Dies to Removal

I think you're right. It's hard to excuse Exclude over Hinder.

Well, in terms of elementary calculus I can see his point. But I agree that there are way, way more factors than elementary calculus that make the game work. My top deck is only equal in value to your top deck until I flip a Forest and you flip a Craterhoof Behemoth and a Demonic Tutor. Conversely, I've seen bad decks draw a dozen cards and not to a damn thing with any of them. So yeah, in a vacuum devoid of power levels (or, rather, where all power levels are equal) the math makes sense. In practice I just can't get over giving someone two cards. Unless I'm playing Nekusar and they're taking a ton of damage every time they draw a card, and I have them locked down so they can't cast half of them anyway. I guess I'd run Arcane Denial in THAT deck.

How much
land do you usually run in a deck with a lot of ramp? More or less than average? I see you have 38 in your list, but you also said it was focusing more on sticking Damia consistently fast, so hitting your drops is important. I usually run 40, going as low as 35 if I find five cards I like drawing strictly better than more land, but 40 seems high here.

38 is the standard I stick to in 90% of my lists, b/c most of them have a ton of ramp, including Sol Ring and Mana Crypt which are effectively two additional land drops (or more) for all intents and purposes. Ancient Tomb doesn't hurt either. It seems to be a good stable number that's very good at creating enough land drops to make it to your four slot, at which point you can usually start boosting yourself over the top with card draw.

I've never understood peoples' attraction to Arcane Denial, either. I suppose if someone is already countering one of your own spells, you can use it as an Ancestral recall of sorts? I wouldn't much care to use it on an opponents' spell in most circumstances, though.

Karn is pretty ok in a lot of lists, especially if you've got lots of critters to help him out. Here, though, the top of your curve is pretty weighted already. I suspect you're going to want some cheaper removal options to help balance out your reanimation fat.

Also, something I've tried in other decks with this high of a fat quotient is Elvish Piper or Quicksilver Amulet.

EDIT: I went looking for explanations on Arcane Denial and found this:

http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/p ... ticle=1682

Theoretically, you calculate the
card disadvantage by dividing those two cards by the number of players in the game, against whom the two extra cards have a theoretically equitable chance of being directed against. I'm thinking that's Ivory tower BS logic, as there are an awful lot of scenarios involving power imbalances that won't play out so conveniently as all that. I suppose seeing counterspells as posing a sort of prisoner's dilemma is a decent argument in favor of cantrips, but I can envision far too many scenarios where giving someone a zero cost Inspiration could turn out very badly.

Well, I thought about Force some more, and then started worrying about getting it stranded in hand and having to hard cast it, and then I slapped myself around a bit and ran it over Frantic Search. Now I'm trying to figure out where to cram in Worst Fears.

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My concerns would be that there's not a whole lot of interaction in this build. Don't suppose you have Gilded Drake access? Fleshbag Marauder, Shriekmaw, Bone Shredder could do some good work.

As for slots I think are good cuts:
Rhystic Study (too conditional)
Sensei's Top (useless given how many cards you're drawing)
Expedition Map (Even if you're running some halfway nifty lands to hunt down, is it better to run this or Beseech the Queen, or Diabolic Tutor, or if you really love lands, sylvan scrying? I wouldn't recommend any of the above for this list, though. The best options I can think of are grabbing Cavern of Souls and Volrath's Stronghold,
which are both fairly conditional cards, enough that I wouldn't want a card that tutors only for them.)
Keiga (conditional creature steal. meh)
Dead-eye Navigator (too inconsistent, not enough ETB)
Solemn Simulacrum (one land, a chump block, and a delayed card draw isn't really worth burning four mana or reanimation on IMO, outside of standard)

That's six.

After that round of cuts, I'd consider ditching Rune-scarred Demon (I like tutor effects, but not at that casting cost)
Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger - Vorinclex is an 8 mana ramp spell. If you can reanimate him, that's nifty. Otherwise, the amount of mana you spend to get him into play can easily outweigh the dubious chance that he'll survive long enough for you to make use of all that mana. And even if he does survive, wouldn't it have been nice to have something that would actually have killed them? Pretty awful politically, too.
Nirkana Revenant in a tri-color deck, huh?
Regrowth - If you were recurring time warp effects, I could see
it, but in the early game I think this card isn't going to have a lot of targets that are mana efficient to the point this card is still worthwhile. A big portion of the deck is fatties, and there's not much in the way of removal it can grab. So, it's either an expensive fatty, an expensive ramp spell, or an expensive card draw spell.
Same critique could potentially apply to Nostalgic Dreams. Terrific in the right build of this deck, I suspect, but in this build it seems much more valuable to return creatures to play, than to your hand.

Also, please note that Insidious Dreams is the most terrifying card for this list, ever. Pitch all my fatties to the yard, draw 7 cards, reanimate the whole world, kill you.

For artifact/enchantment hate, maybe Terastodon? Half the time, I use it as a targeted eldrazi annihilate on enemy landbases, too. Great to cheat in on the 3rd-4th turn.

Posting this mostly for Doc Lawless, but I've kind of been distracted from working on this doc with a lot of other projects, and I figure there's got to be some options I'm not taking into account.

Damia, Sage of Stone

38 Land

Ramp
Mana Vault
Burgeoning
Carpet of Flowers
Exploration
Sol Ring
Joraga Treespeaker
Lotus Cobra
Worn Powerstone
Azusa, Lost but Seeking
Fabricate
Thada Adel, Acquisitor
Mana Crypt
Somberwald Sage
Overgrowth
Thran Dynamo
Tezzeret the Seeker
Gilded Lotus
Mana Reflection

Card Draw/Tutors
Demonic Tutor
Frantic Search ---> Force of Will
Phyrexian Arena
Fact or Fiction
Jace the Mind Sculptor
Harmonize
Concentrate
Compulsive Research
Ambition's Cost
Insidious Dreams
Deep Analysis
Careful Consideration
Tidings
Recurring Insight
Mystical Tutor
Vampiric Tutor

Control[/u:
o4e0f4nv]
Rapid Hybridization
Pongify
Dismember
Mana Drain
Go for the Throat
Gilded Drake
Slaughter Pact
Liliana of the Veil
Seal of doom ---> Spell Crumple
Counterspell
Exclude ---> Hinder
Putrefy
Maelstrom Pulse
Beast Within
Damnation
Glen Elendra Archmage
Treachery
Decree of Pain

Action & Other Stuff
Lightning Greaves
Bribery
Tooth and Nail
Green Sun's Zenith
Diluvian Primordial
Knowledge Exploitation
Memnarch
Avenger of Zendikar
Time Stretch
Kozilek, Butcher of Truth
Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre

Some things I've tried and got away from: effects that make everyone discard. Until Damia's active on the table, they're pretty horrendous. Counterspells. Too many high casting cost spells.

Up till now, I've been looking to enhance the decks' ability to ramp reliably, run enough removal to not get plowed under by something like Zur while also not getting a bunch of removal cards stranded in hand with Damia in play, run effective win
cons/finish well. I do enjoy the card draw that's coupled with conditional discard effects - that's proven handy a lot of the time. But it also needs to be effective prior to Damia coming in. So, IDK that stuff like Bonded Fetch or Careful Study is what I'm looking for. But maybe I'm wrong about that.