You know, I initially went back and forth on Dark Confidant because I can punch myself in the face for 8 with Woodfall Primus, but after many, many games with this deck I've concluded that Bob does in fact belong in it.

The early card advantage from landing a turn 2 Dark Confidant is insanely strong. It can be backbreaking to deal with since, surprisingly, not everybody has answers for a turn 2 Bob in their opening hand. I don't mind having my hand revealed, nor do I mind being hit for 5-6 life early on when I can dig more easily for Kokusho, the Evening Star.

Plus I can always Birthing Pod Bob away into a 3-drop. I do that rather frequently.

I like where you went with this - although perhaps because it's very similar to what I was doing in between the two versions of Meren on my profile, so I may be biased.

But... how do you fare against creature-light combo decks or creature-based combos that just go off, such as Boonweaver or Jarad's several options? A lot of your value seems dependent on making trades at parity and then recurring creatures for card advantage that these decks just shrug off.

For example, I see almost no way for you to stop a Laboratory Maniac + Mind Over Matter combo. Is this simply a result of your local meta being more creature heavy?

You make an absolutely excellent point. Thank you so much for pointing out that weakness. You're right--most of my value is gained off of denying opponents advantage early-on, but if they manage to get a combo like Mind Over Matter set up, I'm going to have a very difficult time.

This is both a result of local meta being more creature-heavy, and me lacking the foresight to think about every "broken" combo in the format. Now that I think about it I don't think I can answer a Deadeye Navigator + Palinchron deck on the spot, either. This is a huge fault in the building.

Do you have any recommendations to combat this?

Well, if those combos are rare in your local group I'd say just stay weak to them.

But if that changes, now things are interesting! My own The Circle of Life is trying to handle this exact problem because I'm commonly matched against Azami, Jarad, Tasigur, and Sen Triplets. The best solution I've found is to really push the stax plan to slow things down, but from an angle that works for Meren.

This means avoiding tax effects and Winter Orb for the most part but going light on hurting the untap step isn't a bad idea. Instead, I've cut a lot of my creature hate for discard and targeted land destruction plus grave hate. Since I'm not facing a fully powered storm deck that is adept at refilling its hand, denying cards is really strong.

If my meta shifted back to creatures, though, I would play something closer to your list but perhaps with a lower avg CMC.