Shove it

Someone's always got to push the buttons and in this case, it was Fuz.

That's four, count 'em 4!, Hover Barriers. How the hell am I supposed to get through all that madness?

I didn't: Fuz milled my library to goo so I started talking to Fuz about this deck.

What is slowing this deck down? Lands that enter the battlefield tapped and creatures with echo. Of the creatures with echo, Pouncing Jaguar is the only one that doesn't have an additional effect and probably needs to be replaced. It's such a strong turn 1 play though and with so many ETB tapped lands, I often don't have a turn 2 Golden Hind ready so I'm reluctant to let it go.

It was Fuz who suggested something from the Evoke school. Spitebellows can be played for very little and so can Briarthorn. Spitebellows felt like a no-brainer: kill a thing and look at the top six cards of my library for 3? Yeah, let's do that! So out came a Mitotic Slime and the two Flametongue Kavu for three of those. Why the Mitotic Slime? Slime's purpose is to give me resources against Wrath of God effects and I have Wrath defense in Hound of Griselbrand too. Since five mana is expensive, I feel that taking out the redundancy for mana is wise. I also swapped a Forest for a Mountain because of the RR needed to Evoke Spitebellows, tweaking the manabase just a little more toward red but not too much.

Briarthorn feels less obvious but the more I think about it the more awesome I think of it. The ability to play it as an instant is a big deal, and getting a 6/6 blocker as a surprise, plus looking at the top 3 cards of my library? That could be huge for two mana and still a really good deal for 4. It plays nicely with my smaller creatures and could be an acceptable substitution for Pouncing Jaguar. Time to give that a go.