive (well... not for me in Brazil anyways). But there are competitive people playing it (as there are in almost every format, I guess).

@fsecco Yeah, I agree completely. I've played with survival against lavinia and it's good at slowing survival down and it can even blank some hands we keep.

So, for maindecking sounds like Lavinia is better if you have access to the 4 colors. Leovold is a completely different thing for xerox decks, I'd run it sideboard in the very least (if you want to improve that matchup).

BTW fsecci is right, I didn't pay attention to that. Vengevine triggers on cast, and lavinia counters cards that weren't paid mana to cast, so they are still casted. Lavinia + cage or something like that completely shuts off survival's free creatures engines.

Considering the cost, I'd say probably Lavinia is the best one to play in higher numbers. Her effect is AWESOME in the early game, meh in the mid and bad in the late game. So if you play her, you want it early. Leovold in the other hand, has a great effect through the whole game.

I agree with most that you said, I only disagree on the xerox section. Leovold shuts down completely URg xerox until they can find an answer or somehow flood the board entirely. It's a roadblock and it's ridiculous at stopping them from doing anything. I've got to situations where I couldn't see an out (because I kinda underrated him on the MU), and then leovold with no more cards in hand against a xerox opponent with dack, pyro, 4 or 5 tokens and a few cards in hand just bricked everything they had.

Maybe Lavinia on turn 1 or 2 against some xerox hands would be as good as Leovold. But when she may be good in certain spots, leovold is just bonkers against almost any scenario (except for like 10 tokens staring you at 8 life or something like that...). Again: all of this against xerox.

They do kinda slightly different things, and I'd go with Lavinia is they both costed generic mana. To be worth playing Leovold, he must be very in-color IMO. If you play Lavinia, you should play it to land it early. In the early game she can lock your opponent out of the game by itself, and it gets worse in the late game (at some point of the game she's really not useful at all without wastelandS).