I mean I do agree with a lot of what you said...but those last examples... xD
Anecdotal evidence like that can go both ways!
In my match against Aldoc (who I'm pretty sure is considered one of the better players in this game) I teched in a bronze servant to go with my irontooth (didn't have 2) and used that to remove his Khopesh winning the bwd mirror.
After that he DID bring zombies to a $7000 tournament and won the next game with it in a cunning swap the neuter my aggro war, which did not run any weapon removal and could not get past all the leech gained by zombies.
Also I would argue that Scepter of Artistry is more important to remove than Pallas' wand even against many fine tuned magic decks. I say this as somebody who plays magic more than anything else with an extremely high win rate against other top players. It is an even harder win condition than Pallas' wand, you do not even need the draw if you can get it on a scryer or any creature you have given ward/protect in the majority of matchups (and getting it on the scryer is a real win condition in the mirror, which is the matchup it is least effective in due to copious amounts of removal and mage bolt).
Still, on the whole I do not think running bronze servants and wiccan trappers is something I would choose to do. I rely mostly on the sanctum to remove necrosceptres and usually just win through high statted creatures and value cards regardless of it being equipped. A counterfeit can actually be really disgusting though and I do not run control deception, more an order one. If you ever run non meme deception decks based on stats/order I would suggest trying it, I have found a lot of success, even just getting 1 charge of a Jaguar Staff or Blade of Styx can be game changing.
I mean I could not include any examples... But I gave a bunch of percentages, too. The overall point is way more matches will be determined by having better creatures in matches where your opponent has dead cards in hand.
That's why I said I generally agree and don't plan on including wiccan trappers or bronze servants in any normal decks, especially for ladder, but there are definitely times it comes in handy and I've seen a number of great tournament players bring 1 or even 2 irontooths/counterfeits depending on what you expect to face! I even lost to SamBam in the Cujo tournament with him bringing 2 irontooths the first game and 2 counterfeits the 2nd! :D
Was just providing some counter examples of where it really can win games incase people see this and think it is never a good thing to do! As the way you phrased it made it seem like a terrible choice to bring to any tournament!
No, read the bottom of the article! I say that tournaments are one of the best reasons to play relic removal! 😎
In my case I knew my opponent wouldn't play zombies but if your opponent might, definitely gotta be careful. Though I don't think it is a good deck and I'm very surprised Aldoc would run that!! I'd love to watch those games, I saw you uploaded a match?? I'll cast it this week!!!
Ah I guess I misunderstood! Thought you were saying it was only good against magic :D Well I apologize if my tone came across as overly confrontational, I really was not trying to disagree with the statistics or logic or anything and hope I made that clear! Had just lived through examples of the exact opposite situations lol!
And yeah it was some interesting matches with some interesting techs and deck choices! I played some decks for the first time ever lol, most notably bwd. Hope you enjoy watching the games, they were very stressful to play through ahaha!