Some thoughts:

In non-goldfish testing we are most afraid of getting our hand picked apart by discard spells - that's why it almost seems like there are two stages to the playing the deck. Stage 1 is cantripping into as many Silence/Chant/Veil/Fow's that you can get and Stage 2 is assembling the combo. Since Stage 1 is such a big part of the deck's strength it's hard to justify cutting out protection spots. This makes sense when you look at the successful lists which all run about 10 to 11 protection slots. Especially as the meta turns to answering this deck it seems improper to answer that meta by cutting protection spots - if anything you need to fine tune the protection spots.

In regards to 4C versions we need to look at what each color brings to the table and why we would play that color:

White - Enlightened Tutor and Silence Effects. Tutor provides card selection and silence is a big card in combo-wars or fighting against control. It also simply acts like a time skip against decks early on which is just so useful to this deck.

Green - Veil and Burning Wish into Reverent Silence. Veil doubles as a better Silence compared to white, but the real difference between the two colors is that you have better wish targets. Now that the meta is advancing to answer breach decks the maneuverability of the wish board becomes more important.

Black - Infernal Tutor, Discard, creature kill. ITutor can function like Etutor in some scenarios and with some work arounds, and discard also fufills the general role of silence/veil to varying degrees. Due to this black seems like a worst White redux since every tool of black that you would want white has a spell that fufills that roll either cheaper or better. Even creature kill, that is becoming more important due to GSZ -> Ouphe can be solved by white (STP) or even Dismember, which doesn't require black.

Looking at the above I would think that if you want to build a 4C deck instead of URwb or URgb you should go URwg.

I think this is a novel concept since the only 4C builds that I have seen thus far have been URwb or URgb. But such builds confuse me since the cards you would get from black seem like worse cards that you can get from white.

So I'm thinking of something like the following:


10 fetchlands
1 Snow-Covered Island
1 Snow-Covered Mountain
1 Snow-Covered Plains
1 Snow-Covered Forest
1 Tundra
1 Volcanic Island
1 Tropical Island

4 Lotus Petal
4 Lion's Eye Diamond
4 Underworld Breach
4 Brain Freeze
4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder
3 Preordain
3 Enlightened Tutor
3 Burning Wish

4 Force of Will
4 Veil of Summer
2 Orim's Chant

//Sideboard:
1 Consign // Oblivion
1 Empty the Warrens
1 Grapeshot
1 Infernal Tutor
1 Reverent Silence
1 Shenanigans
1 Tome Scour
1 Serenity
1 Defense Grid
4 Swords to Plowshares
2 Dismember


Edit - RE the above I think to justify the 4C build you have to argue what it is doing better than 3C builds. I think with URgw the argument would go that it has access to Veil and Silence, that while they fulfill similar roles, this version runs around 6 of that effect and runs 4 of the best version (veil) of that effect. Moreover this build gets to run the wish board with Reverent Silence and also have the flexibility of Etutor.