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Modern is a pretty much combo dominated format making it hard to win with an untested beatdown homebrew. (and with untested I mean you haven't played over 100 games against each of the popular decks played in the format)

You can get up to date of what's successful in the format here

http://www.mtgdecks.net/formats/view/Modern

The card quality in your deck is really low compared to what's being played these days. You also presume that decks win based on creature beatdown, some do but many don't. There are so called trap decks that cheat in Emrakul and other big dudes but they take only a small part of the meta and I don't think I would run Bribery mainboard.

some decks you should test against your deck are:

Splinter Twin/Kiki-Jiki combo

http://www.mtgdecks.net/decks/viewByArchetype/809

Affinity (popular aggro)

http://www.mtgdecks.net/decks/view/27506

You can also use an app like http://cockatrice.de/ to playtest your deck if you want to get into competitive magic

good luck

Hmmmm..... sounds like the world has turned and left me here. 8)

From what you are saying, this deck will get killed. Considering my pool of available players around here is very shallow, I haven't even seen KiKiJiKi decks. I have Cockatrice, but haven't started playing around with it much.

So, am I understanding that the new standard for decks are non-creature direct damage decks, which use combo play rather than traditional beatdown to win? Hmmmm. Seems I have to relearn everything I have learned.

I will look at those links you provided. I may have more questions.

Would the deck as presented have any viability in any other formats? Or am I stuck being a casual player forever? 8)

I play mostly legacy tournaments myself and only modern on rare occasion but if you look at something like legacy where most cards dating back to Alpha are still legal you'll notice that 70-80% of the the cards played are actually cards printed in the last few years. The powercreep of cards has been insane and Wizards keeps on printing stronger cards so that we keep on buying them.
Of the old cards played are mostly the old dual lands and cards that have led to combo decks like Show and Tell, Lions Eye Diamond, Dark Ritual, etc...
But the bulk of the muscle of modern day legacy are Knight of the Reliquary, Noble Hierarch, Jace The Mind Sculptor, Stoneforge Mystic, Batterskull and many more cards that simply proved to be better then anything else ever printed.

So in order to answer your question: no matter what competitive format you choose or how far you go back you always find the same power cards of recent years. In Modern many of these powerhouses were banned from the start to make the format "less broken" but nothing is further from the truth. Modern easily allows a 5 color mana base without much to fear from land disruption tactics. Modern is a format where one broken tactic after another pops up, gets banned only to be replaced by yet another one. Give me Legacy any day, it's the only truely balanced format.

That said there is nothing wrong with casual magic. Also you could look into Pauper magic as a competitive format. It's actually a lot of fun and the powerlevel is really high. I won a pauper tournament a while back and I had tons of fun.

check out this site for competitive pauper magic

http://pdcmagic.com/

it's also a format where you can pick up any deck any time you want and you'll never spend much money.

Yeah, I've noticed what you mention about Legacy. For something that allows pretty much any card printed, it seems rather tilted towards recent stuff.

This "power creep" was one of the reasons why I stopped playing Magic. I remember when I started out (way back when 8) ), you could pretty much play any kind of deck - everything had a solution. Outside of making a killer rainbow with as many of the Power Nine as you could find, there was ALWAYS a way to break a problem. That was the thrill of the game... if someone's deck beat you, you went back to the drawing board and designed a deck that would beat it.

I think that idea started to get broken around Ice Age, when Necropotence pretty much broke everything. Now, I agree, it's all about finding how quickly you can develop a game-breaking "broken" combo, and how much you can use it before it gets banned. There's isn't any "creativity" any more, because one a broken combo is discovered, it gets beaten to death. Which is sad, really, because the reason I first liked Magic was because of it's flexibility. It used to be fun to find out how many DIFFERENT ways you could batter an opponent senseless, or how you could make those "useless" card viable. Now, the cards are loaded guns right out of the booster, and it's just a matter of how much of an arsenal you can pack into a deck. And maybe it's just me, but I would rather go fo an elegant kill, like a skilled assassin, than simply nuke my opponent from orbit.

Anyway, this discussion is neither here nor there. 8) I am still exploring. I bought a preconstructed Dark Ascension deck, to see how the mechanics work, and maybe that will help me get into a new mindset.

I have to look into this "Pauper" magic. I've heard about it before.

The idea isn't broken, the game just requires you to keep up with relevant cards which obviously requires a constant investment. Old cards that used to be good, even crazy (I remember what a house nightmare was) have been replaced by newer cards that are simply more efficient. But it's still a very complex game, more so then ever before. It's not about who topdecks the first bomb. When I play legacy a good game can take an a full hour and that's in a format where every turn counts and decks can kill as of turn 1. Once you put aside the cost of cards you get back to what you are talking about, you fight with equal weapons and it all comes down to minor tweaks to attack a specific meta, play decisions, risk calculation, etc... I play a tournament every few weeks and it's always the same faces I see in the T8. They don't always play the same deck, they are just very good players.

There are 2 kinds of 'serious' players in my group, the ones who've been playing for a long time and own most good cards like myself and those who started not long ago but invested in one archetype and just own the cards to play and experiment within that archetype.
Either way we battle with the same level of decks, equal chance of winning and it's a fair fight. Also when playing legacy magic on a tournament level there is no superior deck, there are dozens of good decks and each one of them has good and bad matchups. It keeps magic interesting knowing its no longer who has the most expensive deck or who has a lucky day, it's about minimizing play mistakes. Each time I loose it's 99% of the time my fault because of some decision I made either while playing or while designing my deck before the tournament.

There are other formats that make magic interesting and bring variation like Commander. A format where you play a 100 card singleton deck and start at 40 life. This means you can play the bigger cards because games take longer and are less aggro minded. It gets crazy though with cards like Genesis Wave for instance. Wizards keeps on printing these cards that can't be played in tournaments but are totally broken in multiplayer formats. The good part is, if you play in a group of friends you can build your own banned list. If something is just rediculous and everyone agrees you just ban it.
We did this with Sundering Titan to name just one crazy card. It became obvious that once this beast entered the field games ended almost immediatly. It gets cloned, ressurected, blinked etc... It's not who plays it, it's who abuses it first.

anyway, magic is fun but to keep it fair you need to either play tournament decks which is expensive or you need a group that puts down strict house rules to balance the game.