I got to masters (for the first time ever!!!) running this. At the moment,
Defiance has been very valuable against aggro decks and the flexibility has made it better than a dead card in worse situations. I swapped 2
Avigraft for 2
Eilyn's Choice after the nerf patch because reanimator has been seeing a lot of play against me and blocking a grasp from shadows has won some games.
Brilliant Idea is a great way to reload once we've dumped a bunch of resources into gaining power. Merchants are the key cards in this deck. We want to use them to grab and curve
Eternity Core if we're not being pressured,
Desert Marshal if we're against aggro, or
Equivocate if they seem like they will buff a card like Hojan with weapons and whatnot. If we're looking to have enough power (and influence, sometimes we just don't end up with the TTT influence if we haven't played out
Minotaur Ambassador yet), we can grab
Pit of Lenekta and run away with the game.
I try to avoid playing the pit until I have a power to summon some 7/7s on the off chance they have relic hate in hand.
Here are some tips with what to bottom with
Strategize:
If you're against Feln or a 3f control (FTP, FJP, SOME TJP, etc) you can probably safely bottom
Hailstorm and Defiance.
If your opponent drops an Oni Ronin or similar 1-drop, bottom Brilliant Ideas, Eternity Cores, and
Wisdom of the Elders (sometimes keep it, but more often than not we won't have time to draw cards). We may be able to survive to play Ambassadors, maybe not.
Bottom Harsh Rules if we have more than one copy in hand (unless they're spamming aegis units, hopefully we have a hailstorm to pop aegis).
If you can help it, don't bottom
Sword of the Sky King since we realistically won't see it again. If we're down cards however, feel free to drop that hot rock.
Mulligan tips:
Ideally we have PP influence by 3 to play Hailstorm/Wisdom of the Elders, so sequence your power to hit those.
Time influence is not necessary for most opening hands. We'll usually find a
Seek Power or Time sigil with our filtering from Strategize.
Avigraft is
not
a removal we want to throw out randomly, we target fire merchants first priority (we are probably going to lose if they ever grab
Bore) then value engines like Heart of the Vault, Telut, Vara1, etc, and after that are recursion dorks like Dawnwalker.
Don't keep hands with too much draw. My general rule for mulligans is assume opponent is aggro and hope to have a Defiance,
Vanquish or Eilyn's Choice available for killing early drops, then work from there and filter out bad removal with Strategize later.