How do you win the game in the 60% of games that you don't get Quest in your opening hand?
There are several options:
1. Mulligan until you find a Quest.
2. Student of Warfare, pump him up and hope you draw one.
3. Stoneforge Mystic, dig up an equip and go to town. SoBM makes your Memnites 3/3 and your Thopters 2/4, makes aforementioned Student 5/5, and you can usually get it going even if Mystic eats a kill spell. Even better if you have Outfitter as well, then you can (potentially) still get the Armor attached to something as early as turn 4.
4. Just drop a Hawk and a Memnite turn 1 and start turning men sideways the old-fashioned way.
1) Not a great alternative.
2) Not enough by himself, given that there is a lot of heavily played removal that offs him before he gets relevant.
3) This is a really slow way of doing something that a good deck can already do. When you remove Quest from the equation, Memnite and Ornithopter are both terrible and they NEED equipment to even stay on par with the creatures other decks are playing. The Stoneforge-Outfitter combo is extraordinarily overrated; while Stoneforge is good, tutoring Armor when you don't have Outfitter in hand is a waste of a turn and Outfitter is as good as dead when you don't have Mystic. Turn 4 is also far to slow for a TARGETED equip effect since point removal kills the equipped thing in response, wasting the Outfitter. Furthermore, it's not fast enough on Turn 4 or 5 to prevent your opponent just casting their Day of Judgment or whatever and leaving you with an unequipped Armor and no way to get it back on.
4) They're not big enough to be a credible threat.
Ultimately, the problem with the non-Green builds of Quest Weenie is that without the Quest, their alternative game plan is dramatically worse than the standard game plan of every other deck in the format. The reason the green decks are playable is because without Quest, they're still a strong midrange deck. That's of no comfort against something like Valakut, which curbstomps midrange strategies, but against everything else in the format that's quite an effective route.
Focusing on alternative slow methods to get the combo (4 Mystic + 4 Outfitter), or making the Quest draw more powerful (Trinket Mage/Riddlesmith) are both insufficient to make the deck playable because it's still a one-trick pony.
