When I'm searching for competitive lists I usually surf TC Decks site, probably the bigger and best database for tournament decklists:
http://www.thecouncil.es/tcdecks/index.php
You should find many Affinity lists running Pierce in the last year.
Hope it will help you.
Our opinions about Pierce and Chalice are very different, or maybe we play in very different metas.
You can probably agree with me when I say Chalice is better vs RUG and many combo decks like Storm, Dredge, Reanimator and Elves (against combo Spell pierce won't save you unless you find at least 2 of them, since they usually have either lots of discard or counterspells, and sometimes both, so they will start their combo when they are sure your Pierce will be useless or discarded; while Chalice can literally make you win alone if not countered), which right now are respectively:
- the most played (and probably stronger) deck in the format
- probably our worst match-ups
Chalice is far better than Pierce also against Burn, another matchup not so favorable to us (usually Burn can deal 20 dmg faster than us, and kill our Skirges easily if we land them).
On the other hand, I would say Pierce is absolutely better vs Control because it can interact with their removal and planeswalkers.
But I don't think it would save you very often from Terminus, since they rarely play it with less then 3 total mana in play.
And against Show & tell, which is so full of counterspells that your Pierce will rarely resolve, I think Phyrexian Metamorph should definitely be more useful.
Also against Spiral tide your Pierce shouldn't resolve very often, since they play both FoW and Pact (and Pierces sometimes).
Pierce > Chalice vs planeswalkers, Pernicious deed, other forms of mass removal and generally speaking control stuff, that's for sure.
But against Control our best card probably remains Tezzeret.
Against Combo I would also play Cabal therapy (I don't remember if they are in your list) in addition to Chalice: I'm pretty sure both Chalice and Therapy are better than Pierce in combo matchups.
Of course Pierce would be very strong against combo if only we could follow a permission gameplan together with our traditional aggro plan (like Merfolks for example), but since we are Affinity we can rarely play more than 2-3 Pierces from SB... and 2-3 counters total are too few to fight current combos.
So we can come to this general conclusion, tell me if you agree with me:
- Chalice is best against many combo decks, RUG, Burn
- Pierce is best against control
- Cabal therapy is best against generic combo
So everything depends from your meta.
In my meta, the amount of RUG + Burn + Combo is bigger than Control, and that's probably why I prefer Chalice over Pierce.
Probably your meta is the opposite, since you consider Pierce the best solution.
Metas are fluid and with the recent addition of Abrupt decay there's a chance BUG control or tempo decks will find a nice spot: in that case Pierce would be very sweet against Pernicious deeds (but BUG usually plays 4x FoW and at least 4 more counterspells between Dazes and Pierces, so they could counter your Pierce) but useless against Decays.
Your examples are surely correct.
Yet they describe exactly the kind of situations I was referring before when pointing out the decks against which Pierce is better: Control.
U/W is control; also reaching mid-game to keep U open without bothering too much is a typical situation we meet against Control, since combo usually kills us (or fizzles) before mid-game, while against aggro Pierce is usually dead.
So here you are stating that Pierce is a house vs control, and I couldn't agree more as I said earlier.
But the examples you brought don't concern other kind of decks.
Of course you can keep your opinion about Pierce being generally better ("overshadowing") than Chalice.
But imho, the thoughts and reasoning I've followed in the last posts shows that Pierce shouldn't be considered "generally better" than Chalice.
We can say it's better in certain matchups, and at the same time we should say Chalice is better in others.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Anyways, very nice and stimulating discussion :)