something old, something new, something cold, something cru... el

doesn't really rhyme, i know.
grixis list i'm working on for states, at the moment:
4 terminate
4 lighting bolt
3 blightning
3 double negative
3 bituminous blast
3 cruel ultimatum
3 deathmark
2 liliana vess
1 chandra ablaze
2 nicol bolas
3 jace beleren
3 sphinx of lost truths

bolas is negotiable. a must answer card for certain but didn't initially feel like it did enough. liliana seems good with jace and all the planeswalkers managed to serve as walls at times given the necessity to answer them at anyone point in time. critique away, you sandy beaches...

I would suggest moving the deathmarks to the sideboard, upping blightning count to 4, and possibly adding some negates.

you don't feel deathmark has an immediate and encompassing application main board?
it eats jund, mono white, bant, mono green? i do agree with the counterspell impulse. i was almost more inclined toward flashfreeze more than anything but i'll have to give negate some thought too.

If you're gonna go more counterspell heavy then I would dump the Bituminous Blast or you're going to run into some wasted cascades and a 5 mana for 4 dmg to a creature spell. I mean it's possible to Bit Blast in response to a spell you want to counter and then cascade into a counter, but that's way too situational.

What made you opt for Chandra Ablaze over Nalaar? Is it because of her discard hand, draw cards ability? I like Nalaar more.

What about a single Sphinx of Jwar Isle for an alternate win condition and an excellent preceding turn before a Cruel drop?

dan and i smashed this list up against jund for something like an hour and a half before we just gave up on it. it is such a tough matchup. it is precisely the kinds of things you talked about alex. when i winning, i still had a hard time closing the deal, in spite of three cruel ultimatums and the sphinxes. i actually played one game against vamps and really shouldn't/couldn't have lost and still did. frustrating, to say the least.
we then tried wafo grixis. that build is terrible. i honestly don't understand how the guys that play that list expect to compete. divination is a nauseatingly terrible card (seriously, playing the card made me want to kick a puppy everytime). the last thing you would ever want to do between turns three through six is sink three mana into drawing two cards. its just reverse blightning and i'd rather cast blightning for virtually the same advantage. it also ran into the same problems end game. in fact, it did worse against jund than my silly planeswalker build. so bizzare.
so, after much deliberation and staring at decklists, dan made the simple suggestion that he's pretty sure where ever control is going, three color (or team america, if you will) is probably it. we looked at the list and it seems like the best positioned to deal with jund favorably, while not folding to the rest the field. so we'll see, thanks for the suggestions, as i think, in retrospect, you guys were pretty right.