I think
Authority of the Consuls is runnable in a tempo swarm build. Drop it early, build an army, strike while the iron is hot. You don't run it purely for the
Tombstone Stairwell interaction, if it works otherwise in your build it deserves consideration.
Ashiok, Dreamrender. I mean, I dunno. It's effects are solid, albeit griefy, and there is my first problem with it. It's a red flag to a bull, as the saying goes. My second problem with it is we have no way to tick it up to keep it in play, and my third is we have no way to retrieve it
should it when it dies. It just seems like grief for the sake of control without any relevance to the rest of the components we run. Which is fine, but, personally I'd prefer something with a bit more redundancy, especially considering we run so much reanimation. I'm aware there isn't a creature, much less a zombie, that does what Ashiok does, but I'd prefer to wait for one or go without personally. Running it without support seems an invitation to opponents to flush your
down the drain.
Kindred Discovery is just disgusting levels of draw here, it shows you more cards in your deck than Archive even. With it's CMC where it is, it's definitely a 'drive the nail home' card for mid-late game to keep momentum up, so I can see how if you run enough tutors or intend to combo out early you could probably leave it out, but for those of us not comboing it's such solid draw I can't anymore see this deck without it. That being said, it's not an 'either/or' - you definitely run early game draw too - mana fixers to get Varina online early,
Mystic Remora for me,
Phyrexian Arena,
Undead Augur,
Cryptbreaker,
Geier Reach Sanitarium. Without hard tutors redundancy is imperative.
[mention]Supersprite[/mention] how have you got on with
Planar Birth? Anything further to report?