umm, no lands?

Under construction.

I like how the one red card in here is double red...

On a more serious note, this is three coloured; Redirect , card:Geth's Verdict, Increasing Vengeance and Victim of Night will be hard to play when you want them while Dissipate , Murder and Volition Reins will likely call for a pesky unbalance in your mana sources. Also I find that Lone Revenant , Temporal Mastery and Barter in Blood are often underwhelming although all could work in your almost creature-less take on current Grixis.

I'm currently running Bolas myself and have found a great number of cards that really fill gaps well. These include the monstrous Bonfire of the Damned , Devastation Tide , Forbidden Alchemy , Pillar of Flame , Olivia Voldaren , Crimson Muckwader , Liliana of the Veil , Tamiyo, the Moon Sage , card:Traveler's Amulet, Tragic Slip and our best buddy Vampire Nighthawk .

My favourite choices out of the cards you've included are Gilded Lotus , card:Curse of Death's Hold, Murder , Think Twice and Tribute to Hunger as they all help you get to the point at which our king comes out in all his glory to destroy our opponents. Also Mystic Retrieval is cute and could become quite helpful later in the game when you can use that Murder or Tribute to Hunger again and again.

All in all, I love your work and am very excited to see the end result of this.

Sudden final note: If Vessel of Endless Rest and card:Life's Finale work for you, go for it. Over the former I run the slower Evolving Wilds , card:Traveler's Amulet and an additional Gilded Lotus , over the latter I run Bonfire of the Damned and Devastation Tide .

It should also be mentioned that in none of this am I trying to tell you that you're wrong, I'm just giving an opinion.

Hunted - These are excellent opinions. Haven't had too much time to make the cuts I want to make so far, but this is super-valuable advice. I think I will stick, given your last pg, with Vessel, not so much because of its graveyard removal, but because it RAMPS, while Evolving Wilds and Amulet really just fix.

Bonfire of the Damned is definitely something for me to contemplate, though. Given the other kill, I wonder if card:Life's Finale is overkill.

Also, this is basically my attempt to remake my most successful standard deck ever, another Bolas deck that I used in both LOR-ALA standard and ALA-ZEN standard, with greater success in LOR-ALA standard. I miss Terminate .

You mentioned Terminate?

http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=135125&d=1346558120

Also, Painlands are back, new Niv Mizzet and this...

http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=135114&d=1346557423

It's going be a fun standard, and it's beginning to look a lot like Grixis.

Maybe include Skullcrack or Appetite for Brains in the sideboard against Thragtusk ?

Appetite for Brains , perhaps. Skullcrack I'm not so sure about; I really don't care about them gaining the life. My opponents could start with 60 life against this deck for all I care.

A little confused on the lack of shocks, not gonna lie.

@Gull - I'd put them in if I could afford 'em.

Sooo what's the wincon here?

the wincon is a resolved Bolas, he kind of wrecks faces.

I was running a list similar to this pre-ravnica (when grixis walker control wasn't even a thought). Cards that worked for me were sidedboarded 3x Zealous Conscripts and 2x Bonfire of the Damned with 1 more in the sideboard for matchups where I found myself stuck up against hordes of tokens that needed to be dealt with early on.

In the update section you can hide these ancient comments.

As for the deck, it definitely needs more blue mana dual lands, you're not always going to have a lantern out and it's easily possible to have hands of just r/b land making it difficult to Think Twice or Counterflux .

For a boardwipe there are many options that are decently costed and doesn't get completely shut down by a Sigarda. (Magmaquake for example)

Rakdos Keyrune over Chromatic Lantern ? It's just too much of a boss. and you should put in a Charmbreaker Devils . It's a fringe card that gets way too damn overlooked. But if it sticks for more than a single turn, you essentially win the game. oh, Did I mention you can 20 them in one turn? yeah.

@NoSkill - The problem with both of these for this deck, anyway, is that I have no other creatures. The Keyrune and the Devils both will definitely suck some kill spells. As it is, all creature kill in all opposing decks are nothing but dead draws, and I'd hate to fix that problem for them. Rakdos KR over Lantern is particularly difficult, as a Chromatic Lantern is the instant solution to all mana fixing problems, and as Demarge notes, blue mana tends to be my primary problem color, also.

I would put Sever the Bloodline against tokens

Do you mind if I bring this to FNM? :D

I've wanted for a long time to see Havoc Festival played somewhere. Would that fit here? (are you able to stave off all damage threats so you don't hit 0 first? (I think hastey creatures would be the main issue...))

With Ash Zealot being played in a lot of decks right now this doesn't seem like a good idea.

@martin - Ordinarily I'd agree, but the token decks these days are terrible pains in the ass that generate DIFFERENT KINDS of tokens, so Sever the Bloodline doesn't even hurt them that much.

@pthomas - Not at all! Let me know how you do with it! I'm not sure about Havoc Festival though. I'm basically always going to be behind my opponent in life with this deck, especially by the time I something as big as a Havoc Festival out. I have no real way to deal damage with it other than Bolas, and I need to be able to give my life away as a resource for making the most efficient use of my cards.

I think the deck could be helped a lot by adding some burn in.

@Youdrongo - Possibly. What would you suggest cutting?

If you were to get the cash for shocklands, would you put in full playsets of Blood Crypt , Watery Grave and Steam Vents ? Or would that be too much? Your 3 copies of Chromatic Lantern do seem to do a pretty good job of fixing mana.

Blood Crypt would probably be a bit unnecessary, though it would certainly improve the deck. (Although, some people do continue to run Ghost Quarter ). The other two shocklands would be the priority.

Chromatic Lantern does an excellent job reducing the number of games where I have to care about this stuff, but I don't always have it in hand, of course.