I, FOR ONE, EMBRACE OUR NEW PHYREXIAN OVERLORDS

Vintage is a fragile ecosystem, an elaborate food chain of predators and prey all constantly evolving in an ongoing struggle for metagame survival. There is a long held belief among the Vintage elite that if any one archetype becomes too dominant that the others will inevitably adapt by growing sharper more specialized claws and teeth with which to take a bite out of the new top dog.

If Dredge becomes too prominent everybody plays more Graveyard hate.
If Mishra’s Workshop becomes too prominent everybody plays more Artifact hate.
If a blue deck gets too good the DCI restricts a card or two.

And thus, the cycle of the metagame spins onward into the future.

There is clearly a double standard when it comes to the ‘live and let live’ Vintage mentality when it comes to the Restricted list. If a blue deck is great for a three months the world abandons all hope and cries out for the all equalizing banhammer; whereas if a linear “do broken stuff deck” is great (let’s say for the sake of argument for four or five years?) the consensus opinion urges us to wait and let nature take its course.

Given the way that I’ve framed my opening sentiments you may be fairly surprised to learn that today’s article WILL NOT be a discussion about which cards I believe should be added or stricken from the Vintage B&R list. I’m going to approach today’s article 100% in the here and now and argue for why I believe that Mishra’s Workshop is the best deck in Vintage.

The handling of the B&R list has certainly aided Mishra to the mountain top. Consider that the last time the archetype has lost a card to restriction was Trinisphere a decade ago. Blue decks may come and go but Workshops are forever.

Food for thought: Roughly half of the cards in most of the Mishra’s Workshop decks are printings post Trinisphere bannings. Obviously, they don’t make Lands and Artifact Mana like the old ones any more, but for the most part with a few exceptions like Tangle Wire, Chalice of the Void, and Sphere of Resistance most of the actual “spells” are new recruits!

The actual Workshop cards have gotten much better than they were back in the day and the Workshop player no longer has to compete with the likes of Thirst for Knowledge, Merchant Scroll, Ponder, and Brainstorm.

We live in a world where half of the cards in Workshop decks have been upgraded and many of the best blue cards have fallen by the wayside.

One reason that I believe Workshop is the premier Vintage deck right now is plain and simple that the archetype has gotten tons of new toys over the past decade and has never had to sacrifice a single thing to restriction.

ROSES ARE BROWN AND VIOLETS ARE BROWN AND MUD IS THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN

For those of you who are familiar with my decade long body of high level competitive Vintage play will probably note that there are not a lot of Mishra’s Workshop decks in my past. I have a reputation for playing and innovating various blue combo and control archetypes.

First of all, let me clear something up right off the bat. I don’t favor any particular type of deck over another. One of my least favorite things about online Magic discussions is when people get all sentimental about their decks and defend them as though they are an extension of themselves. It is very cool to like your deck and I understand what it is like to get into a “zone” with your deck where you feel like you are an unstoppable master of spellcasting.

However, it irritates me to no end when somebody tries to invalidate one’s argument by saying something ridiculous like: “You’re only saying that because you love Mana Drain.” In fact, there is only criteria that I use when selecting which cards I am going to play with in a tournament and that is whatever gives me the greatest chance of winning. You see, I value winning more than I value any sentimental attachment to a particular card or archetype.

You see, when I was on a five year spree with Control Slaver top 8ing nearly every event I played in it wasn’t the fact that I liked Control Slaver that made me win so much, it was the fact that Control Slaver was without a doubt the best deck in the format by a very wide margin. To further illustrate my point, I also never made arguments like “Slaver is my favorite deck and if you restrict Thirst I’ll sell all my cards and never play Magic again.” In fact, I said things like “Thirst is a ridiculous atrocity and should pretty clearly be restricted — the fact that it still isn’t boggles my mind.”

Long story short: I do not value sentimentality over winning and will play whatever deck I think is the best in any format, even Vintage (a format that certainly evokes a nostalgic quality from a lot of players because of the old cards).
It may also surprise some of you Vintage fans out there who primarily know about me as a Mana Drain slinger or Ancestral Recall jockey that I have played some Workshops in my day.

There was a time way back when Onslaught was the newest set on the block when I used to sleeve up the “Four Thousand Dollar Solution” AKA $t4k$ and pound on all of the Grow-Atog players out in the midwest. Yes, a deck with all nine Power 9 and four Mishra’s Workshop was only $4000 back then.

As it turns out, Sphere of Resistance was as good against Gush back then as it is today. Long story short, I’m no slouch when it comes to playing Mono Brown even though I don’t typically choose to “get my metal on” in big tournaments. In fact, when I team with friends for big Vintage events I typically end up playing the Workshop side of the match ups because I’m highly proficient with the deck.

The key here is that I could have chosen to play Mishra’s Workshop at any time in the past 12 years and passed on the opportunity, but all of a sudden NYSE 3 rolls around and I choose to to get my Phyrexian on. It is finally clear to me that Workshop is the best deck in Vintage.

I learned a very important lesson at Vintage Champs last year. I played Steel City Vault which is a deck that was very good against blue decks but fundamentally soft against Mishra’s Workshop decks. To compensate for this deficiency I side-boarded 11 cards against Workshops in hopes of being able to overcome. In the end it was simply asking too much. I lost two die rolls and my tournament was over despite handily beating every blue deck that I got paired against 2-0.

In the meantime I tinkered with my Steel City Vault list and tried out several different plans in hopes of making headway against Workshops. I tried adding Oath of Druids, I tried adding more Hurkyl’s Recall main deck, and I tried playing more Goblin Welders. In every event that I played I fell short against Workshops. Needless to say, when it came time to actually play in another large scale Vintage event I wasn’t exactly excited with the prospect of being on the draw against a MUD opponent.

The bulk of my playtesting was with Kevin Cron in preparation for NYSE. Kevin is an excellent player and elite deck builder and has been riding a hot streak in the midwest playing Jeskai Mentor. I had faith that if anybody was going to have a great blue deck with a great plan for beating MUD Kevin would be the guy leading the way.

You see, Kevin is a heavily decorated Workshop player and his contributions to the archetype over the past decade are legendary. I’d put his innovations straight up on the level of Roland Chang or Raf Forino. When I was getting started on the competitive Vintage scene Kevin was basically “The Workshop Guru” and was winning and Top 8ing a ton of events. In fact, the first Stax deck that I ever put together was his 75 from the Vintage Championships where he made the finals! I got his list out of “Sideboard” Magazine and 15 years later I’m playtesting with him for a tournament. How the time flies.

Now, when I say that I was disappointed by Kevin’s Jeskai deck I don’t want to do Kevin a disservice because it’s not his fault. I believe that he had one of the absolute best plans for beating Workshops of any player in the room at NYSE. He had a fantastic Mana base, a solid game plan. and a ton of cards to bring in against MUD. As I sat there playing from the enemy side it just didn’t seem to make that much of a difference. It felt like I was still better than a coin flip to win every game we played and without sideboards it felt like a slam dunk for the Workshop deck.

I made my choice right then and there.

“Kevin, are you for sure locked into the Jeskai Mentor deck for NYSE?”
“Yes.”
“Can I borrow your Workshops?”

I was not going to make the same mistake that I feel like I’d been making for the past two years and assume that the metagame ecosystem can simply contain the Phyrexian invasion with Ingot Chewers. I was going to switch sides and play what I actually believed was the best deck in the format.

75 COLORLESS SPELLS THAT I BELIEVE IN

When it actually came to putting together a MUD deck for NYSE I realized pretty quickly that I needed to do some homework. There are a ton of tools at the disposal of a Phyrexian Mage and lots of different angles to attack from.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a month to simply play a thousand games and learn for myself exactly how to squeeze the most juice out of my seventy five. Typically, the way I prepare for a big tournament is to play a lot of little tournaments but with Vintage the scarcity of IRL events makes this approach difficult. I had also just come off playing five travel tournaments five weekends in a row for other formats so I had spent a lot of time preparing for those events as well.

I had a week to prepare and would have to rely on the knowledge and experience of others to help me build my Phyrexian Doom Machine.

Luckily for me, I know some really knowledgeable individuals. In fact, given my predicament of needing to learn a lot of specific high level intel about building and playing Workshops I actually can’t imagine a better person to know than Roland Chang. The man basically has an encyclopedic knowledge of all things Workshops, is the only player to have won the Vintage Championship with Shops, and is constantly at the forefront of innovating the archetype.

I was able to learn a great deal in a very short amount of time about how and what other decks would likely sideboard against me and how I should be sideboarding against them. As well as the pros and cons of sideboarding certain cards over other similar cards. For instance, I ended up not including Wurmcoil Engine in my 75 and instead opted to play Batterskull simply because I didn’t want to have the Engine stolen by Dack Fayden. It stands to reason that if you have a life gain creature in the board you would want to board it in against a deck like UR Delver but not want it to be a liability!

The Batterskull is great because Dack can steal the equipment but it is still attached to the 0/0 Germ token that you control. Therefore, they need to steal it AND pay 5: to equip it in order to actually gain value. Much, much, much less of a liability.

These sort of subtle, yet extremely useful, tidbits of information are something that you can only ever get by playing the games and learning them first hand or having somebody who is really knowledgable share with you. These are important decisions when it comes to deck construction. Wurmcoil tends to be better in the mirror match, but the downside against Dack against aggressive Delver decks is so high. Everything is a little give and take.

I already had an idea that I wanted to play a Martello style Forgemaster MUD deck but I wasn’t exactly sure about my last few cards and how I ought to be constructing my sideboard.

It didn’t seem to me that I needed to be doing a ton of sideboarding against non-Oath blue decks. So, I would have lots of room in my sideboard to address the mirror and other “unfair” combo decks.

MUD
Brian DeMars
19th Place NYSE III

4 Mishra’s Workshop
4 Mishra’s Factory
4 Ancient Tomb
4 Wasteland
1 Tolarian Academy
1 Strip Mine
1 Black Lotus
1 Mana Crypt
1 Sol Ring
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Sapphire
4 Chalice of the Void
4 Sphere of Resistance
3 Thorn of Amethyst
4 Phyrexian Revoker
3 Phyrexian Metamorph
1 Trinisphere
4 Tangle Wire
4 Lodestone Golem
3 Kuldotha Forgemaster
1 Steel Hellkite
1 Sundering Titan
2 Coercive Portal

SIDEBOARD

4 Grafdigger’s Cage
1 The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale
1 Expedition Map
1 Ghost Quarter
2 Crucible of Worlds
1 Sculpting Steel
1 Phyrexian Metamorph
1 Batterskull
2 Dismember
1 Duplicant

As you can see I didn’t exactly reinvent the wheel here by any means. Most of the cards I’ve selected in the quantities that I did are fairly standard to what other successful MUD lists have been playing.

In fact, the way that I reached my first draft of my list was to take an average of how many copies of each card that Forgemaster MUD decks that got first or second place in tournaments played and to start there. Can’t argue with results!

For instance, every MUD deck played Steel Hellkite and Sundering Titan but there was a wild difference between the other tutor targets that they played. I figured that 90% of the time I’d want one of these two cards anyways and simply left the other targets in the board. Lo-and-behold I was correct and that in every game one situation where I activated a Forgemaster I wanted one of these two cards (I got a Tangle Wire one time too).

The extra space that I earned by dropping an expensive Tinker bot allowed me to make the humble innovation that I did add to the deck.

COERCIVE PORTAL

Coercive Portal is a card that I’ve been looking at as a potentially awesome card for a Workshop deck for a long time.

One of the primary reasons I was drawn to this card is that back in the day when I used to Vintage with former Vintage World Champion Mark Biller all the time was that he was always on a Grail Quest for exactly this card for his deck. He tried out tons of things but none of them were actually good: Grafted Skullcap, Mindstorm Crown, Bottled Cloister, Serum Tank, and probably even more that I can’t even remember. “If this deck could just draw some cards..” He used to say, “It would be unbeatable!”

One of the cards that I insisted that I wanted in the Workshop deck when I was testing against Kevin was a Staff of Nin as a way to draw cards and as a potential Forgemaster target should he flash down a Containment Priest in response to me activating. I liked the Staff so much that I wanted a Coercive Portal in addition to the Staff.

Then there was a game where I drew the Staff and couldn’t cast it because of my own Sphere effects, but could have cast the Portal and easily won the game. I’m not going to say that the pinging ability is irrelevant because I can certainly see instances where it would be baller, BUT let’s not kid ourselves and say that 99% of the reason the Staff is good is the card drawing. If I wanted to “ping” dorks I’d play Triskellion, but if I want cheap card advantage I’ll Portal thank you very much. Casting my spells is a priority and so I switched to a straight up two Coercive Portal configuration.

I called Biller on the way home and described the card to him and asked if he would play it. He has been out of Vintage for a while now and doesn’t follow it particularly closely, but he’s pretty invested in playing and brewing Standard. Anyways, his snap response to hearing about this obscure Conspiracy Mythic Rare was first, astonishment and secondly that he’d start at least two in any Workshop deck.

I also asked Roland what he thought about the card and he said he wasn’t against playing with it either. In fact, the consensus opinion (excluding the very excited Biller outlier) was that people seemed to think it sounded good but they had zero data prove it one way or the other!

There is no pressing need to play with the card because the MUD lists are already so good and so tight that nobody had really bothered to put the card through the testing. The biggest concern with the card is that it doesn’t impact the board immediately when you play it in the way that most of the other cards do. The thing is that just because its presence isn’t felt immediately doesn’t mean that that your opponent isn’t going to feel its presence eventually. It typically takes about two draws off that card to bury somebody. In fact, I don’t think I lost a game in which the card resolved which is fairly high praise for a 59th and 60th card.

As the tournament went on it was actually a card that I didn’t really want to sideboard out very often. In fact it only came out 3 of 8 rounds: against Oath of Druids (lots of cards to bring in), Blue Belcher (to slow to impact the game), and Dredge (again, lots of cards to bring in). I was actually very impressed with the card over a long tournament and would run it back for an encore performance.

As far as other notable “ins and outs” of the deck that I played I opted for Black Lotus over a 4th Thorn of Amethyst. I wanted to board out Thorns against a lot of the blue decks because they are creature heavy and get heavier after bringing in Containment Priest, Ingot Chewer and sometimes Stoneforge Mystics. I cut the third Kuldotha Forgemaster tutor target (in my case Duplicant) and the 4th Kuldotha Forgemaster for the two copies of Coercion Portal.

For a future event I think that I would build my sideboard slightly different — although for going into the tournament largely in the blind I think a lot of my presumptions were fairly on track.

Right now I have the following sleeved up and ready to go for Gen Con.

4 Grafdigger’s Cage
1 The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale

2 Tormod’s Crypt
2 Crucible of Worlds
1 Ghost Quarter

2 Batterskull
2 Dismember
1 Phyrexian Metamorph

As far as my actual tournament went my wins were pretty uneventful. I workshopped people and there wasn’t much they could do about it.

I was fairly happy with my 5-2-1 record considering that I didn’t get as much time to actually test and familiarize myself with the deck as I would have liked beforehand.

I lost my “win and in” for Top 8 to Dredge and admittedly got my butt kicked pretty hard. He kept his hand of seven both games while I mulliganed. Is there any greater injustice in the universe? There wasn’t much I could have done to take that match from him and that is one of the reasons that I’d like more cards in my sideboard for that matchup. Dredge is a deck where you really need those cards for them in your hand and on the battlefield and a lot of the other stuff besides the hate cards becomes irrelevant pretty quickly.

My other loss was by no fault of my deck but due to my inexperience piloting and a fundamental lack of knowledge about the differences between the various Jeskai decks. I set out on a voyage of the damned in a crucial game three where I led out with a Chalice on 0 and a Sphere of Resistance. If I had known better, I should have held the Chalice of the Void and played it on the second turn with X=1.

I ended up drawing five 0cc artifacts off the top when I needed a Mana and died. Seriously, freaking five in a row. The moral of the story is that the Chalice set to 1 was actually better than zero and would have posed less risk to me by taking away my access to artifact mana. I probably win that game if I don’t make that mistake. Never doing that one again.

My unintentional draw was actually by far the most frustrating moment of my tournament because it was incredibly stupid.

In the last round my opponent and I are basically playing a match for a Mishra’s Workshop. The winner will get Top 16 and a Shop and the loser will get nothing. Also, if we draw neither of us get anything. I bet you can see where this is going…

The round goes to time and at the end of turns neither of us is able to defeat the other in the five extra turns. Basically, I have staved off my opponent’s completely fortunate draw of all four Force of Wills and all four Ingot Chewers to create not only a defensible position but a winning position.

I have a Chalice of the Void for 1 and 3, a Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale a bunch of Lands, and two Mishra’s Factories which are holding off a Containment Priest, a Young Pyromancer, and three Tokens. My opponent cannot make a big Elemental Token army and beat down because the Tabernacle limits him to only having six creatures in play. Basically every draw in my deck is a threat from here on out and he has very few cards left that can actually interact with me.

Also, I’m at 16 life.

Long story short I hate certain aspects about the collusion rules and this just so happens to be one of them. I can’t tell him that I’ll split the prize with him because it’s against the rules and he has no idea that in this situation one of us should concede and the victor should ship half.

“So, I’m a pretty heavy favorite to win this game here and if we draw neither one of us will earn any prize. Would you concede?”

I have no idea if my opponent is flat out lying about the fact that he thinks he is going to win in hopes that I’m actually dumb enough to believe him or whether he is actually delusional enough to believe he is winning, but nonetheless his response is: “I’m pretty sure that I’m actually winning, so you should concede to me.”

“You realize if we draw that neither of us get anything, right?”
“Yes.”
“OK, then.” I sign the match slip and mark that we drew and say: “If you would have conceded I would have split the Shop with you right down the middle.”

There is zero chance that I would ever concede to somebody who is losing in that situation. The only plausible explanation for why my opponent wouldn’t concede in the situation is that he was wanted to keep the prize all for himself OR that he had no idea that the expectation for a split is the norm in this situation. These two items are also not mutually exclusive.

We discussed the options that I had over dinner and my response was basically that there was zero percent that I was going to afford that guy the opportunity to get paid off with a Shop and potentially stiff me in that situation. Given the circumstances, (it was agreed upon by all seven observers that I was HEAVILY favored to win the match given the game state) there is no good reason for the losing player to not concede in that situation besides to a) actively harm the player who was going to win by not allowing them to receive prize, or B) try to swindle the prize for oneself.

So, at the end of the day I put together a really solid record and fell unfortunately short of a nice finish. I really enjoyed playing the deck. It was for the most part very straightforward and extremely proactive. I liked that I was always taking the fight to my opponent and that the burden of interacting was almost always on them and on my terms.

WHY I THINK MUD IS FUNDAMENTALLY GOOD AGAINST THE FIELD

I’m going to wrap up today’s article with a few brief arguments for exactly why I think that Mishra’s Workshop is so good right now in Vintage. Earlier, I stated that the reason I switched to Workshops was because I think they are plain put “better more powerful decks” than the rest. So, I think that it is in order to put together an argument for what exactly I mean by this broad sweeping statement.

1. Mishra’s Workshop is the most powerful unrestricted card in Vintage.

I think that this is a really important point when we talk about why Mishra’s Workshop decks are so good. Every single other card that has a similar effect to Mishra’s Workshop — that is a card that makes multiple mana for virtually no cost — is restricted. Ancient Tomb and City of Traitors have a real cost. If you don’t believe me look at my life totals at the end of the games where I drew two Ancient Tombs. Not only does Tomb have a cost it isn’t even as good, as it has a drawback and only makes 66% as much mana.

I’m not saying whether it should or shouldn’t be a restricted card. My point is that it is easily the most powerful card in Vintage that isn’t currently on the restricted list. Something always has to be the best. Being the most powerful unrestricted card in Vintage isn’t necessarily a qualification for restriction because something will always be the most powerful unrestricted card in the format. However, the fact that Workshop IS the best one is a fact and a darn good reason to play with it.

2. There are a high velocity of fair decks in Vintage right now.

Most of the Blue decks are just Delvers and Mentor “fish” style decks. They play some permission, they play some threats and they play some removal and they look at some cards. None of what they are doing is particularly dangerous nor is it particularly good against a Workshop deck.

We are not living in 2007 where the blue decks are Hurkyl’s Recalling and then Yawgmoth’s WIlling to end the game. Nope. They just play some creatures and try to attack with them.

The key is that the vast majority of the blue decks don’t really go over the top of the Workshop decks with something truly scary like Yawgmoth’s Will or Time Vault. The reason for this is that the “fair” blue creature decks are particularly good at beating the “unfair” blue decks.

The other thing that I noticed is that the blue decks are really inbred toward battling with each other. They are packing Mental Misstep, Misdirection, and Pyroblast all in the main deck. I’m no genius, but in my estimation those are not cards I typically want to play against Workshops.

Who needs Coercive Portal when I can get card advantage off the blue Mage’s dead draws!?

I will admit that I’m a little bit afraid of Oath of Druids as that is an “unfair” style deck. That is one of the match ups I’m going to be studying heavily for the future and I think a great article topic.

3. “The Hate Ain’t That Great”

I want you to contemplate the following sentence for at least ten seconds.

“Blue decks have to struggle, STRUGGLE, to cast a Sorcery speed Shatter in Ingot Chewer against Workshops.”

Now that you’ve let that settle in…

The common consensus among the Vintage elite is that Ingot Chewer is the best sideboard card against Workshop decks.

The best sideboard card in Vintage against an all artifact deck is basically just a one cost Shatter. I’ve been locked into Affinity in Modern for a while now and let me tell you that my opponent’s have some really nasty sideboard cards to attack my all artifact deck: Stony Silence, Creeping Corrosion, Vandalblast, Shatterstorm, and Fracturing Gusts all make my life really difficult.

Let me get this straight, in Vintage I get to play with 4x Mishra’s Workshop and instead of sideboarding in cards that kill all my cards my opponent’s sideboard in Shatter?

What a dream come true.

Now I realize what you must be thinking right now: “C’mon, Brian you are clearly comparing two different things here. You and I both know the reason Ingot Chewer is so good is because it is a piece of removal that the blue decks can actually, possibly get a chance to cast through all the Sphere effects and Tangle Wires. The reason that Vintage decks don’t sideboard really fierce sideboard cards like Shatterstorm is that blue decks will never be able to get enough mana in play to consistently cast them.”

That very argument, i.e. piece of common knowledge is exactly why I believe that Mishra’s Workshop is the best deck in the format. The very things that it does naturally in attacking an opponent’s mana and leveraging its own makes it immune to an opponent playing the kind of hate cards that ACTUALLY punish a linear artifact deck (like Affinity in Modern for instance).

You can’t actually play good Artifact hate like Shatterstorm because you can’t actually get enough mana to consistently cast a 4cc spell against Workshops. It is like a MUD player starts the game with Meddling Mage in play naming all of the really messed up Artifact hate cards that people play against Affinity Mages in Modern just because they are too hard to cast!

Therefore, the “artifact hate” in the form of Ingot Chewer is little more than a glorified Swords to Plowshares. Granted, it is the best possible Swords to Plowshares given the situation, but still it’s not like resolving a Choke against a blue deck or a Stony Silence against Affinity.

The reason that Mishra’s Workshop is so good right now is that it is intrinsically good against the things that other decks are doing. It makes more mana than its opponent and oppresses its opponents ability to use its mana to cast relevant spells at a ridiculous level. I don’t care how you slice the cake doing this to your opponent cannot possibly be good for them.

Secondly, because of the manner in which the deck leverages mana and its opponent’s access it drastically reduces the types of way that the opponent is able to interact. Other decks can’t punish you for being “Linear, All Artifacts” because the spells that create that kind of effect cost four and five mana and might as well cost a million if there is a Lodestone Golem and a Tangle Wire on the table.

One last point to drive home:

MUD is a deck full of threats that cost 3, 4, 5, and 6 mana that requires your opponent answer everything using only cards that cost 1 and 2 mana.

If you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em.