- Search your library
- Artifact
- Put it into your graveyard
- Graveyard to battlefield
That’s a lot of “keyword – broken” flags being raised for Goblin Engineer, and not a lot of mana in any of the costs. Of all the Modern Horizons previews so far it stands the highest chance of being long-term broken, surpassing both Urza and a Mox.
But what about the short-term? What can we do with this card in Modern as it exists now?
First off, we see the importance of formal education at Goblin University. The hobby tinkerer blows themself and the project up; the engineer plans out what they want and utilizes the right tools to make it.
When you want a good artifact deck, hire the certified professional.
Fueling Goblin Engineer is trivial. You can talk about how to get the most value out of a sacrifice, but the best value is just sacrificing something you didn’t pay much mana for. Expect an almost direct correlation between Engineer and Mox Opal.
Goblin Engineer, like any tutor, is good with silver bullets that KO specific decks. Note that with Grafdigger’s Cage, you sacrifice it before the recursion resolves, so you can swap Cage out for a creature if needed.
The Pithing Needle interaction is really exciting. The base level is you’re allowed to reset Pithing Needles if needed, like if you got super-aggro naming a fetchland, but the sick next-level play is making your opponent commit mana to a specific threat before you instantly Weld back in Needle in response to lock it out. The classic Aether Vial / Phyrexian Revoker play is coming to another format near you, except it already existed in about eight other ways, including the classic way.
The other interaction between Goblin Engineer and hate cards is using it to break synergy. Vintage players may remember this from Goblin Welder plus Tangle Wire, but the softer Modern version is Trinisphere. If you need to unload some cheaper spells, sacrifice Trinisphere on their end step, make your plays, and then swap it back in.
Goblin Engineer, like any repeat recursion, is good with effects that you want to recycle. Spellskite is an especially attractive pairing, despite my recent rant about the card. You protect Engineer from removal, and if you have an untapped Engineer and something gets Spellskited, you can Weld away the Spellskite after targets change for a free sacrifice.
There’s also the ability to cycle any artifact with Mishra’s Bauble or Chromatic Star, including all your extra copies of Mox Opal. If you thought the Lotus Petal mode for duplicate Mox Opals wasn’t broken enough, just wait until you also have the free cycling option.
That all said, I wouldn’t build a pure Prison deck based off Goblin Engineer. It’s trivial to play one of a few different lock pieces with Engineer and add a Prison toolbox to any nonsense artifact deck.
Goblin Engineer, like any tutor, is good at assembling a combo. The obvious one is Thopter Foundry plus Sword of the Meek, where Sword is both the piece you would rather tutor for than draw and a piece that works if it is sitting in the graveyard.
The question, since Thopter Foundry gives us a hybrid choice, is Grixis or Jeskai? I wanted to look at some four-color nonsense, but Ancient Stirrings isn’t the best with this combo. You can freeroll a sideboard card in any color, but your base is Izzet plus one.
I will mention that while Goblin Engineer adds a color to the traditional Thopter combo shell, it may fix your mana by letting you cut the triple blue Whir of Invention. Whir also regularly creates a card bottleneck with Ensnaring Bridge and too many three-mana cards.
I think the tiebreaker is Unmoored Ego as a sideboard card. The best white cards to sideboard in the format are Stony Silence and Rest in Peace, both of which are literally hate for your core combo. Unmoored Ego gives you a plan to waylay the decks too fast for Thopter tokens and lifegain, namely Tron.
Creatures (6)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (21)
Spells (29)
This may not be exactly the right mix of hate cards, but there are a few additions from recent Karn Prison lists that I really like. I don’t love the three-card infinite with Urza, Lord High Artificer, but I do think Urza lines up well as secondary win condition along the lines of Sai, Master Thopterist. I’m honestly unsure if Sai isn’t just better because three mana is less than four, but Urza seems like it actually costs negative ten mana, so I’m willing to try it.
Pentad Prism makes a lot of sense to ramp into a fast Karn, the Great Creator or Urza, Lord High Artificer. The counter argument is that it might be less powerful than the colorless lands you have to trim on to play such a proactive sunburst card. Maybe you don’t quite need the second Academy Ruins or Inventors’ Fair, and I guess Karn, the Great Creator into Mycosynth Lattice is as good of a lock to bridge into as Tectonic Edge plus Crucible of Worlds is post-Damping Sphere.
I do really like trimming on Tolaria West. Even though it’s a value land, I think the slower starts aren’t something you can afford right now. Izzet Phoenix is on the downswing, Chalice of the Void isn’t the phenomenal lock piece it was pre-War of the Spark, and you want to assemble something more powerful as quickly as possible. Also, the blue value land is just worth less when your deck doesn’t play Whir of Invention.
On that note, if there is any part of this Prison list I’m the least sure about, it’s the mana that’s entirely based on old Whir lists that had to produce near mono-blue mana and couldn’t afford to get a little funky with their sources. I think more fetchlands might be in order for the selective cantrip combo with Mishra’s Bauble, especially if Ancient Stirrings is no longer part of the equation.
The less obvious combo that caught my eye was Semblance Anvil. Goblin Engineer finds and recurs the namesake artifact and bins the relevant copies of Myr Retriever to get the full loop going. I did say I didn’t care much about value, but looping Ichor Wellsprings is a good way to proceed to an actual combo from low resources.
Starting from a recent League 5-0 by Sam Pardee (Smdster on Magic Online):
Creatures (13)
Lands (18)
Spells (29)
The latest addition of Arcbound Ravager and Inkmoth Nexus is super nice. Your combo deck has a backup pseudo-combo deck! It’s not like any of the other cards you play matter when you go off that way with Affinity or Hardened Scales, as long as they have the card type artifact.
There’s another combo Goblin Engineer can really help assemble, but we will get to that next.
Goblin Engineer, like any Entomb, is good with reanimation effects. The problem in Modern is the rate. Trash for Treasure isn’t that fast; it literally saves one mana from Refurbish. You spend five total mana to find and recur your artifact of choice, compared to three to Goryo’s Vengeance up a Griselbrand. You must be absolutely sure your opponent will die to what you get back.
Sundering Titan, Inkwell Leviathan, and Possessed Portal all might do that, but they aren’t close to the creature equivalents Iona, Shield of Emeria; Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite; or Griselbrand. I even looked at Nullstone Gargoyle, but too many decks can just throw away a random cantrip prior to going off.
Seriously, these options are embarrassing. Narset, Parter of Veils might stop more combo decks than any giant artifact you can Trash for Treasure. Maybe it’s time to build Narset / Karn Prison and call it a day.
Now we are talking. If you construct the right deck, Bolas’s Citadel will just kill them and you probably can afford a flex slot for a different option when it won’t.
Also, as I’m self-obligated to say, a “draw” your deck combo that avoids Narset, Parter of Veils is a nice spot these days. I’m just ignoring Karn, the Great Creator for now, though. Get the deck humming along, then fix that problem. You can churn almost your whole deck without activating an artifact, so it shouldn’t be too hard, right?
Goblin Engineer even works towards a naturally drawn Bolas’s Citadel without Trash for Treasure. Bin Lotus Bloom, recur it next turn for a plus two mana boost. That’s a Simian Spirit Guide or Mox Opal away from a Turn 3 cast.
Starting from Emma Handy’s VS Live! list from a few weeks back:
Creatures (4)
Lands (15)
Spells (41)
Serum Powder is a clean swap for your actual tutor Goblin Engineer. I have also retooled the end-game to be more about Aetherflux Reservoir, with the full four Noxious Revival for the Bolas’s Citadel loop. Cast Noxious Revival from deck, return the other Revival, that is castable, gain incremental life with Reservoir and 50 them a few times.
If you want the most telling takeaways from all this exploratory work, here they are.
- First, Goblin Engineer as just a pure tutor for a combo deck adds a ton of depth to the deck. Being able to tutor up an Ensnaring Bridge then have your tutor churn cards with Ichor Wellspring or Chromatic Star is something old artifact combo could barely dream of. Do you know how much mana Sai, Master Thopterist costs just to approximate a portion of that effect, and it’s still one of the stock pieces of all these shells?
- Second, Goblin Engineer layers very easily with existing artifact tutors like Karn, the Great Creator and Whir of Invention. It’s almost too easy to put your pieces together, and the process of trimming that part of the deck down will be based more on optimizing drawing the least incorrect duplicates, like the second Whir of Invention, and less on which is the absolute most powerful.
- Finally, the number of weird things Goblin Engineer could fit with has massively increased with just the last set and has tons of room to grow over time. Even if Goblin Engineer doesn’t quite hit it off in a weird Karn, the Great Creator-saturated format right now, the card finding a home is basically an inevitability.