Puschkin

And that contributes to Seismic Assault/Treasure Hunt ... how?

Groundskeeper
Storm Cauldron
Ghost Town
Wheel of Fortune/Windfall/Timetwister/Memory Jar
Land Tax (!)

Because it isn't indestructible. The idea is to put the phylactery counter of the Lich on it. An artifact-land is super-easy to destroy, trying to hide the phylactery on that would be foolish.

But totally worth it. The database I am using is http://magiccards.info/search.html
Sometimes I just click the "random card" button until I stumble about something interesting. If it is just interesting but doesn't spawn a deck idea immediatedly, I add it to a "deck" here I called "The Cool Pool" to not forget about it. Sometimes I check it and move single cards to existing decks.

Also, I think, this isn't any less time consuming than the more traditional ways since when we are about to actually build the deck, we know exactly what it will contain, card for card, we just have take the cards out of the binders. Whereas back then you changed your mind in the middle of deck construction and then had to put back a lot of cards. It's like cooking chinese meals: The preparations take longer but the actual cooking is very fast :)

Here is what I do since I am using MTGVault:
First I add the key cards 4 times each. Then I add 20 or so basic lands as placeholders for the actual mana base. Then I add more cards that I find that fit my theme - but only one of each! Later then, when I am about to hit 60 cards or run out of ideas I revise what I have up to that point, toss out what works the least and up the numbers of those that fit the best. And then adjust the mana base of course and maybe add some other cards that help out with problems I identified.
That way I am free to brainstorm without losing any idea. I also don't care about colours at first because. And, this way, I might find new interactions and subthemes that I might build on.
Still a lot of 1-ofs remain, especially for the first couple of games I actually play, then, after some games, I start weeding out those that didn't impact enough, were unfun to play etc.

That's how I built all of my decks. Either a combination of cards or a concept and the rest indeed builds itself. Usually I find more cards I'd like to include than the deck has open slots, so my decks usually turn out to be highlanderish except for the key cards.

Splash blue for Paradox Haze and you'll have a fun budget deck with a nice twist to it :)

Darksteel Citadel is an artifact, too? Cool, didn't know that. Yes, that makes it an auto-addition!

If I play Akuta it will stay as a one-of (and I don't own a Crucible), so not worth the trouble.

Yes, I considered the Gargoyle, but it is too expensive for what I am trying to do.

The golem you are referring to is Transguild Courier and yes, he fits in perfectly, thanx! It is also nice, I suppose, that this is possibly the first time Transguild Courier is used outside of Domain decks :)

But my opponent draws, not me ;)

Still not enough - extra life as a form of protection is useless. Because it doesn't affect board position. If you had better creatures you wouldn't get into the situation where you need that extra life in the first place.
Okay, I discounted the Ascendants, that's because I don't think you'll get to 30 life in time to make a difference.

you asked why it doesn't win that often, I proposed a possible reason. Maybe try my suggestions and find out?

Maybe this deck doesn't win because with the exception of the Pridemages there is no card that takes advantage of all the lifegain! Guys like Martyrs of the Sands just aren't competitive if you fail to use all that life for good.
Since this is part of the "[colour] wins" cycle I can't suggest a splash (would have been black). Test of Endurance would be great but isn't Modern legal. Felidar Sovereign is, however, at 6 mana he is way out of your mana curve. Cradle of Vitality is probably too slow. That's all I can find in white and modern.
Which means, you should probably replace some of those lifegainers for something more productive. The Martyrs should be replaced for sure, preferable with something that makes good use of all the creatures you have, for example something with battalion. And I would upgrade some of the Soul Wardens/Attendants to Soldier of the Pantheon (can still gain life but is stronger and invaluable against multicoloured decks).

If this was helpful, please check my latest decks, I need help, especially regarding this one:
http://www.mtgvault.com/puschkin/decks/down-with-the-sickness/

Thinking more about it, Primal Hunter is next to perfect for this deck, I just have to trade for one.

You mean using the "friend" thingy here? I don't know what it does, it's like following on Twitter or something? Feel free to do so^^

I wasn't complaining, I was submitting constructive criticism. *Especially* since so many people seem to like it - you want to help newbies, I want to help newbies. I am good with longer texts, teaching things and english (even though it's not my first language either). What I am not good at is adhering to social norms ... reading my posts may give you the idea that all I am do is complaining and pointing out mistakes etc. but believe me, I wouldn't bother doing that if I wasn't trying to help :)
I am serious, though, if you need help with articles like this you can call me out.

I question the order in which you do things. Most importantly, you should not start with the mana base! You might do so if you are very experienced but even then you should adjust the mana base once again once you finished all other steps. You write "-Try to count how many mana symbols there are in the mana costs of the deck's nonland cards." <= At that point there are no cards in the deck and hence no mana symbols to count!
Hence, adding mana should be the LAST step! Yes, this inherits a different problem: Newbies will be lazy about the mana base, tend to add too less, but this is something most players will do anyway during their early careers, no matter what.
Also, I would at least mention that lands aren't the only sources of mana.

Next, why do you add small creatures before "cards of your main strategy"? Somehow this is all backwards ... wouldn't it be best to start out with the main strategy and then build the rest of the deck around that? Especially these days with rampant block mechanics. Your main strategy determines the flavour of the other additions, for example, if you put Thassa in the center of your deck you are able to make your creatures unblockable - so, when selecting your small creatures you might want to look for creatures that trigger effects when not blocked while you can skip creatures that are unblockable by themselves.

And, whether you reorder your steps or not, I recommend adding a 5th step: Examine the deck you just put together and determine if some of the decisions you made later may have impact on the decisions you made during the early stages. Especially if you did lands first, you WILL have to adjust. But there will be many other factors, for example, you might end up with many cards that damage yourself and realize you have no way to get life back and then decided to replace some creatures with other creatures that have lifelink instead of, say, trample.

See, for you and me, these things aren't so important because when we start building, we have a clear vision of the deck in our head, know the basic structures by heart and know the cards and abilites without having to look them up. But for a newbie all of this is overwhelming and he has to keep way too many things in mind. That's why the order he does things in is crucial.

That's their problem.
See, THREE out of the top 10 "decks" in the "hot decks" section are currently no actual decks! People are misusing the main feature this site has to offer. At least, one of the other three is a newbie guide, but still, if this trend continues, we'll be swamped in non-decks. This is Vault, not Facebook, damnit.

Can't you ask questions like this in the forums? "Decks" like these clog the decklist sections and it annoys me to no end!

Of course they tweak new cards according to their most popular formats. That's the problem! In many ways!

First off, while we play Vintage, this is not about formats. Casual isn't a format. It's just we want to use our entire collection of cards. Of course, some things have changed and changed for good. And of course, cards very unbalanced early on - a few way too strong but also the mayority very weak. BUT this has been fixed just a few sets later. They found a good powerlevel around Tempest. But the just didn't stop tinkering. What I described above is a process of 20 years and it gets worse each year. We experience a continous powercreep and dumb-down as well as big changes to the way they create cards. Here is the main probelmatic issue with this policy (besides the obvious powercreep:

Cards are created with their block mechanics in mind and judged by this. This creates problems in a grand picture. Let's take Masticore. That card was considered very powerful in it's era, so it got a reasonable upkeep (discard a card per turn or he is gone). This upkeep was clearly designed to be a disadvantage to balance the card advantage the Masticore can grant. But a few sets later we got madness, threshold, flashback and cards that directly profit if you discard cards. There we got cards like Waste Away. 5 mana for an effect like that is bad, even for old standards, and yet Waste Away requires you to discard a card on top of it. In other words they considered discarding cards an advanatge now <in this particular set>. Which may make Waste Away playable within this set but horribly weak outside. But it's not the single card that is unbalanced - they designed the entire set/block with this attitude in mind, a design rule that only applies for this block.

That may be a nice marketing trick but it fucks up Magic as a whole. Same is true for their constant shifting around with the colour pie. If they made their mind, changed it once and stuck to it, fine, but they just keep on doing this, sometimes for single sets even (Planar Chaos). The problem here being that, banning aside, you can't undo a card once it has been printed. They are here to stay. And we are playing decks condensed to just 60, sometimes 100 cards. Which means, in eternal formats, colours lose they colour identity (print one good flyer for green every 10 sets and at one point you can assemble an efficient mono green flyer deck, something that shouldn't exist theoretically) and if they printed a brainfart, we have to deal with it forever.
And of course this also applies to the power creep - for example, once they printed Baneslayer Angel, a bunch of older white flyers has become obsolete and a new white flyers below the power of the Euroangel are obsolete as well.

"Don't like the power differential from the Vintage to Current? Then play Standard or Modern, and incorporate this as part of you "casual" rules."
No. Just no. It would mean locking the mayority of my cards away in a locker and never touching them again. More importantly, it would force me to buy more cards of each new expansion just to keep up to day. That is of course exactly what WotC wants, sure, but I don't own Hasbro stock, sorry. See, casual is where players of all formats, ages card pools gather. It makes no sense to restrict yourself to something like Modern or even Type II when playing casual. Casual usually uses Type I or Type 1.5 rules simply because it allows the biggest card pool. A Type II or modern deck will most likely also be legal in Type I or 1.5 but not vice versa. Which means if a newer player wants to join my group of oldschoolers, there is no problem.

And about mana burn: Funny thing that you mention that. That's the only rule we didn't take over - we dropped mana burn for a while and then decided to reinstall it. First, there are cards like Power Surge that just don't make any sense without mana burn. Secondly, without the possibility of mana burn, people tend to play more sloppily. They just don't care anymore how to tap man properly which also increased the cases of players taking back their moves. Mana burn introduced interesting choices when playing with certain cards. For example you had to think twice what to cast with things like Mana Flare out if you want to cast cards with odd casting costs. Then there are cards like Mana Drain where the possibility of mana burn was needed as a drawback (Mana Drain is not even more insane). It was a nice twist that you were able to give your opponent mana via Spectral Searchlight or Eladamri's Vineyard in the hope he might eat damage from that (but you were risking that me might use this extra mana for good against you). And one of the most memorable games I ever played was watching my buddy struggling to use up all the mana he got from his out-of-control Black Market. At some point we (his opponents) were killing our own creatures to get more counters on the Market while he was using the Corpse Dance Bottle Gnomes combo to both stay alive and use up his mana.
As you can see from these examples, mana burn added some strategy to the game. Removing it can be considered streamlining, I consider it dumbing it down.

What I said was not about tournament vs casual. It's not that casual isn't played - the problem is that casual has become spoiled and dull. My playgroups are oldschoolers as well (15+ years) but the percentage of enjoyable games per session is on a steady decline. It's not just power cards, block mechanics and tribes ruining the fun - it's all the subtle details that changed. Shroud has become hexproof, dangerous upkeeps are a thing of the past, cards with symmetrical effects have become very rare, cards have their combos built-in or signal possible combination via creature type, mechanic or card name (guild names for example). And most effects aren't capped, these days cards are only balanced for 1-on-1.
The result: Boring but poweful run-of-the-mill decks all over the place that still get ridiculous in multiplayer/casual (money is NOT the issue here!). Single cards just explode in multiplayer/casual (read: slightly longer games).

See, I have always put a lot of restrictions to myself: Don't use I-win-cards, don't lock people out of the game, don't use overused cards, don't use anti-social cards like Gravepact or Haunting Memories , don't use cards that get exponentially powerful too fast in multiplayer (Luminarch Ascension), don't built decks that play with themselves for minutes or, generally put: Try to make decks that are as fun to play AGAINST as they are fun t play WITH. In all those about 20 years it happened very rarely that anybody complained about my decks, in fact, I can only remember 2 occasions (and one of them involved bad luck on my buddy's side, he played the worst possible deck to oppose mine).
Yes, this of course meant my decks were a bit weaker. Although weaker here usually means "a bit slower and not explosive". They can still be strong but I won't win one or two turns after a certain card hits play. I add nice synergy upon nice synergy, so my opponents will always have time to react. And, this leads to interesting games. I even claim that this is one of the main factors why this group is still playing Magic. This also means that I lose more than I win. But as you might have guessed, I don't care much. Not even when my buddies tease me with that fact. Winning is nice but not important. The important is that we all have a good time while playing and my decks where a cornerstone for that. You don't need to win but in order to enjoy the game, you need to make your mark on the game. If you made everybody gang up on you, you certainly played a factor in this game.
However, this is not the case anymore. We rarely see tournament level decks in our playgroup, however, my pals are experienced and know what they do. It is impossible for them to ignore all the tools that are out there today. Ridiculous creatures like the 5 Titans are standard fare by now. Which means, true casual decks are dead. It is next to impossible to brew something up outside the intended decks and mechanics that is able to survive. Not to compete, remind you, I don't need to win, but if I get overrun with beefed up tribes on turn 4 or if single no-brainer cards can turn the game upside down all by themselves, my decks are no longer able to generete intresting games. They just fold. My buddies claim, that that's okay, because, at least, these days, if a game sucks, it will most likely at least be over fast. Which is usually true in a game that is virtually over once a planeswalker uses his ultimate, a broken two-card combo goes off or ridiculous creature hits play and is unchecked for 2 turns. Yes, but problem is, if 80% of your games are like this, it doesn't matter much if they are long or short games.
And I know that I am still lucky to have these buddies because, at least, most of their decks are original and they at least try to keep things grounded and fun. That's why I still play.

Again, my rant was never directed against tournament play and also never about expensive cards. We have gigantic collections and many of us do own P9 and stuff, that just isn't a problem - for one, very few cards have kept their value, you can get VERY powerful cards like Reins of Power for half a dollar. Secondly, with a growing collection, at one point you just stop disassembling decks. I have about 25 decks now and won't deconstruct one unless I am truly sick of it. And that means the power cards i have are spread across so many decks that it doesn't really matter.
Besides --- really, it is just a handful of older cards left that are "too powerful". Look at modern cards and compare. Cards like Spear of Heliod are deemed *too weak* to be considered these days. So, something like Glorious Anthem is obsolete already. Glorious Anthem! Wasn't it, like, yesterday where Glorious Anthem was the shiat because it was able to just boost your own creatures (before then things like Crusade, Bad Moon and Sunken City had the potential to boost your opponent's creatures as well)?

You are still reading this? Then I might as well rant on, explaining the things I mentioned earlier. Powerful effects used to be symmetrical. Both negative and positive effects. It was your task as a deckbuilder to find a way that the opponent can't benefit from it (Relic Barrier to tap a Howling Mine so it won't work during opponent's turn) respectively that you aren't affected by it yourself (using creatures with Vigiliance to circumvent Meekstone). And if you were good you managed to turn the global negative effect into something positive for your self (Reverse Polarity on a Time Bomb) respectively a global positive effect into something negative for your opponents (adding Black Vise to Howling Mine). They rarely print symmetrical effects anymore, eliminating the need to build decks around specific cards in a creative way.
Same is true for dangerous upkeeps. Upkeeps in general are rare by now and if there is a upkeep, it is usually one that is easily turned into an advantage. And with easily I mean "it is tailor-made for the current block mechanic". For one, I seriously question why the modern super strong end-gaming don't have any upkeep. I mean, there was a time when an enchantment like Earthlink needed an upkeep. But Emrakul or Erebos doesn't? Secondly, IF there is an upkeep, it is rarely dangerous anymore. It is a simple payment and if you don't pay, the card is sacrificed. This means, again, that deckbuilders aren't ancouraged anymore more to get creative regarding those powerful cards - they get them for free and don't need to build decks around them. But it also means that you won't get these wonderful games anymore where Pieter got eaten by his own Demonic Hordes because someone Pillaged his third black mana source.
One-card-combos. Take Sisters of Stone-Death. Three abilities and they all work together. The ultimate boon for unimaginative deckbuilders. No need anymore to use Lure, Venom, Thicket Basilisks, Nettling Imps, Coffin Queen and someone combine them because you can do all of this in a single package. The idea for it comes for free as well.
And then all those other upgrades. As I mentioned, shroud has essentially been replaced by hexproof. Seems like the little brains of too many Magic players got confused with the concept that they can't enchant their own creature anymore once it was protected from opponent's spells via shroud. So R&D upgraded to hexproof. I don't complain that hexproof exists. I just question why shroud has gone at the same time and why thy put hexproof on cards like Invisible Stalker that is unblockable on top of it. It's this munchkin type of thinking that ruins casual. And unlike Type Tournament play, whatever enters casual, stays forever. You just can't go back. Hexproof is just one example of many ... creatures don't need to damage opponents anymore in order to trigger abilities, they just have to attack. Persist has become undying because why bother with -1/-1 counters when it could be +1/+1 counters? Munchkin! Equipments - generally a welcome addition to the game, just don't care about the colour pie. Artifacts are supposed to help out colours in areas they are lacking. But in doing so, they should do it a bit less efficiently than the dedicated colour. For example, a card drawing artifact should not work more efficiently than blue card drawers because, otherwise, why add blue if you could add artifacts instead? But here we have equipments like Lightning Greaves, or the Swords that add multiple effects that would normally not be available for certain colours for very few mana. For example slapping a Sword of Light and Shadow on a red creature gives a mono-red deck 4 abilities it usually has no or very limited access to.

In an environment like this it is no wonder that deck builders get lazy and just play whatever WotC earmarked for them.

While I appreciate the effort I hate spamming and other distractions. Unfortunately, "Decks" like this one contribute to the spam, clog the "active" and "hot" decks lists, dilute the keyword filters etc. Also, shouldn't you do this for the fun of it and maybe to help the game instead of reaping praise for yourself?

See, it's a love-hate-relationship for me. On the one hand I was/am like you, trying to invigorate casual play, on the other hand it is an uphill battle that I am not sure if it is worth fighting. Casual, at least as I know it, is dead beyond repair, because the broad base of players is unable to even grasp the concept of it. Of course, the cards WotC is printing now for years don't help, in fact, they make things worse. It's not really the players anymore that build the decks, it's Wizards. They dictate what our decks will look like because they shoehorn creatures types, block mechanics and gimmicks in a way that makes every alternate strategy or card combination obsolete. Which results into legions of deck builders that can't envision anything beyond tribal decks, block mechanic decks or spoiler laden tournament decks.

Well, most of you won't even understand what I am talking about and probably vote this down, but NorthernWarlord asked for opinions and my opinion this is.