I played Maverick yesterday with a blue splash and ended up in 13th at the SCG Legacy Open In Providence. I have a few comments to make about the deck and the specific list I played.
1. Fauna Shaman is insane, it helps your combo matchup signficantly, allowing to ditch any useless card (Noble Hierarch, Dryad Arbor, Qasali Pridemage) for one that you really need, i.e. Ethersworn Canonist, Gaddock Teeg, even Thalia. In my Rd 6 matchup against High Tide, I was able to get All 3 of the forementioned "stoppers" out against Tide, all because of a Fauna Shaman on the board. Against Combo Elves, I was able to get Linvala as well, although he ended up being able to beat me down with mass elves because he was just a turn ahead of me having been on the play.
2. 3 Spell Pierce/Flusterstorm is really good as something that people just don't expect. Against Maverick in Rd 1, I played a Spell Pierce that countered a swords to plowshares on my knight, which allowed me to connect for 10 and close out the game quickly thereafter. It's not something that most players will play around, because they don't expect you to be playing blue. However, if they do play around it and respect the threat of spell pierce, that gives you the extra turn or 2 that you need to just beat them down with knights/thalias/oozes.
3. Linvala is definitely a gamebreaker, as well as aven mindcensor. I highly recommend running both of them, as well as Fauna Shaman. I did not play during the survival era, but seeing how powerful shaman is, I can only imagine how broken survival of the fittest was. I definitely think it is correct to be playing shaman over stoneforge, since you're only running 2 jittes these days anyways. the 2nd stoneforge is mostly just a squire at that pt.
My only losses were to combo elves in Rd 2 and to Kevin Jones playing Esper Stoneblade in Rd 8 for win and in. It was a difficult matchup in both scenarios, with elves being just a turn faster and getting out elves before i could drop linvala. Stoneblade blew me out with a maindeck zealous persecution on my noble and mother in game 1, and then I had to mull to 5 on the play in game 2 to lose fairly easily thereafter. Congrats to Kevin for Top8ing!
Final Thoughts:
I highly recommend this deck as it is very intuitive and extremely consistent. (I rarely needed to mulligan). It has good game against all the decks, and shaman makes it even better against combo, as well as your pierces/flusterstorms. It's an autowin against Delver most of the time, since Choke completely locks them out of the game.
P.S. My tournament matches throughout the day:
Rd 1. Maverick - W2-0
Rd 2. Combo Elves - L2-0
Rd 3. Rock - W2-0
Rd 4. Feature Match Thopter-Stoneblade W2-0
Rd 5. Dredge - W2-0
Rd 6. High Tide - W2-0
Rd 7. Dredge - W2-1
Rd 8. Feature Match Esper Stoneblade L2-0
Rd 9. RUG Delver W2-0
Finally Record: 7-2
If anyone has any requests, I could write a tournament report too. Good luck everyone and remember to always have fun :)