I added Winds of Rebuke as another tempo card with a little bit of mill/self-mill attached to it. I suppose if you wanted to go with actual removal for creatures you could go with Lightning Strike, Magma Spray, or Shock. Essence Scatter is probably a good choice as well. I'm playing against more Combo and Control than straight Aggro so I don't need those cards as much, but to each his own when it comes to sideboards.

So I'm playing this deck and I like it. It's been fun so far, but I find Madcap Experiment to be a little unreliable at times. So I've splashed white, put in Refurbish, and removed Fateful Showdown. I may put it back in the sideboard depending on how I feel. Gonna start testing, so I'll let you know how I do.

I did buy Inspiring Vantage and Glacial Fortress in order to do this, but I didn't want to shell out for Spirebluff Canal. This means I removed Evolving Wilds.

Testing complete. Out of 5 games I went 4-1. I lost because I never drew into what I needed, and the game went late, too, so I was very unlucky. The new build has 1 Noxious Gearhulk, and 2 Cataclysmic Gearhulk instead of Bloodwater Entity and Enigma Drake. Of course 4 Refurbish.

A bit more expensive, but looks better.

I did have a three color build that wasn't about this particular combo but it had the same frame with Refurbish, Madcap, and Gift with the Gearhulks making up pretty much the entire creature list and the rest of the deck drawing and discarding. I wasn't terribly happy with how it played because with three colors I just seemed to have too many matches that lost turns from not quite having the right colors out. I went with Blue and Red instead of Blue and White because in Red there are more options to draw/discard than there are in White, even though Refurbish is 100% better and safer than Madcap. I'm partial to the high risk/reward aspect of this build since the final combo is just so good. I've pulled it off successfully on turn 4 on 3 separate occasions (during actual matches, it's happened a lot more just testing solitaire style without an opponent) and when I don't but still win it happens by turn 7 when I can just hard cast the Gift. When I lose I really lose and that's ok. It is very exciting to assemble the combo moments before death and beating an opponent that has a much stronger board presence, especially when they represent lethal damage.

I do like this mostly the way that it is, but I do find that the Drake and the Entity aren't either as good as Champion of Wits since I added it in terms of getting to the finale. The combo is so effective that it's worth dropping the secondary win condition of Flying damage to tighten up the drawing/discarding with another 4 cards that do just that. I think that if I had a full playset of Champions and replaced the last two creature slots with either Chart A Course or Tormenting Voice then everything from top to bottom does what I need it to to align the combo. I'm thinking that I should go with Voice to keep the pie nice and even, but Chart a Course could let me draw into what I want to discard which makes it maybe the better card. I wish either of them were instants, but that's not a huge deal.

The flavor text on Voice is just too perfect: "You are undeserving of the afterlife. You will never feel the God-Pharoah's embrace."

I'm really happy to see that you won most of your games, what kind of decks did you play against? I brought this with me last night to our Monday group but I have 6 other Standard decks in paper and ended up playing a few of them instead because we mostly did multiplayer. This is very exciting for duels and I only ended up messing around with another new deck that I'd just finished yesterday morning to see how it works. It's another one that pulls off some shenanigans. I guess I like shenanigans :)

Hobbez9186 yeah man no worries! That's why MTG is so awesome, because everyone has a different opinion on what is good/what they like/what they want to play! I just LOVE this deck and I want to give you full credit.

The only reason I splashed white was to get Refurbish in here. I actually have, in paper, that EXACT deck you talked about at the beginning with Marionette Master and the Metalwork Colossus with the gearhulks, GPG, and refurbish. Of course this deck is NOTHING like that- it uses your same strategy with the hulks to help you along. It's only to help Madcap Experiment to go off more safely. (I lost a few games because of Madcap before I edited in white, and after I did that not only did I no longer kill myself, but I actually WON games.)

I played against Approach Control, Black Red chumps, Pirate Control, and Cats, and I think some weird Jeskai jank that I wasn't sure of. I played some more today and went 2-1 against MORE Approach, black discard, and white tokens.

I do love me some Shenanigans mate. That's why I picked up this deck, it's just so much FUN!

Hmmm, I might add Chart A Course. I think I prefer it over Tormenting because of the discard AFTER. And I've noticed people using it in modern, and legacy. Very good for a new card.

I have decided... to add them both :)

Fateful Showdown was fun, but any time you get more than one in your hand you can't cast them both. I probably shouldn't have been running 4 in the first place. It was a great way to recycle a dead hand and the only mainboard way to kill anything, but I've been running tests all day and I've decided that I just need to be 100% low cost "shovels" that will help me dig for that turn 4-6 win every single game. Removing creatures and higher cost spells has done that and really ramped up the reliability. Of course it is still completely possible to kill yourself, but getting to the combo this fast minimizes the damage you take along the way and on average I hit either the Gift or the Gearhulk within 6-7 cards so I feel pretty good.

The sideboard has all of the interaction and can actually get really really wide with Drake and Insect tokens. I have mostly gambled with the mainboard and haven't tried very many games with sided cards, but I have played around with most of those cards in other decks and am comfortable with what they can do.

The loss of Sanctum of Ugin hung up my Metalwork Colossus for good I'm afraid... my favorite deck was sort of "Storm" in Standard and was able to hit 4 of them in one turn... for free... and then pick them up and replay them... Aetherflux Reservoir was a hell of a thing and really fun to build around, I might have to play around with it again. There are a lot of cards that allow you to cheat out multiple spells with cast triggers like the Expertise cards and Sunbird's Invocation. Might be fun. I digress...

Thank you, Pickacantaloupe, for the support. I'm really happy to see the combo starting to spread :)

By the way, full on draw/discard mode was the way to go. Changing out those ten cards for less expensive "shovels" was apparently all I needed to do to hit maximum consistency. I've been playtesting this against my other standard decks and the win rate went up significantly. It still struggles when it doesn't actually find the pieces or get them in the right place, but that happens a lot less often which puts every game on a pretty fast timer. Most of the time when it loses the win was literally one turn away instead of being hopelessly behind.

The playstyle of the deck is kind of like Dori from Finding Nemo: "Just keep digging."

Seems so cool!!

If you're trying to make the deck more all-in and drop the other win conditions, maybe go down the Havens in the sideboard for something better?

Just the others from the main board, Drake Haven and Locust God create a ton of flyers for a straight forward aggro strategy with endless tokens. It's not as fun, but still very effective. It recovers easily from board wipes, and without wipes you can just keep attacking with more and more tokens. I'd almost prefer four Havens and another Locust God instead of Abrade and Negates, but then I would be out of answers and protection from powerful things my opponent is doing. Gotta draw the line somewhere.

How do you cheat out gift in this deck?

Russian roulette with Madcap Experiment as early as turn 4. Sometimes it kills you, most of the time it doesn't. Worth the risk if you already played Sanity on 3 and got Swallower in the yard on turn 1 or 2. A lot of the time it all comes together on turn 5 or 6, but occasionally I'll even just hard cast it on turn 7 and win that way, plenty of opportunity to set up by then... if you didn't die yet that is :)

I've noticed that a lot of Gift decks play Minister of Inquiries as a 1-drop that can chump and mill 6. Maybe you should play that over Compelling Argument

Also, Flood of Recollection from Rivals of Ixalan could be in the sideboard to recur Madcap Experiment against decks with lots of counterspells.

And also, Ipnu Rivulet

Patient Rebuilding and Phsychic Corrosion!

Too slow ;-) Although they will make a decent mill deck in and of themselves.