Ghostly prison is $3 fyi, if I'm reading your description right your running everything at $2 and under? Also if you change what set perordain is it might be under $2 as well.

You can sort the deck by price to see what tappedout is saying.

Hi hoardofnotions, thank you for your feedback! I guess I wasn't super clear about how the format works with my local play group. We use the website www.mtgstocks.com to check prices, and as long as at least one printed version of a card has an average price of $2 or under, then any version of that card is legal. Hence, since the Conspiracy: Take the Crown Ghostly Prison has an average price of $2 exactly, the Champions of Kamigawa Ghostly Prison is also legal. However, Ghostly Prison is right at the price limit, so it's likely that it'll be too expensive to play unless it gets reprinted again in the near future.

Clever moves with the budget maybe put that in your description somewhere as well?

could failure / comply be Unsubstantiate or is the aftermath good?

mystic speculation could be Treasure Cruise?

Those are both good suggestions, thank you! At the moment I'll stick with Failure / Comply and Mystic Speculation, however, since the fact that they each involve multiple cast triggers on just one card, which is useful when considering Prowess.

won't Treasure Cruise draw you into more spells, therefore more prowess? It's like a Ancestral Recall but legal in commander! Mystic Speculation doesn't draw anything, just scry nonsense away.

I just want to debate a card, you can obviously run whatever you like. Hope I'm not coming off too strong

Not to worry, I enjoy a good card debate, too. I guess I just worry I'll exile cards from my graveyard that I could recur and use later, but you make a good point about the card draw leading to more prowess triggers. I think overall you're right, Treasure Cruise is better than Mystic Speculation. Sometimes I focus so much on the downsides of new cards that I forget to think of the downsides of cards I already have in my deck, and I'd much rather draw 3 cards in a turn than scry 3 multiple times, because additional scrying may not be useful.

It looks like the only recursion you have is Charmbreaker Devils for spells, and Adarkar Valkyrie for creatures. The valkyrie can only recur on that turn so a lot of the time dead creatures are good delve fuel, and the delve can help determine what spells the devil could get back.

That's a good point about the synergy with Charmbreaker Devils. I also have two aftermath cards, three flashback cards, Bloodwater Entity, Metallurgic Summonings, and Runechanter's Pike. However, I think you're right that the advantages of Treasure Cruise outweigh its downsides, so I've included it!