What do you think of Gemstone Caverns and Ponder?

@Spencerbot15 Gemstone Caverns is awesome 7% of the time and pretty bad the other 93%...I don't like the odds.

Ponder was very close to being included. It's basically the same as Brainstorm. I would rather have the instant over the ability to shuffle though.

wtf? no Archeomancer?

oh, and, I think Urza's Rage would be better then seering wind

@DERPLINGSUPREME Thanks for the comment. The theme of the deck is casting for free and copying and Archaeomancer does neither of these. Casting such fat spells from my hand and paying the full mana cost doesn't excite me too much. As for Urza's Rage, Jeleva does not pay my kicker cost and, holy cow, that is one heck of a kicker cost...

Jeleva doesn't pay kicker costs?

Unfortunately, no. From Gatherer:

If you cast a card "without paying its mana cost," you can't pay any alternative costs. You can pay additional costs such as kicker costs. If the card has mandatory additional costs, you must pay those.

This is why you don't want to run any X spells (X will be 0) or kicker spells (you'll still have to pay to make it great).

Sweet deck, but one thing is nagging me: You classified Cruel Ultimatum as a defensive spell. I guess the life loss is negligible but it'll be considered pretty offensive by the target.

its defensive b/c it will force them to get rid of an attacker (probably) and a few cards, some of which might hurt the deck.

Yeah, it could have gone under either I suppose but I put it under defensive for the reason that DERPLINGSUPREME said. Yes, the creature return and card draw is nice for me, but that sac/discard is a killer for someone else.

Liliana Vess's -2 let's you choose a card for Jelava.

And Soothsaying. I'm looking for a Grixis commander, and she might be it :) +1

@TeaIsExplosive Thanks for the comment! Liliana Vess is out of the price range I want for this being a budget deck, but Soothsaying looks pretty sweet and will definitely hit my acquireboard. Thanks for the suggestion!