Emry, engineer, and Oswald all love greaves, emry and Oswald love Amber, ossy and engineer can tutor grinding station, emry or engineer can replay what we fiddlebend away, the mana is actually ok-ish with glimmervoid/spire. Crackdown combo gets around graveyard hate, Nettlecyst is a fair beater.
IMPORTANT TESTING NOTES:
Grapeshot: I'm testing this over Thassa's oracle for a few reasons. 1) It isn't just a dead card in hand the way thoracle is -- even if it's bad removal, it is removal. The "two mana sorcery speed ping" floor is better than the "literally useless" floor of thoracle. 2) it isn't weak to the same sort of hate. Torpor orb is a popular sideboard card right now thanks to pitch elementals, and that screws thoracle, so I picked grapeshot to go around that.
On top of all of this, grapeshot plays better into the "fair" game plan where we just beat down with creatures and push through that last few damage with burn -- also, Breach into a couple of lightning bolts ain't bad either.
Saheeli, Sublime Artificer: because I switched to grapeshot, i wanted a density of red legends to turn on mox amber -- this is much easier than finding a chromatic star to filter our mana, which would require even more cards in the yard to exile for the escape cost. Saheeli works great for a few reasons: 1) red or blue for mox. 2) makes chump blockers and/or attackers. 3) makes a lot of artifacts to power up nettlecyst and double grinding station untap triggers so that we don't need as big of a graveyard to pop off. 4) Opens up a lot of interesting lines: can copy an artifact land to "ramp" on a combo turn. Can turn a token into a copy of something we'd like to fiddlebend but also keep (I have lightning greaves into nettlecyst in mind -- fiddlebend the copy and we keep the original!). Copy grinding staiton to double up mill. Probably more. Copying Nettlecyst out of the blue is no joke.
Upgrading mana base as we go. Obviously saga is huge, and bauble is good, T3feri is wild, and maybe someday we’ll get there. But my current budget is cards I own + the 12 total tix of free rental from manatraders and cardhoarder. Jamming penny dreadful tourneys when I can to maybe win a few tix here and there
