I appreciate the suggestions very much!!
It's funny...I initially started out with probably 8-10 counterspells (all the good "free" ones and a few other 1 CMCs) and probably 4-6 removal pieces (
Swords to Plowshares,
Snap,
Chain of Vapor,
Abrade,
Chaos Warp, and
Force of Vigor).
The more I kept thinking about it and goldfishing earlier builds of the deck, the more I kept coming back to wanting/needing ever more draw cantrips. You and Crazy Monkey called it right I think....the insanity that is Zada is that she turns any random 1-2 drop cantrip into <insert # here>
Ancestral Recalls over and over again. Adding every color to the toolbox ends up stapling that ridiculous draw to a pretty wide variety of tricks ranging from combat stuff to token generation to evasion to untapping to counters, etc akin to your original 4-color Zada list. Additionally, Zada's ability effectively neuters a lot of the bog standard staple-type cEDH countermagic except for niche stuff like
Stifle/
Tale's End or stuff that basically counters everything at once like
Whirlwind Denial (which i've never seen in a game ever) or
Glorious End.
I love the "play an extra land this turn" cantrips....with
Quandrix Apprentice live and any board of 5+ critters you're talking about massive ramp that just kinda comes out of nowhere.
I'm about 97% sure that the
Food Chain line is getting chopped b/c frankly it was just really difficult to pull off if the cards didn't show up in the first couple of cantrips and building around all-in FC combo takes up too many slots when all I want is more draw cantrips. I feel like the draw engine is so strong with a decent opener that by the time I normally got to food chain + a cast from exile critter, most of the time i'd already have 30+ cards in hand and the potential to end the game without having to jump through all the FC combo hoops. I think the main win cons will most likely end up being
LabMan,
Thoracle, and
Witherbloom Apprentice.
I keep waffling on
Impact Tremors or something in that sphere given the ridiculous amount of stuff this deck can vomit on the board with a few decent draws via
Orvar or the token maker cantrips. In my heart of hearts, I want to include
Psychosis Crawler but I feel like that is too slow for my goal of making this build fringe cEDH-ish.