- Birchlore Rangers isn't a great color filter. Elf-Storm is a unanimously bad deck. It requires virtually nothing going wrong in your combo (which is 100% possible) and finding all the right shit. You can't just tutor it and win.
- Ezuri feels strictly worse than Craterhoof Behemoth; he requires either a decent amount of mana and a lot of elves, or a ton of mana and a few elves.
- Mirror entity isn't bad. It feels cutesy and in order to go infinite requires quite a few things to land into place.
- Banefire / Maga whatever -- No. These cards are totally useless in your hand and are hard to cast without a birchlore ranger.
- Emrakul -- A lot of people do this, this is a no-no. There's no reason to run this card with the printing of Behemoth. What purpose is there when he can't be tutored and Craterhoof Behemoth: costs less, is tutorable, and applies a buff to all your creatures, so even if they DO kill him it doesn't matter. They need to have instant speed board wipe or they lose.
- Akroma's Memorial - Not tutorable, not guaranteed.
- Craterhoof Behemoth -- Every should just play this card somewhere. Every other win condition is crap compared to this card. It's tutorable, it's of a reasonable casting cost, it wins the game on the spot every time (seriously, I've never dropped it and not swung for at least 160% of their life), even if it dies you still win, it has haste to swing with your dudes, it's just insane.
Ezuri, for a similar effect, requires 4-5 more mana. Ezuri is castable early, but if you cast him early it's very likely they're going to just kill him. He's probably really sick against RUG--maybe I'll board him for that matchup, but against white deck's he's useless compared to Behemoth. My combo is about a turn slower on average than the hardcore elf combo lists (the inclusion of Cabal Therapy and fewer tutors for the added consistency), but even then my turn 3 combos (with or without glimpse) swing for lethal with Behemoth. It's easily hard castable with a mana lord out or a cradle, it's just insane.
I'd also like to speak to the idea that when comboing off you'll draw your entire deck. This is only true in very rare circumstances. The Elf Combo is actually entirely prone to fail occasionally. If you don't find Nettle Sentinels, for instance, or hit a land one too many times, you actually just run out of mana and dudes to play. Without Nettle Sentinels your combo suffers immensely--any non 1 mana elf hurts your next round of tapping by a lot, any land you hit instead of a creature can set you back and force you to burn measures that you wanted to hold out longer on (symbiotes / tutoring). I mean yeah there comes a point once the engine really starts rolling and you're gaining mana with three nettles down you can probably draw your entire deck, but these is immensely over-kill and a time-sink, which many elf decks fall prey to.
You don't have to beat your opponent by a lot, you just need to beat them. If you're combo'd sufficiently to kill them, stop and just kill them. If they're a deck with answers--sure, sculpt a perfect "just in case" hand and win the next turn but there's no need to go crazy with it. For one, killing them quickly saves time (Emrakul decks with no
Fierce Empath tutor for instance, can often take forever to find him) on the round and relieves some stress from you. Playing elves and keeping track of everything is stressful and time consuming, faster kill cons reduce both stress and time.