David, unless you're one of the wizards you mentioned in your post, you're far more likely to miss or wound a pheasant at 70 yards than you are kill it. Shoot some patterns at 70 yards, loads of your choice, then tell me what you think your percentage of dead birds vs wounded would be.
As far as big shot and high velocity, there ain't no such critter if you're talking 2 oz, 3" 12ga loads--and as I said before, you pretty well need that much shot. Fastest 2 oz 3" 12ga going is 1200 fps, in the book I have. That compares to the old standard pheasant load of 3 3/4 drams-1 1/4 oz--which is a 1330 fps load.
Both LC Smith and Fox, with the "Super Fox", made some pretty serious claims about long-range patterning back in the 20's, when the Super-X shell first appeared. But there's a reason Fox started stamping 'Barrels not guaranteed" on the flats of Super-Foxes, and that was that unless Burt Becker bored those barrels, chances are the gun--as good as it was--would not live up to the claims Fox made in their ads.
This is a bit like all the Hevi-Shot nonsense, about 60 or 70 yard loads. In the case of HS, the loads may actually be that good. The problem is, only a tiny percentage of shooters are that good. In most cases, a gun with a lot of choke and a reasonably heavy load has a greater maximum effective range than the guy pulling the trigger.
