In this quote from earlier in the post, Dice_Box was giving a thoughtful response to a somewhat heated discussion. As I was rereading it, I wondered whether we still think there is general consensus around a "Best" list and, if so, what would that list be? For instance, Reid Duke dropped
Birchlore Rangers altogether and had some success. (Reviewing his games, it's not clear to me whether, if we replaced his three mana elves with Birchlores, we'd have ended up with a significantly different result. I haven't read his SCG article so he may have thoughts on this point.)
Strikes me that we can, with slight modifications, tilt our deck in various ways (none of which seem to fare well against UW CT miracles and the like; maybe wizards will bring some relief in the future). But each of those modifications will help us more or less in a given match up.
So, to conclude on my primary query, I do wonder if there is a "best" at this point?