Due to scheduling conflicts, I went to GMR on Friday instead of going tonight - and it was a pretty interesting game. 

Stephen played his Ramos Superfriends deck, as ever, Tristan was in the game with a colorless Karn, Silver Golem deck, and the other guy (he had a name I hadn't heard before and I can't remember it, no matter that I tried to get the pronunciation right like 20 times) played a five-color goodstuff Jared Carthalion deck with Jegantha as a Companion. Worthy competitors all.

Before things got started I checked with Christian to see if the colorless Lesson sorceries were available along with Searing Touch and Whispers of the Muse, and only Whispers wasn't. So I bought them, along with Drakuseth to put into Obeka, for less than $3. I removed some stuff that I can't currently think of and slotted them in and we were off. I had to mulligan at first but drew a better second hand and was able to hit land drops pretty steadily and get Vadrik out and doing stuff pretty early. The game was the only one that got played, as it was a long game while still being rather action-packed. The Jared guy (Shantry, maybe? We'll go with that) was the threat early on as he got Jegantha out to bring out the commander and we were all in some trouble at that point. I managed to avoid taking too much damage and kept growing Vadrik and allowing the spells to keep getting bigger as well. One of the biggest swings was casting Jaya's for 15 - taking out Stephen's MOM Vorinclex, Shantry's enormous Glint-Eye Nephilim he'd been smacking me with and drawing huge handfuls of cards with, and another of Shantry's threats, which were manifold. 

Vadrik's ability fueled the deck nicely, but the Mindsplice Apparatus came out reasonably early and allowed the shenanigans to continue even after Vadrik was killed a couple of times. There's a good reason that Vadrik is a popular commander - he's really strong and getting a big discount on spells makes for some huge swings. It was certainly a lot more action than the deck ever saw with Kaza at the helm. 

In the end, it was down to Shantry and me, and having used Conflux to grab several board wipes he was in the driver's seat. The deck just ran out of gas and I would say that it probably is short by a couple of counterspells - that reared its head in those last few turns as I was unable to make any headway when Shantry kept blowing my stuff up. Having a boardwipe remove all of my artifacts was the killer - there was no longer a way to discount anything and the deck isn't made to handle that. 

I almost forgot - the most spectacular and wild play of the game was casting Soulfire Eruption for the first time and blowing up most of the board - particularly because I had played Galvanic Iteration beforehand. It was a very Red move - maybe it will blow things up, maybe it won't - but in the end it was just a very cool EDH moment.

There might be an even better idea - put Vadrik at the helm, with a few different ways to boost his power (equipment, red Auras, that kind of thing). Kaza can stay in the 99 and there can be a Wizard tribal sub-theme but Vadrik is just a way more effective way to make this all happen. He'd be a big-time target, for sure, but that's what the equipments would be for.

Played this yesterday (Sunday the 23rd) against a Dwarf tribal deck, a Boros Equipment deck, and a Morophon deck that was rather overpowered for the table all things considered. The balance is not yet there for this deck between Wizard creatures to make Kaza effective and spells to use that effectiveness; I never was able to reduce the cost of anything by more than 3, because I just didn't have enough Wizards. (Mana issues didn't help either.) I got to do some fun stuff, but it was a bit disappointing overall. Might shelve this for the time being and come back to it when it's a bit better-tuned. 

Made some additions, so the deck will hopefully be a bit more capable. I'd play it if everyone was insisting on Budget. I bet it would be fun!

Played Kaza in a budget match on 3/27 and definitely reached the "fun stuff" threshold by casting a kicked Maddening Cacophany and making the other three players mill more than 40 cards each. I couldn't stop giggling. 

As per usual, the deck didn't do very much else but that's not the point, is it?