So, while not being new to the area, but having not played M:tG for quite a while, my housemates and I took a tour of the easily reachable gaming stores. We found a few, but when we stopped by the Monster's Den they mentioned they held legacy tournaments every Thursday at 7pm, so I figured I'd build something janky, show up and lose, and trade a whole bunch. Mistakenly holding the belief that I had most of Belcher (I found out I was missing Burning Wishes, Charbelchers, and a whole lot of random accelerators, not to mention an entire sideboard), I didn't build anything else, but managed to trade into the store for much of it, and trade for the remaining two Wishes with a cool dude who was hanging out before the tourney started. No Guttural Responses were to be had, or a fourth Xantid Swarm, so I just made do with this:

4x Goblin Charbelcher
4x Burning Wish
3x Empty the Warrens
4x Land Grant
1x Taiga
4x Lion's Eye Diamond
4x Simian Spirit Guide
4x Elvish Spirit Guide
4x Chrome Mox
4x Lotus Petal
4x Tinder Wall
4x Rite of Flame
4x Pyromantic Ritual
4x Desperate Ritual
4x Seething Song
4x Manamorphose

SB: 3x Xantid Swarm
SB: 4x Red Elemental Blast
SB: 1x Tendrils of Agony
SB: 1x Empty the Warrens
SB: 1x Diminishing Returns
SB: 1x Shattering Spree
SB: 1x Infernal Tutor
SB: 1x Hull Breach
SB: 1x Pyroclasm
SB: 1x Goblin War Strike

Looking back, I think not having the Guttural's was a good thing. The times when you want to counter a blue spell but don't have a red mana available are few and far between, at least in my limited experience, and the Pyroblasts had added functionality that I had missed; namely, they blow up Meddling Mage. This wasn't relevant in any of the games that I played, but then again, neither was having a surplus of green mana and no red when I needed it.

Please forgive me if I played against you and got your name wrong or misspelled it. Match details may be hazy since I didn't write anything down.

Round 1 - Dana - Uw Merfolk

I felt bad playing such an underhanded deck against Dana in the first round of the tournament, as trading me his Burning Wishes had made the deck possible...c'est la vie, I guess?

Game 1: I think I belched him out first turn. I saw him side in stuff, and I sided in 3x Xantid and one REB for the Manamorphoses.

Game 2: I punted this hard. He had mulliganed, which I assumed meant digging for a hand with Force of Will or some effective sideboard card. So I figured I had to go off with Storm, and being he could slow roll me by throwing fish in front of any Ancient Mew tokens I threw at him, I had to do it with a high storm count. So after a small counter war over a first turn Xantid Swarm, I drew for a few turns and then attempted to go off while he played a legendary merfolk of some sort that gave could give his duders protection from stuff. I badly miscounted my available mana, ending with 5 in my pool, and a Burning Wish getting....something. I snagged an EtW once I realized my mistake, but it was too late, and me basically mulliganing to 3 gave him the time he needed to start shipping with a Jitte.

Game 3: I kept a fairly retarded hand, that was something like:

Rite of Flame
3x Lion's Eye Diamond
Simian Spirit Guide
Burning Wish
Land Grant?

and just exploded on him. This was the one time this tournament I Burning Wished for Diminishing Returns. I blew all the LEDs in response to the DR, drew lots of cards, and either dodged a FoW from his new hand or just stormed out so bad it didn't matter.

Round 2 - Casey - Mono-black control

Casey's deck was similar to the Gate, although he ran no Bitterblossoms or Abyssal Persecutors. He'd picked it up off a SCG top 8 list and modified it some, playing 4x Vampire Nighthawks instead of 3, and so on. It was a pretty sweet list, from what I saw.

Game 1: Belcher on turn 1, but with not enough man to activate it. I'd seen what he was playing from wandering around after the first round, so I figured getting it out of the way of Duress/Thoughtseize might be good. After a few turns of him wrecking my hand of the mana sources I draw but can't use, I mise an LED and activated Belcher. I think I Land Granted, so once he'd seen I ran no other lands, he conceded.
Game 2: He played a first turn Dark Ritual into a Thorn of Amethyst. I tried to bust through it with a Burning Wish into Shattering Spree, but while I was wasting acceleration paying for crap he was annihilating my hand and actually developing his board, and once he got me Wastelanded my Taiga with a Nantuko Husk and a Gatekeeper of Malakir on the board, I conceded.
Game 3: Blind belcher activation on turn 1. Taiga wasn't in the top 10, so that was game.

Round 3 - Blake - Bgr junk

Blake was playing a disruption-heavy black deck that splashed into red and green for, from what I saw, Grim Lavamancer and Maelstrom Pulse/Goyf.

Game 1: He accelerates into a first turn Revoker (I think) naming LED, but I go off around it. He sides some stuff in, but I don't really have anything for him, so the deck stays the same.
Game 2: He mulligans a few times, looking very irritated. I assume it's because he's not seeing any SB hate, but it turns out after his first turn of Chrome Mox, Inquisition of Kozilek (taking Rite of Flame, my only 0cc-2cc bridge spell), go, he was just totally land-screwed. I draw into a Spirit Guide or Lotus Petal or something, bridge the gap to my Rituals, and go off.

Round 4 - Alex (I think)

Game 1: I belch for lethal on turn 1, having not seen anything he was playing except a Chronicles Tobias Andrion sitting on his playmat that I didn't read too much into.
Game 2: He Ponders turn 1. I shit out a bunch of Mews. He Ponders and uses another Cantrip, fetching bad cards away. At this point, I'm terrified he's going to find an Engineered Explosives before I kill him. I attack him down to 6 or so, and he cantrips again, then plays acceleration and starts to Ad Nauseum. He only gets a little ways before he's forced to stop, and with limited acceleration attempts an IGG loop, but with no Tendrils in hand he has no way to use his storm count.

Alex(?) asks if I would concede to him to ship him into the top 8, since 3-1 makes it. He seemed pretty cool, and was the only opponent who took the first turn moneyshots with a genuine "well, I'm trying to do that too, so it's cool" attiitude, so I conceded.

Top 8 - Casey (again) - Mono-Black control

I offer to do a 5$-rest of the money split with Casey, since apparently top 4 at these things just always split the winnings. This way, whichever of us loses at least gets our entry fee back for making top 8. He accepts, and I blow the crap out of him game 1.

Game 2, he goes first so I have to fight through a decent amount of disruption, with a turn 1 Duress taking Belcher (with no other win conditions in hand) and a turn 2 Hymn to Tourach ripping my one Ritual effect and Seething Song out of my hand. I lucksack into two Lotus Petals over the next couple turns while he plays Vampire Nighthawk, use those and random crap in my hand (an LED, Land Grant or whatever, and the two other Petals) to up my Storm count and go off. He tries to stabilize with another Nighthawk, but despite each of them killing a Mew a turn, and gaining him 4 life, the two or three fetchlands he'd used before I went off put him just out of range of stabilizing (last attack was 2 Nighthawks blocking 2 Mews, gaining 4 life negating 4 other attacking Mews, and three Mews getting through with him at 2).

So, 5$ to Casey, handshakes to my opponents, and bravo to the completely disinterested-looking youth running the counter and the tournament who did a great job despite looking like we could all drop dead and he'd just turn off the lights and slouch home.

Thoughts on Belcher: I like the list as it is a ton. When I first started playing Belcher, I felt it was a deck that punished you for playing it, since it was inconsistent. But apparently, it was just me being bad, since the thing I've noticed lately about it is that it WRECKS people who are playing decks with lower levels of consistency. The threat count is nearly perfect, and you're able to fight through whatever incidental hate most opponents have in their maindeck, and then you only have to grind out one of two games, which isn't terribly difficult against most opposing decks since most decks, even with sideboarded cards in, can't match your speed.

The only changes I would make to the "standard" Belcher lists would be to play REB over Guttural Response, for the added utility of killing blue creatures that may lock you out.

I would love to find some kind of "free" removal spell that can be Wished for over Pyroclasm, since if you're fighting through a Teeg you likely won't be able to go off if you have to spend the mana for a Pyroclasm anyway (same with Phyrexian Revoker, which I imagine can be a massive pain in the ass).

And finally, once it becomes legal, I think Gitaxian Probe could easily take Manamorphose's slot. Manamorphose does have some interesting utility, in that you can filter red or green mana into blue or black, which in combination with a Burning Wish can be relevant...sometimes. But the vast majority of the time it's a +1 storm type card, but one that requires you to commit mana sources to it, which sometimes lands you in the awkward situation of blindly going off, hoping to find a win condition, or blindly sitting there, saying go, hoping for a win condition to be drawn so you can justify storming up. Probe has no such commitments attached, so it is likely to be a better fit for the maindeck.