Blood and Iron: Breaking Krark-Clan Ironworks in Type 1

Welcome to the Type 1 portion of combo week! When I was writing up my Fifth Dawn review, I was working only from a partial spoiler, so in addition to some of the errors (for instance, Helm of Kaldra at the time was templated so that it didn’t give haste and first strike unless you had the trifecta going,) there were some cards missing, and embarrassingly Krark-Clan Ironworks, which pretty much everybody regards as the most dangerous card in the set, was one of them. I also might’ve sounded a bit down on Fifth Dawn, and while I’m not that excited about this set for Type 1 (although I do have to say that it was really cool in Limited when I played at the prerelease,) I also wanted to be kind of harsh on it because I know that my favorite part of set reviews are when the author trashes a card horrible and then gets owned later on when that card ends up being horribly broken. Names have been changed here to protect the innocent:

Hint: it was not Oscar Tan. However, he is hidden somewhere within this article. See if you can find him.

My disclaimer for this article is that not only is building new decks in Type 1 freaking hard, but building combo decks are even harder because the benchmark is ridiculously high. You’ve got Draw-7 and Belcher, which both have a fair number of potential turn 1 kills if you want to go for speed, and if you want to go with more mid-game power, you have Dragon and its ability to draw three extra cards per turn. That said, I’m treating this more like an experiment and I’m giving it my best shot.

Step One: Draw-7

My first attempt at breaking Krark-Clan Ironworks was to use it purely as a mana accelerant rather than as the centerpiece of the deck. I took a fairly typical Draw-7 decklist and modified it to this:

4 City of Brass

4 Glimmervoid

1 Gemstone Mine

1 Underground Sea

1 Tolarian Academy



3 Chromatic Sphere

3 Krark-Clan Ironworks

1 Black Lotus

1 Lotus Petal

1 Sol Ring

1 Mana Vault

1 Mana Crypt

1 Mox Sapphire

1 Mox Ruby

1 Mox Pearl

1 Mox Jet

1 Mox Emerald

1 Lion’s Eye Diamond

1 Memory Jar

4 Force of Will

4 Brainstorm

3 Diminishing Returns

1 Mind’s Desire

1 Ancestral Recall

1 Time Walk

1 Windfall

1 Timetwister

1 Mystical Tutor

1 Tinker

4 Dark Ritual

2 Tendrils of Agony

1 Necropotence

1 Yawgmoth’s Will

1 Yawgmoth’s Bargain

1 Vampiric Tutor

1 Demonic Tutor

1 Wheel of Fortune

1 Crop Rotation

1 Fastbond

The premise here was to use Krark-Clan Ironworks in order to make your Moxes into Lotuses and to give you the ability to use Chromatic Sphere as a fixer or as another Mox. The problem that I had with this deck was that I almost never actually got to use the Ironworks. If I tried to cast it, it ended up using too much of the colored mana that I needed for my spells, and as you can see, the deck doesn’t have a very big use for colorless mana outside of spells like Yawgmoth’s Will and Mind’s Desire, both of which were capable of winning the game just fine prior to my modifications.

Step Two: The Machine Deck

My next attempt was to build a machine deck similar to the ones that were being toted by R&D. I threw in a bunch of game-winning combos, and since the deck was nearly all artifacts (other than Goblin Welder and some land,) I included the Ironworks as a way to potentially generate a huge amount of mana to power something along the lines of Goblin Cannon.

4 Great Furnace

4 Mishra’s Workshop

3 Ancient Tomb

1 Tolarian Academy



4 Krark-Clan Ironworks

4 Serum Powder

4 Time Vault

4 Goblin Cannon

4 Staff of Domination

2 Lightning Greaves

1 Mox Sapphire

1 Mox Ruby

1 Mox Pearl

1 Mox Jet

1 Mox Emerald

1 Mana Crypt

1 Mana Vault

1 Sol Ring

1 Black Lotus

1 Memory Jar

4 Voltaic Construct

4 Metalworker

4 Lodestone Myr

4 Goblin Welder

The main combos that this deck runs on are Metalworker/Voltaic Construct and Metalworker/Staff of Domination, which provide infinite mana and in the case of the latter, also finds you a kill. However, the former is easier to pull off because you only need to generate four mana with the Construct (after the initial six mana: four for Voltaic Construct and then two for the untap on Metalworker) before you can begin. The use of the Staff to generate infinite mana requires the same amount of mana up front, but requires you to have an additional artifact in hand in order to begin comboing because the Staff’s untap effect costs four mana rather than two (three to untap the Metalworker plus an additional mana to untap the Staff.)

The Metalworker/untapper combo has a few different ways to kill. Goblin Cannon is the most straightforward way. There are also ways of killing with Lodestone Myr, such as by creating about fifty mana with the combo and constantly tapping and untapping one of your artifact creatures to pump the Myr. The Myr can also get kills through Time Vault, as you can keep tapping and untapping Time Vault to make the Myr an infinite/infinite creature. This has the added bonus that if it gets killed by Swords to Plowshares, you will still probably win since your opponent will in all likelihood not be able to deck you, since you won’t ever get another draw phase.

Because of all of these two and three-card kills, I included Serum Powder in order to just draw into turn 2 kill hands. This actually worked out pretty well. The unwritten drawback of Serum Powder is that if you draw it in your opening hand but you want to keep the hand, it’s practically a mulligan. This deck managed to minimize this a little by giving the deck two different ways to use a Serum Powder that wasn’t used to mulligan with. The first way was the obvious use of the card: casting it. It did provide a (admittedly inefficient) way of converting Mishra’s Workshop mana into mana that could be used for anything and an extra card to fuel Ironworks or to pump Lodestone Myr (which believe it or not, could often kill on turn 4 by itself if you cast it turn 1.) The other use was to fuel Metalworker, which is actually fairly important, since the deck needed to keep three artifacts in hand in order to go off with Staff of Domination.

The problem that I had here was that the deck never actually needed the Ironworks. I drew up dozens of hands with the deck and the only time that I ended up using it involved a hand with turn 1 Metalworker and then a huge turn 2 featuring Memory Jar and Lightning Greaves on Metalworkers and Goblin Welders to abuse my Jar further-but oddly no Staff of Domination or Voltaic Construct. Therefore, I just made a huge amount of mana with the Ironworks and my Metalworkers and did a Goblin Cannon for twenty.

Step Three: Mit dem Ravager Gebeatdownt!

My last attempt to break Ironworks was to try it in combination with Skullclamp. I figured that the best creatures to clamp would be the 0 casting cost ones like Phyrexian Walker and Ornithopter, because they could survive after being equipped and then would be able to provide mana to fuel further Clampings.

4 Glimmervoid

4 Mishra’s Workshop

4 Ancient Tomb

1 Tolarian Academy

4 Krark-Clan Ironworks

4 Skullclamp

4 Chromatic Sphere

1 Mox Sapphire

1 Mox Ruby

1 Mox Pearl

1 Mox Jet

1 Mox Emerald

1 Mana Crypt

1 Mana Vault

1 Sol Ring

1 Black Lotus

1 Memory Jar

4 Arcbound Ravager

4 Phyrexian Walker

4 Ornithopter

4 Disciple of the Vault

4 Myr Retriever

1 Myr Moonvessel

1 Tinker

1 Time Walk

1 Ancestral Recall

1 Yawgmoth’s Will

The kills here are Disciple of the Vault (usually in combination with double Myr Retriever) or Arcbound Ravager, which often times will sacrifice to himself in order to pump another creature (such as one that you cast last turn and thus is able to attack.) Most of the cards are pretty obvious. I chose Ornithopter over Shield Sphere because Ornithopter can attack. This might not be the right call though, since Shield Sphere can take multiple Clamps before you sacrifice it to the Ironworks.

I built this deck for a pure goldfish and it has an extremely consistent turn 2 kill. One of the important things to consider with this deck is that you tend to mulligan a lot because it has a lot of hands that are full of nothing but”air,” such as when you have a lot of mana but nothing to do with it, or a bunch of wimpy creatures and no Skullclamp.

I haven’t tested any of these decks against real opponents, but I did test Ravager Affinity for a while and as the third deck is fairly similar, a good number of the points are still valid. I am still considering playing with Goblin Welder in this deck to help out against Null Rod and to give some more resilience against control. It isn’t very common to use Goblin Welder to get rid of an opponent’s Null Rod. Rather, Welder becomes a powerful way to disrupt combat.

The reason that this is important is because Null Rod is played almost exclusively in aggro or aggro-control decks. Against these decks, if you can’t combo them out on turn 2, the best play is usually to just try to go all-in with a Ravager. If you can pump your Ravager to around 6/6 or 7/7, it becomes almost impossible for any aggro deck to deal with unless they plan on spending a huge number of cards. You then can take advantage of Modular by moving the counters over to a Phyrexian Walker or something equally useful if they kill the Ravager, or by putting combat damage on the stack and using Goblin Welder to exchange it for another creature. Because Welder’s effect simultaneously returns the creature from the graveyard and sacrifices the other, the new creature will be a legal target for Ravager’s triggered ability. Even without Ravager, Goblin Welder can still be useful to provide a stream of chump blockers by sacrificing useless artifacts or to exchange creatures after damage has been put on the stack.

The reason that I would run Goblin Welder over something like Duress or Oxidize is because Goblin Welder works within the context of your deck rather than hoping to match up with a specific card in your opponent’s deck. If your opponent doesn’t have the Null Rod, your Oxidize is worthless, but you also might not necessarily be winning the game. Your Goblin Welder can still be useful as you can use it for combat tricks, generating mana by returning dead mana artifacts in exchange for tapped ones, or just by letting you bring back an important combo component.

Similarly, Duress might take that Force of Will, but you could just as easily drawn it out by casting a Welder or a spare Ironworks. Your opponent will simply have to Force whatever your next spell is, so you get to save space in your deck by running another powerful, cheap card that must be countered rather than running the situational Duress, which doesn’t help you win and often times doesn’t keep you from not losing, either. (Wow, that sentence was clumsy.)

I’m still on the fence with how this deck handles against Force of Will. My gut instinct is to simply ignore it and force them to use it (on your say, Skullclamp) and then try to use a second threat, like Ravager or Goblin Welder and win with that. The deck is fairly similar to Belcher in these regards, which then begs the question as to whether or not this deck has anything to gain over that deck. This deck probably withstands hate cards better, but loses speed in the kill. I only was able to get a few first turn kills with this deck because you need an opening hand along the lines of the following:

Mishra’s Workshop

Mana Vault or Mana Crypt

Krark-Clan Ironworks

Skullclamp

(preferably multiple) Zero Mana creatures

Turn 2 becomes much easier, because you don’t need the Mana Vault or Mana Crypt, and you can get away with using more expensive creatures as Clamp targets since you now have the ability to use your Mishra’s Workshop a second time.

The last aspect to deal with is the sideboard. I would probably expect something with either Chain of Vapor or Oxidize to deal with Null Rod, Goblin Welder (if it isn’t maindeck), a cheap creature removal spell (like Vendetta) to deal with Goblin Welder, and possibly a card to deal with combo decks (possibly Abeyance). The other option is to run a somewhat transformational sideboard and turn into Ravager Affinity (possibly 4 Frogmite, 4 Myr Enforcer, 4 Oxidize, and 3 Vendetta.) I’m not sure what decks that would be the best plan against, however.

Honestly, I think the final verdict on this deck is that it’s cool, but until I put more lot work into it, I doubt it will be on the level of Belcher or Dragon. It straddles a bit of a middle line between the two, as it’s not as fast as Belcher and not as durable as Dragon. Type 1 combo decks usually end up being either amazing or horrible. That’s sounds like a really sharp divide, but it’s pretty much true. If your deck is the slightest bit too slow, it can run into all kinds of hate cards, and if it’s the littlest bit too fragile, you can lose too often to the ubiquitous Force of Will.

So in conclusion:

–JP Meyer

jpmeyer at optonline dot net